From spaf Sun Nov 10 13:46:22 1985 Received: by gatech.GTNET (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA26188; Sun, 10 Nov 85 13:46:22 est Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 13:46:22 est From: Gene Spafford Posted-Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 13:46:22 est Received-Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 13:46:22 est Message-Id: <8511101846.AA26188@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-II Subject: Administrivia Status: O Welcome to the Usenet-II mailing list. A formal "Introduction and Charge" will be mailed out later today or tomorrow. This message is intended to present some basic information and guidelines for this list. The idea behind any mailing list is to present a non-public forum for a discussion of some topic by a limited number of participants. When I started soliciting people to discuss this topic (to be explained more in the next posting), I anticipated 25 - 30 people on the list. However, I got an overwhelming response from the backbone admins, and a number of other people were recommended for invitation in one way or another, and the list now stands at 50 people. That shouldn't present too many problems, but I think it important that we keep this number in mind when posting things to this list (more on that below). Since some of you have indicated that you haven't participated in a mailing list before, let me cover some important points: 1) To post something to the readership of the list, mail your submission to: ...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!usenet-II (or look at the path taken to get this mail to you -- "gatech" speaks to lots of other sites.) Mail can also be addressed via CSNet or the Arpa Internet to (respectively): usenet-II@gatech usenet-II%gatech.CSNet@Relay.CS.NET 2) Requests for changes to your address, archives, etc, can be mailed directly to me (spaf@gatech), or to the alias "usenet-II-request@gatech" Please, *do not* mail simple administrative requests to the whole list! 3) Participants of the list with CSNet or Arpa Internet addresses may wish to have me use those in the list instead of UUCP-based addresses. If so, please bear in mind that "gatech" currently is contacted by the CSNet relay only once or twice a day by phone, and mail through those networks will probably be delayed more than similar UUCP-routed mail. Similar considerations apply to submissions. 4) An archive of all articles posted to the mailing list will be kept at "gatech". If you want a copy of any past mail, just let me know (mail to me as in #2, above). 5) There will be *no* editing or moderation of postings. This is a simple remailer type of list. Spend a little extra time yourself to edit your submissions and make sure that they are coherent. At some future date, we may wish to publish (to the net) selected portions of our activity (with authors' permission), and it is important that the material be at least moderately readable. 5) Anything mailed to this list is done so with the implicit permission to show copies of it to members of the list. As a basic ground rule, assume that *NO* permission is granted to publish this material anywhere else *until* the author(s) grant specific permission to do so. Authors retain exclusive copyright until assigned or waived -- this is a mailing exchange and *not* a public forum. 6) Keep in mind that the group represented by this list is interested, experienced, and probably over-committed timewise. The majority of list members appear to be administrators of major sites, and many have been on the Usenet since its start. Therefore, try not to spend too much time stating the reasonably obvious. If clarification is needed, it can be asked for and gotten via mail. Don't quote long sections from previous mail, either. 7) I probably don't need to include this, but for the record let me point out that as intelligent, mature adults we have no need to flame each other. I have puposely invited individuals with different outlooks, philosophies and needs to participate in this list because I feel we need the depth and the challenge. We do *not* need harsh words. We need creative input, even if it seems a little far-fetched at first, or opposed to our own particular viewpoint. Please don't "shoot from the hip" and cut down suggestions without a little thought, and please be especially careful not to fall into the (bad) net-habit of cutting down the poster simply because the posting is naive, confusing, or just not to your liking. This is not like net-news -- please be a little more temperate in your postings. The Usenet etiquette guide written by Chuq is applicable here. Okay, that covers the points I believe are important for any mailing list. If I missed any, please let me know. As I mentioned above, I will be posting an "introduction" for this list sometime later today or tomorrow. Once that is out, someone suggested that each member of the list post a short paragraph or two about themselves and why they are on the list. I don't think that is too bad an idea, so, if any of you are interested, go to it. We have a few people on the list who have participated in Usenet since its inception. Would one or two of you post a short history about how Usenet came about and grew, and (if possible) some of the original goals of the net? If we have any Arpanetters familiar with the history of the mailing lists there it would be nice to see the same for those. And maybe someone could explain to us all about "notes".... I will be out of town from Nov. 12 to Nov 19. Mail directed to me during that time will be answered as soon as I can after I return. --gene Following is the list of participants as of 1pm, 10 November 85: Rick Adams Ken Arnold Larry Auton Steve Bellovin Mark Brader Liudvikas Bukys Dave C. Herb Chong Laura Creighton Richard Doty Jim Ellis Joan Eslinger Ray Essick Erik Fair Dan Forsyth Greg Fowler John Gilmore Ron Heiby Greg Hidley Hokey Mark Horton Byron Howes Curtis Jackson Jim Johnston Rich Kulawiec Robert Lake Paul Lutt Mike Lutz Jim Madden Jeff Meyer Ron Natalie Arthur Olson Mel Pleasant Scott Preece Frank Pronk John Quarterman Brian Reid Mike Rodriquez Jan Sanislo Glenn Scott Dave Sherman Greg Skinner Becky Small Gene Spafford Henry Spencer Dave Stewart Sid Stuart R. J. White Charley Wingate Greg Woods From spaf Tue Nov 12 01:45:31 1985 Received: by gatech.GTNET (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA13370; Tue, 12 Nov 85 01:45:31 est Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 01:45:31 est From: Gene Spafford Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 01:45:31 est Received-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 01:45:31 est Message-Id: <8511120645.AA13370@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-II Subject: Introduction Status: O Introduction to Usenet II Mailing List -------------------------------------- Let's consider, for a few moments, the current state of Usenet. Backbone sites are dropping newsgroups and discussing ways of automatically limiting volume. There are almost as many different (and often incompatible) versions of news transport software in use as there are newsgroups (and there are far too many of those), and in some groups the space occupied by the control information in each article is nearly 2 times the contents. A significant fraction of the sites making up the network can't accomodate flexibility in naming, resulting in awkward constraints on newsgroup naming. There is strife and hostility over when and how to create and delete groups, and the sheer volume of postings is drowning sites. In fact, the current volume of postings *about* postings ranks in the top 3 topics in the news being circulated this month. Posters are becoming ruder, maliciousness abounds, and the general response to everything is "just try to make me do it." Cancellation messages are being forged, "rmgroup" messages have been forged, and articles and replies have been directed to the wrong places on purpose. Many sites can no longer handle the transport time and costs, nor can they handle the storage and cpu loads. Perhaps the analogy is trite, but it is like a cancer. Where there should be cooperation, there are contrary efforts. Instead of working together as a whole, the parts are fragmenting and working at crosspurposes, if at all. Basically, the Usenet is dying. It has a had a long and fruitful life, especially considering how it came about and grew to its present form (not bad for some former shell files, eh?), but its lifetime is limited. Maybe Usenet has another year of functionality left. Maybe two at the outside. If you believe the net is still healthy and these are all little problems easily solved, then perhaps this mailing list isn't for you. What I'm hoping this list will be for, is to discuss what we have all learned from the Usenet experience. How can we take the software, transport connections, and sheer human experience and form a better system? What is more, how can we craft a new system so it has some of the best features of the current network, yet keep from growing in such an undisciplined way? In fact, maybe we even need to discuss if we want such a network (note: I do, or I wouldn't be trying to organize this). I don't mean to sound gloomy. This is intended to be a message of hope -- of determination to not give up without a fight. Butler Lampson has stated a few times in his papers on OS construction that you should always build a system twice -- the first time just to make it work, and the second time to do it right. I think that applies here. I'm keen to try to do it right (and that isn't in any way intended to slight the efforts or work of others that has gone into the current Usenet). Let me tell you why I decided to start this group now (I should really wait until I finish my thesis and have time for stuff like this). I've been thinking about the future of the net for about 2 years now. I've always been intrigued by the idea of what this kind of communication resource can bring to people. I've gotten some ideas about what could come next, and I've discussed those in mail with some of you before. I ran a mailing list on those ideas about a year ago (or was it two?) which was possibly a bit before its time. Recently, elements of those same ideas have come up again, in mail among the backbone sites with Mark Horton suggesting we divide the namespace in a different manner, and with Mark Brader (I believe -- I didn't save the article) suggesting a cutover to new software by force at the backbone. It's odd how the same ideas can come up again and again (and independantly, too). While the ideas are fresh and there is a lot of enthusiasm, I feel it is time to discuss some of these ideas in a larger group to see if they can be of use. Hence, this group. If we come up with something worthwhile, we can present it to the net. For now, though, I think we'd make better progress by keep the discussion limited to some relatively small number of interested individuals. Basically, what I'm suggesting we do is along the following lines: 1) Assume, if not for real, at least for the purposes of this list, that Usenet in its present form will not last and that we are going to try to design a worthwhile alternative. We need to adopt this as our "ground" and then proceed from there. We must assume that we are going to take all our knowledge and experience with the Usenet and other communications mediums and develop a whiz-bang system which we will call Usenet II. (Son of Usenet? Beyond the Valley of the Usenet?) 2) Define and write down *precisely* what we would like Usenet-II to be -- software exchange, technical resource, entertainment, creative outlet, or just wide-ranging experiment. This has to be a set of purposes that each of us, as individuals and as quasi-representatives of the sites which will support the network, must see as worthwhile and workable. We should then come up with some common intention list which can serve as the preamble to a Usenet II "charter." 3) Define a set of characteristics of the structure defined in (1) above. This would include things like support for sequencing discussions, keywords, graphics in signatures, tree structures for topics, archiving, limits on followups, how to post sources (if at all), and so on. One very important characteristic is that we recognize and support the idea of regional (company, organization, continent) topics and distributions as well as world-wide topics. This all should take into account the current software environment where we hope to run Usenet II, the transport and storage limitations, and most especially: the limits on how much software can be developed for support in a short amount of time with volunteer labor. 4) Codify a set of "rules" which reflect 1 thru 3. Included with this would be procedures on starting new groups (or discussions or mailing lists or whatever), deleting old groups, dealing with malicious users, and so on. We should also describe some representative body and/or "officers" who can help modify and implement these rules in the future, as necessary. This codification would be a semi-formal "charter" or set of guidelines for the Usenet II which would have to be agreed to by any site wishing to join. There would be no compulsions in these guidelines, and no formal organization formed. There would, however, be a document (like an RFC) to which we could refer quibbles and problems, and by which we can define "conformant" sites. We might wish to make that statement stronger, but I'm not certain how. 5) Develop a common set of transport and storage formats for the new net. Develop a system that can be transported in compressed format, that doesn't have 14 character name limits, and which won't require hundreds of hours of cpu time a week in delivery and upkeep. This should include the possibility of tying in Arpa Internet sites, too. 6) Develop a set of reading and posting programs for (5), possibly derived from some or all of the current popular software packages. Include with this development a set of formal documents describing how to use the software and the net itself. 7) Define a set of groups/topics/keywords/lists to start Usenet II with. These should be consistant with our intents for the network, and our perceived interests. 8) Set up a small network of sites (probably drawn from people on this list) to test the software and refine everything in steps 1 thru 7. 9) Start adding new sites in a manner consistant with 1-4. If those sites want to continue with some or all of Usenet, fine. If they wish to drop Usenet in favor of the new network, also fine. We will not present anyone with an "either or" situation. Does that all sound radical enough? I hope so...I don't think continuing with "business as usual" is going to do anything other than allow the situation to deteriorate further. And I, for one, do not intend to devote any more of my time or creative energy to trying to salvage the current situation. With all that I have seen lately, I don't think the reality is worth saving -- it has degenerated too far. I love the idea, though, of a world-wide community able to communicate and share their thoughts. I would like to help develop what I have seen a glimpse of in some of the Usenet groups. So, tell me, is the idea crazy? Am I being too negative about the current situation? Or is there a possibility that we could do this thing? If so, is it worth doing? And do you want to be a part of it? Would you be willing to contribute to the effort? These are the first topics of discussion. Let's hear your comments and ideas. If you think I'm wrong, say why. If you think I'm on the right track, suggest something towards the next step. I've had my say to open the discussion -- now it's your turn to pontificate. --gene 11/11/85 From cbosgd!cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP!mark Tue Nov 12 14:59:16 1985 Received: from cbosgd by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA24282; Tue, 12 Nov 85 14:53:04 est Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 12:50:39 est Received-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 14:53:04 est Received: from cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (cbpavo.ARPA) by cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (4.12/0.98.UUCP-CS.beta.4-27-85) id AA04966; Tue, 12 Nov 85 12:51:15 est Received: by cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (4.24/3.14) id AA20064; Tue, 12 Nov 85 12:50:39 est Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 12:50:39 est From: mark@cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (Mark Horton) Message-Id: <8511121750.AA20064@cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: Re: Introduction Status: RO I agree with Gene. I think the time has come to create an alternative network, one without the history of Usenet to drag it down ("But we've always done it THIS way") and with some of the mistakes corrected. We have to think about some important issues, in addition to the ones Gene lists. For example: Scope. Is this new network internation, or is it limited to the USA? If USA, what provisions do we make for peer networks in other countries to connect in to us? (It may seem obvious that it should be world-wide, but there are regulations about international traffic and concerns about ARPANET gateways that make it look simpler to have each country have their own network.) Control. Right now Usenet is an anarchy. Some argue that this is its best feature, others that it's the fundamental problem. How much centralized (or distributed) control should there be over the new network, and how is it enforced? Resources. The new network will have to be higher quality, and it will probably not be able to exist with just volunteer effort. There will have to be people who spend significant amounts of their time doing things like software development, support, administration, moderation, testing, and consulting. Where do these resources come from? Funding. There are expenses for people time, machines, communications costs, travel expenses, etc. Also, part of the problem with Usenet is that, since it's free, people have no incentive to ration their use of the net. WHere does this money come from? I spent 10 days in Korea and Japan last month, and got to talk to the people who run several other academic networks at length. I talked to Dan Oberst about BITNET and Mailnet, to Larry Landweber and Dave Farber about CSNET and NSF/NET. I learned quite a bit. Let me try to pass some of this information along. One observation is that there is a decided difference in quality between CSNET and UUCP. CSNET provides better service, and it costs more. (There were people who felt that CSNET's PhoneNet isn't necessarily better than UUCP, but each has its own advantages. It seems that, from the user's perspective, the primary advantage to CSNET is that mail is more reliable.) However, watching the users, they listened politely to the CSNET and NSF/NET talks, but it was Usenet and UUCP that really lit their eyes up and got them going. The reason seemed to be that UUCP is lower cost and therefore more of them can afford it. Lower cost, lower quality things will penetrate the market better than higher cost, higher quality things. Of course, if the costs are similar, the higher quality will be preferred. It's the same reason there are zillions of Commodore 64's out there. If we were charging for this traffic, we'd be in fat city right now. There would be lots of money to pay for expenses and improvements. However, since we aren't charging, the extra traffic is just a headache to us, in fact, the sites that run their machines the best are rewarded by being bombarded with traffic (and with high phone bills.) This has caused research, allegra, and akgua to pull out. decvax has cut back. seismo is already looking for ways to cut back, so is cbosgd. Mailnet has similar functionality to UUCP. It works over dialup phone lines, and the primary purpose is sending mail. The technology is a bit different - it uses MMDF to place the phone calls, and speaks SMTP over the line once it gets connected. It also is a star network, with MIT-MULTICS as the hub. Finally, it's not UNIX specific, but rather there are implementations for several operating systems. Mailnet was started from scratch about 18 months ago. They looked at the other networks and learned from their mistakes. Mailnet started out with a central administration and membership dues. These dues pay for the central administration (it's run by EDUCOM, which is a non-profit corporation that already existed.) BITNET started out the same way UUCP did - as a freewheeling, anarchistic network. It has totally different technology, however. For a new site to join in, they have to buy one leased line from their own machine to the nearest machine that's already on. They must also agree to let one or two new members connect to them. (Sounds a lot like Usenet, right?) Since they don't add redundant links, BITNET is a tree (no loops) and everybody but the original machine pays for exactly one leased line. The leased lines are at 9600 baud, and cost typically a few hundred dollars per month. Their bills are fixed, since there is no charge for traffic. They use a protocol called RSCS, which causes each machine to look like a remote card reader/punch to the other machine. They communicate by reading in "decks of cards" on each others virtual card readers, these become batch jobs in the IBM queue. (It is not true, however, that BITNET is only an IBM network, there are BITNET sites running UNIX, VMS, MTS, and a few others, I think. But IBM dominates, much the way UNIX dominates Usenet.) BITNET is about 5 years old. It is interconnected with some other networks which speak the same protocol, including VNET (IBM's internal network), EARN (the European version of BITNET), NetNorth (the Canadian version), and a version in the Pacific region (Asia, Australia, etc) is about to start up. The connections with VNET are quite weak, but the other nets share the same name space and appear to the user as one network. About a year ago, BITNET got a grant from IBM to improve things. This grant went for a huge IBM mainframe (3081, I think) for the hub (CUNY) for support and development, plus a staff of a dozen or so people to do development, support, and administration. I think the amount was originally around $2,000,000 (half for the mainframe) and it is expected to overrun to about $3,000,000. It was to last two years, after which time BITNET becomes self-sufficient. (Meanwhile, IBM is also funding the efforts in Europe, Canada, and Asia in similar and separate ways.) The existing BITNET sites were just places connected in, they were not formally members of any organization. (Just like Usenet and UUCP.) The new organization, also run by EDUCOM, has created a formal membership system. As an incentive to join, they provide services to the members, such as a newsletter and a map. Nobody is forced to join, but it's made very attractive because all the bills for the first two years are picked up by the grant. After the grant runs out, charges are levied to members. CSNET started up with an NSF grant for 5 years, after which it was to become self sufficient. Nobody really expected it to, but it's now 5 years later and CSNET actually has a surplus. As Landweber puts it, "People have voted with their money." However, CSNET has no formal corporation (other than a board of directors) and has affiliated with an existing corporation (NCAR, I think) for bureaucratic purposes. For example, the CSNET staff is paid by NCAR, and the dues collected go into a fund at NCAR. It is not clear to me that the income and expenses are necessarily tied to each other; I got the impession that NCAR would be willing to fund some CSNET activities separately when the NSF grant runs out. The major problem with CSNET in the past has been high dues ($30,000 for corporations, $5000 for universities, each year.) As you could predict, mostly universities joined, and companies paying $30K/year became rare and highly sought after. Only a few, such as AT&T, HP, Tektronix, Sperry, and Boeing joined. Recently CSNET has adopted a sliding scale for companies, down to $5000/year for a 100 person company. They realize that they won't get many UUCP members (which include a lot of startups) at those rates, and are thinking of extending the scale to perhaps $1000/year for a one person consulting company, such as Dave Farber's. CSNET is starting up a new network, called Cypress. This is a TCP/IP network based on 9600 baud leased lines and SLIP. It would be eventually funded along the lines of BITNET - each organization buys one leased line. The map in Landweber's talk shows four current sites: Purdue, Arizona, DECWRL, and BBN. Three lines exist, with Purdue on one end of all three. Also, BITNET is moving toward TCP/IP. In the long term, everybody wants to use OSI, however. (When academics say "OSI" they mean TP4/IP, which are nearly clones of TCP/IP.) One other thing I learned is the notion of "getting money out of companies." You can view the entire dues structure of CSNET as a way to get companies to fund CSNET. They took it a step further: CSNET is a USA only network, with peer networks in other countries. AT&T is paying big bucks to CSNET, and doesn't want to feel that AT&T is subsidizing big companies like the telcos in Japan. So it is expected that any company in Japan that wants to communicate with the USA CSNET will pay the membership fee to CSNET (in addition to whatever it pays the Japanese net.) AT&T will be happy to reciprocate and pay the fee to the Japanese network. This is really just a way to get more money out of the various companies. (If this somehow seems immoral to you, let me point out that the way Usenet operates isn't that different, just on a smaller scale. All the communications costs are hidden in the phone bills. In effect we've gotten the companies to fund Usenet.) By the way, when I think of a new, wonderful network to replace what we have now, I think of something that replaces both UUCP and Usenet. Both suffer from the same sorts of problems. There could be considerable synergy from using one set of resources to solve both problems. So when we're looking for a way to start a new network, one thing we should be thinking of is to get a grant from somebody to get started, and then to gradually phase into a charging mode when the grant runs out. These charges need not be high, they need not be aimed at making a profit. But they should be high enough to cover our expenses, and to provide an appropriate incentive (whatever that means) to the users to make "proper use" of the facilities. (For example, enough to get a user to make a decision "do I really want to send this or am I just wasting resources, or is there a more economical way to do it?") Possible sources of grants: AT&T (to compete with IBM), Usenix, the federal government. (If I stretch a bit I can picture DEC, HP, Tektronix, or Sun in this role, but these seem a bit less likely.) Obviously IBM stuff costs a fortune, and we could do it for a lot less than $3M. I can picture a backbone network of small UNIX boxes (possibly Suns or 3B2's or the new IBM RISC workstation) speaking TCP/IP/succ(SLIP) (there are a couple of enhancements to SLIP needed) with leased lines which are paid for out of overhead. (This provides a positive incentive to be on the backbone, rather than the current negative incentive.) These UNIX boxes would be dedicated gateways, so load on them doesn't matter. They are sort of like ARPANET IMPs, but more powerful, programmable in C, able to use existing tools like TCP/IP and SLIP, but with 9600 baud links instead of 56K. (We could upgrade individual links to 56K as needed later.) A second class of sites, called "primary" members, would buy a leased line to the nearest backbone site or other primary site. A third class of sites who cannot afford a leased line would run a dialup version of TCP/IP/SLIP, using 2400 baud modems (maybe even 9600.) And finally there would be nonmembers, who have the old stuff and are basically on their own. On top of this transport service, we would provide some sort of communication. This includes electronic mail and something like netnews. Also, I should point out that we do have the option of doing this in cooperation with CSNET, or in competition with it. Both options are viable and should be considered. Mark From akgua!sdcrdcf!RDCF.SDC.UUCP!glenn Wed Nov 13 01:44:57 1985 Received: from akgua by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA05600; Wed, 13 Nov 85 01:44:57 est Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 22:38:02 pst Received-Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 01:44:57 est Received: by RDCF.SDC.UUCP (sdcrdcf) [4.12/0.2] id AA23869; Tue, 12 Nov 85 22:38:02 pst Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 22:38:02 pst From: sdcrdcf!RDCF.SDC.UUCP!glenn (Glenn C. Scott) Message-Id: <8511130638.AA23869@RDCF.SDC.UUCP> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Status: O Some thoughts..., I agree that it would be very nice to use these pre-existing transport services or even to start a new one. But my first thoughts while reading about these various nets and such were "How am I going to do this ?". While SDC is cooperating with USENET as a backbone site, I doubt very much that I could get the money to subscribe to CSNET. In this case CSNET requires a capital expense, not just overhead costs (slush) as we now pay for the bills. It's going to take some smooth talking to get that one through. In planning the transport mechainsm I would like many different types of mechanisms working together. That way sites can join based on what they can pay for, or what they already have. For example SDC is available through TYMNET, I would like to bleed that for all its worth. SDC has two dedicated 56Kb line from Santa Monica, CA. to Paoli, PA. and McLean VA. that must be useful for something, (we're still trying to find out what ;-)). SDC is on the ARPANET, etc., etc. I don't want to sound like I want the future USENET to be based on UUCP or some other *old* technology. But I do think that compatibility with many systems is important. If we start using specialised hardware or expensive networks we might find USENET too expensive for other reasons than we have now. Glenn From mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu Wed Nov 13 16:03:21 1985 Received: from CSNet-Relay.CSNET by gatech.GTNET with PMDF (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA02102; Wed, 13 Nov 85 16:03:21 est Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 10:40:41 EST Received-Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 16:03:21 est Received: from mimsy.umd.edu by CSNET-RELAY.ARPA id a012076; 12 Nov 85 11:52 EST Received: by mimsy.umd.edu (5.9/4.7) id AA26290; Tue, 12 Nov 85 10:40:41 EST Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 10:40:41 EST From: Charley Wingate Message-Id: <8511121540.AA26290@mimsy.umd.edu> To: usenet-II%gatech.CSNET@csnet-relay.csnet Subject: Intro and What I Want Received: from CSNet-Relay by Gatech; 13 Nov 85 15:52:08-EST (Wed) Status: O This is my introduction to the list, and my list of what I'd like to get from the new system. My name is indeed Charley Wingate, and I'm a graduate student at U. of Maryland College Park, about to get my MS (and hopefully, about to get into the PhD program). Most people know me as a poster in the religion and philosophy groups. I would like to see them survive. I would also like to see them become forums for discussion, rather than serve as platforms for diatribes. I'd especially like to see the size of postings go down. I also read a selection of hobbyist and technical groups; in the former case chiefly net.railroad, rec.wood, and (until recently) sf-lovers; in the latter case, mostly net.lang and micro.cpm. All of these are plagued for me by a lot of garbage which is diffcult to filter out. The hobbyist groups tend to have a lot of duplicate postings; the technical groups tend to digress into uninteresting side issues. The survivors are those for which the task of weeding is not too arduous. My perspective on this is as a user. I know nothing about the communications involved in the system. I'd be willing to tolerate a LOT of garbage floating around-- as long as I could avoid having to read it, or even have to pick it out by hand as much as I do now. That's about it for now. Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe From akgua!packard!ihnp4!utzoo!henry Wed Nov 13 19:32:41 1985 Received: from akgua by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA05319; Wed, 13 Nov 85 19:32:41 est Posted-Date: 13 Nov 85 18:04:40 EST (Wed) Received-Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 19:32:41 est Date: 13 Nov 85 18:04:40 EST (Wed) From: packard!ihnp4!utzoo!henry Subject: Re: Introduction Message-Id: <8511132304.AA24545@py/garage/packard.DK> Received: by ihnp4.ATT.UUCP id AA06940; 13 Nov 85 16:52:15 CST (Wed) Received: from ihnp4.UUCP by py/garage/packard.DK; 8511132304 To: ihnp4!gatech!usenet-II References: <8511121750.AA20064@cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP> Status: O > One observation is that there is a decided difference in quality between > CSNET and UUCP. CSNET provides better service, and it costs more. (There > were people who felt that CSNET's PhoneNet isn't necessarily better than > UUCP, but each has its own advantages. It seems that, from the user's > perspective, the primary advantage to CSNET is that mail is more reliable.) It should be mentioned that there are CSNET users who would dispute this claim of high reliability. I'm not a CSNET user and am not familiar with the details, but I do know that not everyone agrees with the rosy view held by its implementors and organizers. We should beware of emulating existing networks without investigating their flaws as well as their advantages. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry From linus!utzoo!henry Fri Nov 15 05:57:07 1985 Received: from linus by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA17322; Fri, 15 Nov 85 05:57:07 est Received-Date: Fri, 15 Nov 85 05:57:07 est Received: by linus.RESEARCH (4.12/4.7) id AA20651; Fri, 15 Nov 85 05:55:23 est Date: Fri, 15 Nov 85 05:55:23 est From: Posted-Date: Fri, 15 Nov 85 05:55:23 est Message-Id: <8511151055.AA20651@linus.RESEARCH> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET References: <8511120645.AA13370@gatech.GTNET> Subject: a dose of heresy Status: O One mistake we should avoid is the dreaded second-system effect: trying to erect a beautiful edifice that will solve all the world's problems, and of course finding it necessary to employ all sorts of new and sexy but untried ideas. The surest way to kill Usenet II is to be too ambitious, ending up with either a beautiful but complex design that nobody has time to implement, or an elegant and beautiful structure that is fatally flawed by nasty practical realities. Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater: Usenet has some major flaws, but it has coped moderately well with a user community and a load far larger than anyone ever expected. Case in point... It is fashionable to criticize the concept of "newsgroups". My contention is that the underlying concept -- a relatively modest number of well-defined categories which is *not* subject to extension at the whim of Joe Random User -- has served us well and should be kept in some form. Lauren's objections to keyword-based news systems seem cogent to me: it is vital to have categories established by an authoritative mechanism rather than a quasi-random free-for-all, so that everyone agrees on the naming and organization of categories. Note that this fits in well with moderation, since moderators are discrete entities with sharply-defined permanent boundaries (their skins!) between them. This is not to say that the existing scheme is perfect! The category space has grown in an ad-hoc and messy way, despite occasional attempts to clean it up somewhat. And existing software does not do a terribly good job of supporting the notion of "discussions" as separate entities within (and sometimes across) newsgroups. Note that supporting discussions implies not only connecting articles into a sequence, but also breaking that sequence to start a new one when the subject changes seriously. (Or at least changing the damn Subject line!) Another role for moderators? Another case in point: uucp. Troublesome though it is, replacing uucp with another mechanism that will do as good a job of exploiting our primary means of communication -- phone lines and autodialers -- will *not* be a small task. And it is not at all clear to me that it is justified. (The stuff that sits on top of uucp is another story.) If we do need a new transport mechanism, we should use the ACSNet stuff rather than setting out to re-invent the wheel yet again. Building a new transport mechanism would be a major diversion of effort. Considering our objectives, I do not see that this would be anything but a stupid waste of our time and a major opportunity for failure. Third case in point: dialup lines. Simply because they can be justified for other, popular, purposes, it seems to me that dialup lines are likely to remain the primary communications medium for most sites, pious good wishes notwithstanding. It's hard to be cheaper than "free", and the hardware we need for using phone lines tends to be effectively free because it is justified for other jobs. Do not underestimate how difficult it is for many sites to justify capital expenditures, even modest ones. By using dialup lines, we get a major and important "free ride" for communications hardware. This is not to imply that the whole network needs to be built using dialups, just that they will remain the rule rather than the exception. We must live with this rather than futilely insisting that it change. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry From akgua!packard!ihnp4!utzoo!lsuc!msb Sat Nov 16 19:07:17 1985 Received: from akgua by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA13083; Sat, 16 Nov 85 19:07:17 est Posted-Date: 16 Nov 85 16:25:39 EST (Sat) Received-Date: Sat, 16 Nov 85 19:07:17 est Date: 16 Nov 85 16:25:39 EST (Sat) From: packard!ihnp4!utzoo!lsuc!msb Subject: Danger of backbone-enforced cutover Message-Id: <8511162125.AA10797@py/garage/packard.DK> Received: by ihnp4.ATT.UUCP id AA17615; 16 Nov 85 15:23:34 CST (Sat) Received: from ihnp4.UUCP by py/garage/packard.DK; 8511162125 To: ihnp4!gatech!Usenet-II Status: O This was mailed to me by Lauren Weinstein ({ihnp4,...}!vortex!lauren); I took the last paragraph as permission to forward it to the Usenet-II list. (Begin message forwarded by Mark Brader) I've been out of the country for two weeks and am trying to pick this up by context... but I think I know what you're talking about. Be warned. I've gotten messages from people who have threatened to do everything in their power to WRECK both Usenet and the mail network if restrictions are put in. Nor is it clear to me that you'll ever be able to detect all the possible renegades or get cooperation to cut them off. The most likely result is fragmentation. Nor am I thrilled at the prospect of trying to get people, on the infinitely varied sorts of machines, to try run and support new news software at this point. I think a much simpler suggestion would be to simply create moderated groups and encourage the backbones to stop transmission of the more abusive non-moderated groups. Random newgrps and such could be dealt with through other simple means. So long as the backbones cut off the crap, the impact on the rest of the net will be significant and won't require major changes for most sites, many of whom are in no position to change much of anything without risking a complete netnews cutoff and massive local outcry. In other words, I think the backbones have the power to help this situation without getting us into a situation where fragmentation and new problems would seem a likely outcome. This is just a quick note on this topic, I'll expound on this in depth if/when this reaches a public forum. I'm afraid that Usenet II would just create more chaos and problems than it would cure, given the real world situation. I'm in favor of solutions that involve changes at the fewest sites possible--and that means the backbones. More on this later. Please forward this to the other interested parties on your list. Thanks. --Lauren-- From seismo!polaris!herbie Sun Nov 17 01:33:51 1985 Received: from seismo by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA17264; Sun, 17 Nov 85 01:33:51 est From: Posted-Date: 16-Nov-1985 21:46-EST (Saturday) Received-Date: Sun, 17 Nov 85 01:33:51 est Received: from polaris.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Sun, 17 Nov 85 01:06:00 EST Message-Id: <8511170606.AA13813@seismo.CSS.GOV> Date: 16-Nov-1985 21:46-EST (Saturday) To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: hello, world Status: O i guess accepting an invitation to be on this mailing list means i'm one of the "backbone cabal" 8-). first, some bio-stuff so you know who you're talking to. for some of you who read net.audio and net.games.rogue, i'm a familiar figure, and occasionally i make forays into net.arch. currently, i work for IBM designing and implementing operating systems on their large processors (i.e., bigger than 4300's). i only started here a while back. before this, i was at the U of Waterloo (hi rj) getting my Master's among other things. i am also about the only person from IBM who has approval (very unofficial) to post to USENET. i have been a systems programmer on MVS, VM, and 4.2bsd systems, though not always a very good one. i have both my degrees in Systems Design Engineering (one of the fuzzy fields). i subscribe to some 70 newsgroups these days. i used to subscribe to about 130 before i decided that i was spending too much time reading news. anyway, some comments on the postings to the mailing list to date. >From Gene Spafford (The Introductions): >If you have been following any of the discussion in the net.news groups >recently or if you administer a well-placed news site, you are >undoubtedly aware that there are a number of nasty problems associated >with the current state of the Usenet. We have problems with >signal:noise, transmission costs, transmission delays, naming space, >etiquette, deciding what groups to carry, when to create and delete >groups, etc., etc., etc. >My >intent is for us to come up with some kind of group insight into the >nature and future of a net we would be willing to support -- with our >time, our machines, and our money. Once we have a set of parameters so >defined, we can propose it to the net at large for comment and >clarification. perhaps i'm joining this discussion late, but aren't what you are describing symptoms of a deeper problem? there is something causing the increase in net traffic. is it just the number of sites (and therefore the number of people) increasing, or are people posting more? noise in newsgroups is caused by what? is it a lack of knowledge? is it also the high turnover in the people who read and post? how much of the problem is people-related rather than hardware-related? i don't want to be fixing the wrong problem. supposing that we identify the problem correctly, but decide we can't treat it, only its symptoms, we will at least have a way of predicting the direction that the next set of problems will come from with better accuracy. >2) Define and write down *precisely* what we would like Usenet-II to >be -- software exchange, technical resource, entertainment, creative >outlet, or just wide-ranging experiment. i would prefer that to be a long-term goal. right now, i want to understand the problem. designing a network at all levels from the bare metal to the user interface is a tall order. >4) Codify a set of "rules" which reflect 1 thru 3. >There would, however, >be a document (like an RFC) to which we could refer quibbles and >problems, and by which we can define "conformant" sites. there naturally would have to be an amendment procedure in place from the beginning, as well as an appeal procedure for decisions. this sounds like a constitution. >From Mark Horton (about issues): >Scope. Is this new network internation, or is it limited to the USA? >If USA, what provisions do we make for peer networks in other countries >to connect in to us? a properly defined network and software can be interfaced to by anyone. limiting the scope to north america will not cause problems provided the interfaces are adequately described and we use hardware/software that is not radically different from existing ones. enforcement of intranet standards for internet communications can be easy, or it can be hard, depending on the fragility and the flexibility of the network. >Control. Right now Usenet is an anarchy. Some argue that this is its >best feature, others that it's the fundamental problem. Chong's Conjecture: small anarchies work, big ones become something else. >Resources. The new network will have to be higher quality, and it will >probably not be able to exist with just volunteer effort. There will >have to be people who spend significant amounts of their time doing >things like software development, support, administration, moderation, >testing, and consulting. Where do these resources come from? can a nonprofit organization take over the role of the backbones? $$$$ and legal issues come in, as well as the problems of selling the idea to the people who control the $$$$ for backbone sites. >BITNET started out the same way UUCP did - as a freewheeling, anarchistic >network. It has totally different technology, however. <...> >They use a protocol called RSCS, which causes each machine >to look like a remote card reader/punch to the other machine. They >communicate by reading in "decks of cards" on each others virtual >card readers, these become batch jobs in the IBM queue. (It is not true, >however, that BITNET is only an IBM network, there are BITNET sites running >UNIX, VMS, MTS, and a few others, I think. But IBM dominates, much the >way UNIX dominates Usenet.) the details are wrong, but that doesn't matter. RSCS is a file and message transfer protocol built on as part of the VM operating system. a user logged in is a virtual 370 with all the facilities of a real 370 and a whole lot that aren't. there exist exactly two types of files in RSCS: card images, and print images. now this seems awfully restrictive, but it's not as bad as you think. messages are of three types, commands to be executed on a remote virtual machine, messages that are to be handled by a machine as a service request or protocol handshaking, and messages that are to be displayed on a virtual machine's console (a terminal). about 2/3 of the machines are IBM or compatible hardware. the majority of the non-IBM systems are VAXes running either VMS or Unix (almost all 4.2bsd). there are strange systems on it such as CDC's and Burroughs too. >BITNET is about 5 years old. It is interconnected with some other networks >which speak the same protocol, including VNET (IBM's internal network), >EARN (the European version of BITNET), NetNorth (the Canadian version), >and a version in the Pacific region (Asia, Australia, etc) is about to >start up. The connections with VNET are quite weak, but the other nets >share the same name space and appear to the user as one network. there are about 10 IBM sites on BITNET. this is because only research division personnel are allowed access to external networks. VNET is identical in structure to BITNET except that it is all IBM machines and is about 1.5 times as large. NETNORTH is connected to BITNET via CANADA01, an IBM granted 4341. EARN is connected to BITNET via EARNET, an IBM Madrid site who pays for the trans-Atlantic link at no charge to EARN. the VNET gateway WATSON enforces the access rules for IBM people reaching the outside world via BITNET. isreal is connected through ISREARN, another IBM research site that pays for the link between Madrid and Tel Aviv. >About a year ago, BITNET got a grant from IBM to improve things. This >grant went for a huge IBM mainframe (3081, I think) for the hub (CUNY) >for support and development, plus a staff of a dozen or so people to >do development, support, and administration. I think the amount was >originally around $2,000,000 (half for the mainframe) and it is expected >to overrun to about $3,000,000. It was to last two years, after which >time BITNET becomes self-sufficient. (Meanwhile, IBM is also funding >the efforts in Europe, Canada, and Asia in similar and separate ways.) i think you underestimate the cost of a 3081 (which is what CUNY has). their configuration is closer to $1.5M just for the hardware. >By the way, when I think of a new, wonderful network to replace what we >have now, I think of something that replaces both UUCP and Usenet. Both >suffer from the same sorts of problems. There could be considerable >synergy from using one set of resources to solve both problems. currently, USENET and UUCP are effectively one and the same in the eyes of many people, and maybe they are. >Possible sources of grants: AT&T (to compete with IBM), Usenix, the federal >government. (If I stretch a bit I can picture DEC, HP, Tektronix, or Sun >in this role, but these seem a bit less likely.) Obviously IBM stuff costs >a fortune, and we could do it for a lot less than $3M. on the other hand, the 3081 could support 300 users comfortably. and i think your estimates are optimistic about the cost. also i think the US government would have a thing or two to say about e-mail reaching outside the country. not that i'm worried, i'm a canadian citizen. i can only be caught for spying. <... about possible backbone nodes ...> >These UNIX >boxes would be dedicated gateways, so load on them doesn't matter. They >are sort of like ARPANET IMPs, but more powerful, programmable in C, able >to use existing tools like TCP/IP and SLIP, but with 9600 baud links instead >of 56K. (We could upgrade individual links to 56K as needed later.) you wouldn't want too small a box, or only one modem. a backbone site should ideally be always connected and able to converse simultaneously with several other backbone sites on high speed communications lines and locally with lower speed ones. remember that a lot of the time a box would have it's CPU idle while waiting for device interrupts. >From Glenn C. Scott: > I don't want to sound like I want the future USENET to be based on UUCP or >some other *old* technology. But I do think that compatibility with many >systems is important. If we start using specialised hardware or expensive >networks we might find USENET too expensive for other reasons than we have now. compatibility to some degree must be maintained, but there must also be some sacrifice to improve the total structure. remember that the backbones alone can use whatever they want to communicate between themselves. only the other sites calling in need older hardware and software protocols. >From Henry Spencer: >One mistake we should avoid is the dreaded second-system effect: trying >to erect a beautiful edifice that will solve all the world's problems, >and of course finding it necessary to employ all sorts of new and sexy >but untried ideas. for those of you who are familiar with OS/360, it was a second system effort. we must be VERY careful here not to exceed our means. >Case in point... It is fashionable to criticize the concept of "newsgroups". >My contention is that the underlying concept -- a relatively modest number >of well-defined categories which is *not* subject to extension at the whim >of Joe Random User -- has served us well and should be kept in some form. >Lauren's objections to keyword-based news systems seem cogent to me: it is >vital to have categories established by an authoritative mechanism rather >than a quasi-random free-for-all, so that everyone agrees on the naming >and organization of categories. i belong to the IBM internal conferencing system. it connects everybody on VNET and is divided into about 40 large interest groups. most of the ARPA mailing lists are deposited on the OTHERNET group, for instance. a lot of the purely technical USENET groups are also there. don't be surprised, IBM has been in read-only mode on USENET for more than a year. each of these groups is maintained by a service virtual machine that looks after updating files and history stuff for the administrators. these groups are based in places all over the world and maintained at the central site that created the group. there can be from under a hundred to more than a thousand FORUMs (or FORA if you prefer) going at any one time on each disk. anyone can create a new FORUM at any time. because it is an internal network, it is self-policing. all the FORUMs are technical in nature although what is discussed is not neccesarily IBM hardware or software. you subscribe to a forum in one of two ways: you get a message that tells you a FORUM was appended to and you look then to see if it was interesting, or you have any changes to a FORUM sent to you much as in a mailing list. keeping track of everything that goes on is very difficult, as you can imagine, with a total of over 10,000 FORUMS in existence. luckily, because they are technical in nature and compartmentalized into about 40 broad groups, one can eliminate some whole groups easily. what constitutes a group? Text Processing, VM, MVS, Languages and Compilers, and so on. given the limitations of RSCS and the original lack of standard ways of sharing a R/W filespace this is the technique that evolved. it is a conference system. ALL postings are kept in one form or another online. given the typical configuration of an IBM internal system, it is not a great burden to dedicate a 100M to 600M disk for a conference group. >Third case in point: dialup lines. Simply because they can be justified >for other, popular, purposes, it seems to me that dialup lines are likely >to remain the primary communications medium for most sites, pious good >wishes notwithstanding. It's hard to be cheaper than "free", and the >hardware we need for using phone lines tends to be effectively free because >it is justified for other jobs. dialup is probably with us for a long time for connections outside the bacbone. can some other method be used internally (so to speak). Herbert A. Chong H4-G58 Hawthorne IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center PO Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 Ph: (914) 789-7292 I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble.... VNET,BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: HERBIE AT YKTVMH UUCP: {allegra|cbosgd|cmcl2|decvax|ihnp4|seismo}!philabs!polaris!herbie CSNET: herbie.yktvmh@ibm-sj.csnet ARPA: herbie.yktvmh.ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa ======================================================================== DISCLAIMER: what you just read was produced by pouring lukewarm tea for 42 seconds onto 9 people chained to 6 Ouiji boards. From seismo!elsie!ado Wed Nov 20 22:02:17 1985 Received: from seismo by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA18929; Wed, 20 Nov 85 22:02:17 est From: Posted-Date: Wed, 20 Nov 85 20:09:00 EST Received-Date: Wed, 20 Nov 85 22:02:17 est Received: from elsie.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Wed, 20 Nov 85 20:09:00 EST Date: Wed, 20 Nov 85 20:09:00 EST Message-Id: <8511210109.AA11504@seismo.CSS.GOV> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: a short paragraph or two Status: O > . . .someone suggested taht each member of the list post a short paragraph > or two about themselves and why they are on the list. I'm Arthur David Olson, a 1974 Computer Science graduate of the University of California at San Diego's Revelle College. My first UNIX experience was with Version 6 running on an ersatz PDP-11/40 (a Cal Data XI). I'm now working at the National Insitutes of Health on a VAX 11/750 running 4.1BSD. Back in the seventies, when Version 7 was released it wouldn't run on 11/40's-- so, for technical reasons, the site I worked at ran "backward" software. Today, NIH and UCB lawyers have failed to create a mutually acceptable 4.2BSD licensing agreement--so, for legal reasons, the site I work at runs backward software. The perspective I've gained from coping with these situations may be of use in these discussions. I'm on the list because I'm in a computing backwater. I want to be able to get help from other UNIX folks when strange problems show up at our site, and Usenet gives a way to do that. So out of sheer self interest I'm ready to do some work to ensure the continued existence of the capabilities Usenet provides. My feeling going in is that the biggest problems Usenet has aren't technical, but rather personal and organizational ones. --ado From rsk@asc.purdue.edu Sat Nov 23 21:08:07 1985 Received: from CSNet-Relay.CSNET by gatech.GTNET with PMDF (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA12006; Sat, 23 Nov 85 21:08:07 est Posted-Date: Sat, 23 Nov 85 20:47:25 est Received-Date: Sat, 23 Nov 85 21:08:07 est Received: from asc.purdue.edu by CSNET-RELAY.ARPA id a016583; 23 Nov 85 20:45 EST Received: by pucc-j; Sat, 23 Nov 85 20:47:25 est Date: Sat, 23 Nov 85 20:47:25 est From: Wombat Message-Id: <8511240147.AA08195@pucc-j> To: usenet-II%gatech.csnet@csnet-relay.csnet Subject: my short paragraph or two Cc: rsk@asc.purdue.edu Received: from CSNet-Relay by Gatech; 23 Nov 85 21:04:02-EST (Sat) Status: O Hiya. I'm Rich Kulawiec, tho' most of you know me as Wombat. I'm a Unix systems programmer at Purdue's Computing Center, and I take care of news on about 10 machines or so. I'm one of three people at Purdue who coordinate the local news feeds and all that stuff. I'm also working on a graduate degree in EE part-time; I'm interested in expert systems, image processing, and ultrasonic tomography. I've been Unix-ified for about 5 years, and have worked on machines from 11/34's running v6 to PurDual Vaxes running 4.3bsd. I have no formal training in CS, except for one freshman-level Fortran course--my degrees are in Physics and EE. I spend a fair amount of time immersed in Lisp and Prolog. At this point in the discussion, I'm doing a lot of listening (sound of jaws dropping coast-to-coast here); I'm going to re-read a lot of old articles that I've saved, along with present and past correspondence, before l chime in. I will comment briefly on the environment that we have here at PUCC and at Purdue in general. PUCC has about 6500 Unix users; the Engineering Computer Network (ECN) has about 12,000, and the Computer Science department has around 400. There are something like 30 Vaxes on campus, along with all sorts of 11's and Suns and so on. The local internet is built on Ethernet, PROnet, and our PCL-11s, and is tied together in places with DMR/C-11's. There are also some other machines around (CDC Cyber 205, IBM 3083, etc.) which are hung off at various points around campus. Most machines on campus suffer from a lack of cycles, although sometimes disk space is a problem. Network bandwidth is not a problem. Yet. Lack of terminals would be a problem if we had more cycles to go around. We (PUCC) do not allow the vast majority of our users to post to the net.* groups; only members of group "consult" or "staff" may do so. We did this to cut down on the noise that we generate, as our users are mostly undergraduates, and tend to create large amounts of garbage. (Incidentally, undergrad CS students use our machines, not CS's.) The CS department has no restrictions, as the bulk of their users are grad students, staff, and faculty. ECN has no restrictions that I am aware of. We are considering (based on ECN's experience) removing our restrictions, although we have no desire to be the source of much junk. By the way, local newgroups are used to disseminate class assignments, Mac user group notices, and the daily weather, among other things. ---Rsk From masscomp!inmet!mirror!rs Mon Nov 25 23:06:44 1985 Received: from masscomp by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA18305; Mon, 25 Nov 85 23:06:44 est Posted-Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 22:37:23 est Received-Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 23:06:44 est Received: by inmet.uucp (4.12/inmet) id AA04912; Mon, 25 Nov 85 22:40:05 est Received: by mirror.UUCP (4.12/4.7) id AA06982; Mon, 25 Nov 85 22:37:23 est Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 22:37:23 est From: inmet!mirror!rs (Rich Salz) Message-Id: <8511260337.AA06982@mirror.UUCP> To: masscomp!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Philosphy. Status: O My name is Rich $alz, I am the SA at Mirror Systems where we have a Vax750 running mtxinu-maintained 4.2, and a Pyramid 90x. We have SysV and BSD sources. We run notes, version 1.7, modified by me to handle moderated newsgroups and signature files. We intend on putting some other features in, and may eventually make a regular release of our own. I guess we're a leaf node; we call one system to get the news, and one other system calls us in turn. Any introduction to speechmaking says to start with a joke. Very well. I think we should call the new system "D" news. We've already had "A" news, "B" news is what's out there now, and "C" is likely to get confused with the language. Besides, think how much fun it would be to get our voice-synthesizers to prompt us with, "and here now, D news." I agree that Usenet is falling apart. I'm yet convinced if the rampant obnoxiousness, repetition, and such is a symptom or the problem, but I am ready and willing to help correct the situation. (I guess this is a good point to say that I'm really flattered to be part of this group, having really only been part of the net for less than a year.) I agree that the most important point is to define what the next usenet should be like: what are its goals. I haven't seen much on this yet, so let me throw out a few ideas. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but want to get the discussion rolling before we decide what features the new net should have. 1. It should be limited-access net; you can't just join by finding a friendly neighbor. There's real membership duties and dues and probationary periods -- both for sites and for users. 2. There should be at least site registration, perhaps user registration. 3. There should be a formal group responsible for enforcing "the rules." 4. Not everyone in the net gets to vote on policy; perhaps just SA's. I don't know what to suggest for discussion areas/limitations. I read a fair number of technical groups (wizards, mod.std.unix, *.sources*, net.text, laser-lovers, et. al.), and a few non-technical groups. Of the latter, net.games.* stand out because their traffic is so low that I can afford the time to read them all, net.comics has the highest S/N ratio of anything around, and I used to read net.music until Doug Allen (nessus@mit-eddie) drove me away. I can't come up with a consistant viewpoint that encompasses all these areas, so I won't try. Finally, I think DON'T think we should call the "rules" document a constitution as that sounds a bit too pretentious. RFC fits in nicely with the technical frame of mind around here, and RFC's, like study groups, can have "charges" (or preambles). Since we really will be dealing with philosophy, though, maybe we can call it a charter. 5. Discussions should be mainly technical, concentrating in areas of interest to Unix people. 2. It should support the Amish punishment of "banning" where nobody talks to the guilty party. 3. There should be an elected Board responsible From akgua!packard!ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece Mon Nov 25 23:11:11 1985 Received: from akgua by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA18407; Mon, 25 Nov 85 23:11:11 est Posted-Date: 25 Nov 1985 14:09-CST Received-Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 23:11:11 est Date: 25 Nov 1985 14:09-CST From: packard!ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece (Scott E. Preece) Subject: Introductory random thoughts Message-Id: <501797379/preece@fang> Received: by ihnp4.ATT.UUCP id AA05614; 25 Nov 85 22:04:42 CST (Mon) Received: by a.CS.UIUC.EDU (UIUC-5.5/9.3), id AA25643; Mon, 25 Nov 85 15:42:50 CST Received: from ihnp4.UUCP by py/garage/packard.DK; 8511260408 To: ihnp4!seismo!gatech!usenet-II In-Reply-To: 0's message of Sun, 10 Nov 85 134622 est Status: O I've been a Usenet participant for about four years. Before that I participated in similar networks on Plato and elsewhere. I was our UUCP and notesfile administrator for about a year; that's no longer my job, but I still work on the notes software off and on to support our particular needs. I would like to see Usenet evolve (actually, I guess it's not evolution but revolution, but I can't say "I want to see Usenet revolve"...) into a service or family of services that provides all the kinds of access that Usenet does, but functions more reliably, efficiently, and quickly. I think there should be both intelligently, selectively edited digests and network-wide unmoderated channels. I think there should be "official" channels for specific vendors to speak and be spoken to through. I think there should be an underlying transport mechanism that provides high bandwidth at low cost and is paid for by all the members equitably at a rate low enough to allow all our members to come out of their corporate closets and get their companies' blessings. I think there should be a well-defined performance goal for the network as a whole, which could be used to guide policy in selecting and monitoring topology (for instance, "mean time for passage between any two sites shall be less than 48 hours"). I think the transport mechanism should be clearly separated from the user interface so that news successors and notes successors can coexist happily. I think it should be easy to create a new group and that it should be completely acceptable to have multiple overlapping groups with different personalities. I think there should be a good mechanism for supporting one or more distribution centers for a group, so that a site would not have to take everything unless it (or its downstream feeds) wanted everything: it should be easy for a reader somewhere to see a description and say "Send me a sample of group x" and later to ask for a regular subscription or even the existing archives. I think it should be possible to refer to previous items and to annotate them with added comments. Basic net services seem to fall into several areas: Distribution (one to many) channels like net.sources Magazine (one to many plus response) channels like mod.whatever Discussion (many to many) channels like net.whatever Appeal (one to many with personal response) channels like net.wanted Mail (one to one) channels like mail Each class has different requirements for effective utilization, possibly modified by subject area and readership. Mail should be delivered very quickly; net.sources could be delivered weekly with no loss of value. Some discussions are very volatile and suffer with any delay; some discussions call for detailed, reasoned submissions and gain little from high connectivity. Subdomains are clearly useful, too. I expect to have a more detailed description of the net as I'd like to see it in a while; right now I'm still mulling the question. From masscomp!inmet!mirror!rs Tue Nov 26 05:02:03 1985 Received: from masscomp by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA21292; Tue, 26 Nov 85 05:02:03 est Posted-Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 00:23:24 est Received-Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 05:02:03 est Received: by inmet.uucp (4.12/inmet) id AA09250; Tue, 26 Nov 85 04:02:00 est Received: by mirror.UUCP (4.12/4.7) id AA07339; Tue, 26 Nov 85 00:23:24 est Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 00:23:24 est From: inmet!mirror!rs (Rich Salz) Message-Id: <8511260523.AA07339@mirror.UUCP> To: masscomp!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Necessary features Status: O In this message I'd like to mention, despite my previous note, some technical features I think the new usenet should have. The naming system should be clean and consistant. For example, net.* basically implies world-wide distribution, yet eur.* is a top-level name that really belongs in net. Perhaps we should take distribution out of the discussion group name. Instead, distribution should be on a per-message feature. It should be possible to get a "policy" or "description" of each discussion group. This is issued from a central authority and is the same on all systems, with perhaps local (automatic) additions giving the default distribution and access. Read and write access should be on a finer grain than all or nothing. It should at least be doable on a per-discussion basis. But should it be based on inclusion or exclusion? I don't know. It would be a real win if, by registerng each site (and user?) someone could read an article and then query a database to find out who the author is. A newnet-wide "finger" service. Moderation or editing, if not intrinsic to the newnet, should be supported from the ground up. There should be monitoring at the site-level of both reading and writing. If, e.g., we keep all ".newsrc2" files in one spot, then this can be much easier. As a minimum, the SA should be able to get a log of all messages written at his/her site, sorted by any of distribution, date, size, author, newsgroup. Similarly, s/he should be able to get a "time of last access" listing for each newsgroup, for anyone who has ever read the newsgroup. One the one hand, I like the idea of being able to interface the net into the user's mail reader easily. Like the telephone: whether it's a one-on-one call, or a conference call, the basic mechanisms are the same. On the other hand, if we decide to impose some sort of structure on the communication (articles/followups or basenote/responses), then none of the current Unix(tm) mailers really fit. Of course, we could always expand our scope to include writing a mailer.... (I'll comment more on this after I've read the "Dragonmail" paper.) The system should be screen-oriented. I'm not exactly sure what this means, other than it should use termcap/curses/terminfo. Basically, there should always be useful information on the screen. Unlike mail, I shouldn't have to explicitly say "show me the first message." Most commands should be a single letter; if they all fit under one hand, even better. From dan@msdc.UUCP Tue Nov 26 12:17:01 1985 Received: from msdc.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.14.GT/6.0.GT) id AA28399; Tue, 26 Nov 85 12:06:16 est Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 12:06:16 est From: Posted-Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 12:06:16 est Received-Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 12:06:16 est Message-Id: <8511261706.AA28399@gatech.GTNET> To: msdc!gatech!usenet-II Subject: my intro Status: O My name is Dan Forsyth. I was introduced to Unix as an undergrad at Georgia Tech around ten years ago. After spending several years trying to make a roomful of Primes as useful as a PDP11, I came to work here in the "real world" producing Unix-based large-scale clinical information systems about four years ago. We've been on Usenet since the "A" news days; I think it's been about three and a half years. Glenn's comments started me thinking about how Usenet came into being, at least in this isolated part of the world. Back "in the good old days", there were Unix machines that sat idle most of the night when their playmates went home, and they had phone lines and modems that sat idle while their programmers were snug in their beds. And all of a sudden the poor isolated technocrats that ran them heard a wonderful suggestion from a Usenix conference. (This was in the days when our customers didn't just ask "What's a Unix?", they asked "What's a DEC? Do they make IBM computers, too?") For the mere cost of a few late-night long-distance calls to some other isolated technocracy in North Carolina, we could have technical contact with all the other serious Unix developers out there in the world. Such a deal! (Turns out we had to invest in a newly-announced Hayes Smartmodem to do our dialing. Extracting that $249 was a monumental achievement in salesmanship. It certainly took more than $249 in lost time.) We received most of the news at 300 baud until Hayes released the Smartmodem 1200. We didn't get all of the groups, but we did get a good proportion of them. Our phone bills were running in the low hundreds of dollars a month. By that time, though, we had gotten quite a bit of valuable information from the net (especially from unix-wizards and bugs), and fortunately we could show that it had saved us thousands of dollars of time and money. Thus it was relatively easy to prove that the phone bills were worth it, especially since we could now buy a 1200 baud modem and cut the costs by at least two-thirds. At that time, we were supplying the newsgroups that we got from ncsu and mcnc to a few local sites, gatech being one of them. Somewhere along the road, Lindsay Cleveland at akgua began to bring in all the news groups and very generously offered them to us and gatech and the rest of Atlanta. Since we were constrained to running news on an Onyx at the time, we were only too glad to have someone take over; 20MB of disk only went so far in the days before batching. I'm offering this chronical to illustrate a couple of points. Number one is that without getting a foot in the door we never would have gotten the several hundred dollars a month (our actual costs) we would have needed to subscribe to such a service up front. The fact that we had the cpu cycles and equipment lying around allowed us to get in with a minimal up-front investment. Number two is the old "it's easier to ask forgiveness that to ask for permission". If we had stated up front that we would be requiring $300/month for phone bills, I seriously doubt that we could have extracted permission even for a test period. As it was, it sounded innocent enough at first, and we had hard justification by the time questions were asked. Times have changed a lot since then. We have the personal computer node issues. There is the RBBS craze. There are commercial services that provide similar forums to Usenet (for a price). There is Stargate. We have a lot more sites with enlightened management (e.g. if you said Usenet was going to cost us a $3000 a year subscription, I figure I'd have about a 70% chance of getting the bucks for it. That's up from 0% four years ago). Computers, and modems, and autodialers are cheap; phone lines and phone calls are more expensive. We also have a few incredibly generous (intentionally or unintentionally) organizations that spend huge amounts of money on Usenet to support effective freeloaders like us. But I think the fundamental foot-in-the-door/permission problem still remains. And I see it as the first question that we have to address: do we want to potentially exclude the technical staffs at installations that have unenlightened management. If we don't want to exclude them, we have to use an organization and technology that can support "freeloaders" for a low front end cost. That either means they have to pay in phone charges or cpu time, at least at the beginning. (This also brings up the question of public institutions providing "free" service to a commercial network "company" that charges other people for their work. At least an anarchy doesn't have this problem.) We must also require that the new system be supportable on dial-up phone lines with unmodified (binary license) uucps, since that's all a lot of folks have. My thinking on this subject tells me that a system that (at least superficially) looks like the current Usenet with more political clout (and better software and hardware technology) is still the way to go in providing the widest range of access. (Something on the order of "If we allow you to join this network, you agree to abide by the rulings set down by the paying-membership-elected 'board of directors'; if you misbehave, you get chopped off.") I've purposely begged the question of whether supporting "freeloading" with unenlightened management is a "good thing." I'd like to hear the group consensus regarding what kind of an audience is desirable. What sacrifices should organizations have to make to join Usenet-II? Do we want "just anybody" to be able to buy a PC and hook up? Do we want to explicitly limit membership? Do we want to implicitly limit membership by requiring large amounts of committed resources, (like BITNET or ARPANET)? We need to make these choices up front, because the answers to these questions are going to define our technological constraints. (Even though my outlook is somewhat myopic, I suspect we can get the necessary resources to join whatever the reformed net might be. So I don't really have a vested interest in which way it goes.) Dan Forsyth ({gatech,akgua,mcnc}!msdc!dan) Medical Systems Development Corporation, Atlanta, GA P.S. I think we could save the current Usenet if we psycho-probed all users to determine whether they think use of the net is a "right" or a "privilege"; then we just disconnect all the "rights". Any takers? From seismo!harvard!wjh12!mirror!rs Wed Nov 27 10:01:29 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA00721; Wed, 27 Nov 85 09:50:22 EST Posted-Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 09:42:37 est Received-Date: Wed, 27 Nov 85 09:50:22 EST Received: from harvard.HARVARD.EDU by seismo.CSS.GOV with SMTP; Wed, 27 Nov 85 00:47:06 EST Received: by harvard.HARVARD.EDU; Wed, 27 Nov 85 00:49:09 EST Received: by mirror.UUCP (4.12/4.7) id AA10239; Tue, 26 Nov 85 09:42:37 est Date: Tue, 26 Nov 85 09:42:37 est From: seismo!harvard!wjh12!mirror!rs (Rich Salz) Message-Id: <8511261442.AA10239@mirror.UUCP> To: mark@cbosgd.UUCP, usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: Re: Philosophy Status: O Oh my gosh, I'm so embarrased. ;-) Please delete the last two lines from my first message; the ones that started "5. Discussions should be mainly..." Ooops. From hplabs!glacier!reid Wed Nov 27 11:43:04 1985 Received: from hplabs.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA03164; Wed, 27 Nov 85 11:39:06 EST Posted-Date: 26 Nov 1985 1522-PST (Tuesday) Received-Date: Wed, 27 Nov 85 11:39:06 EST Message-Id: <8511271639.AA03164@gatech.GTNET> Received: by hplabsd ; Tue, 26 Nov 85 16:21:45 pst Received: by glacier with Sendmail; Tue, 26 Nov 85 15:22:08 pst Date: 26 Nov 1985 1522-PST (Tuesday) From: Brian Reid To: hplabs!gatech!usenet-II Cc: reid Subject: intro Status: O I'm Brian Reid. I'm a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. I've been a diehard, addicted user of electronic communication since 1967. I'm the netnews administrator for glacier, a minor backbone site, and for Stanford, a university that basically couldn't care if Usenet lives or dies [most people here consider it garbage, and stick to ARPAnet]. We have about 100 Unix systems here on campus (mostly VAXes), and only 6 of them run netnews. 2 of those 6 are talking about canceling. I come to this group not from a love of Usenet but from a love of electronic communication. I am willing to take absolutely nothing for granted in the creation of "Usenet II". Newsgroups vs. keywords? News or notes or something new? Hierarchical naming or identifier naming? Mail transport or custom protocol transport? Any and all of these things are candidates for rework or replacement. Moderators? Cross postings? Binaries? Censorship? Control? Robustness? Flaming? Hey, these are very real issues. I'm slightly cynical about Usenet II, but I'm willing to work on it. I don't believe it will ever amount to much unless it is radically restructured (incremental change won't help much). Here's a potpourri of suggestions for radical changes. * All netwide groups moderated * All unmoderated groups topologically local (i.e. no per-message toll connections in unmoderated groups) * Consistent statistics of READERSHIP, not writership, made available. * Capability for multiple and distributed moderators (i.e. software support for this--you can do it now but it is hard). * Official software support for the concept that not all sites, even backbone sites, get all groups. Perhaps backbone sites will relay a group without storing it (as we do with net.religion and net.origins and net.politics now). These are design desiderata. What do I want? This: * I want the psychological reward to a poster to be derived from the number of people who READ his message, and not from the number of bytes in it. This will encourage quality postings. * I want to create a situation something like current magazine publishing, where there is prestige attached to having your stuff accepted by certain moderators, so that people are willing to hold the good stuff for the quality places. * I want to minimize the delay of moderation. My time is worth money to me, and I could easily raise thousands of dollars per year of Stanford money to pay towards the salary of professional moderators. I'm sure other places could too. I think that this stands in stark contrast to the sites that have trouble raising $250 for a modem, and I think it is important that we have both kinds of people involved in the redesign. I think that a network of the kind that I want could be built using the transport mechanism of the current network, by having paid professional moderators who read through all of the swill and produced digests that they sent to me to read. Actually, they could just send me message numbers and my software would find the messages. More thoughts on how to achieve these things in a later message. From spaf Wed Nov 27 13:27:09 1985 Received: by gatech.GTNET (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA05451; Wed, 27 Nov 85 13:27:09 EST Date: Wed, 27 Nov 85 13:27:09 EST From: Gene Spafford Posted-Date: Wed, 27 Nov 85 13:27:09 EST Received-Date: Wed, 27 Nov 85 13:27:09 EST Message-Id: <8511271827.AA05451@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-ii Subject: Administrivia Cc: mark, postmaster@uf-cgrl.UUCP Status: O Some of you have recently submitted items to the list and gotten back some (possibly cryptic) error messages from uf-csv and uf-cgrl. Our mailer here was attempting to route some mail from the list through uf-cgrl to uw-beaver, and evidently the mailer at uf-cgrl is broken in a big way. I've removed uf-cgrl from our routing tables until I receive evidence that the problem has been fixed. If you got one of these error messages, you can ignore it. If you haven't received any of the last few messages: "my intro" dan@msdc "Re: Philosophy" mirror!rs "intro" glacier!reid then let me know and I will provide duplicates from the archives. My records show 17 messages so far. I'm still not quite caught up on all the mail that piled up while I was away, and my thesis is receiving the first 110% of my attention, so if you are expecting mail from me, don't fret too much yet. Really important mail should have something like URGENT in the subject to catch my attention..... --gene From seismo!vortex!lauren Fri Nov 29 02:40:43 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA00242; Fri, 29 Nov 85 02:27:18 EST Posted-Date: Thu, 28-Nov-85 21:29:25 PST Received-Date: Fri, 29 Nov 85 02:27:18 EST Received: from vortex.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Fri, 29 Nov 85 00:51:18 EST Date: Thu, 28-Nov-85 21:29:25 PST From: seismo!vortex!lauren (Lauren Weinstein) Subject: misc. Message-Id: <8511282129.399.0.VT1.00C@vortex.UUCP> To: vortex!gatech!usenet-II Status: O Frankly, I have grave doubts that the sorts of models being batted around for "Usenet-II" (I don't like this name, by the way) are really going to do us much good in the long run. Or possibly even in the short run. First a given: ANY successful information "service" must be largely or completely based on moderated "groups" of some sort. The level of "moderation" required may vary from topic to topic, of course. Hopefully we all agree on these fundamental points, so I'm not going to wave the moderation banner here--I've done so plenty of times in detail in the past. If I need to clarify what I mean by "moderation," please let me know--different levels of moderation DO exist. But there is more required than moderation for an information system to operate successfully and SCALE UPWARD well. Dialup systems (the choice of transport protocols is virtually irrelevant to this discussion) may SEEM to sometimes be "cheap" but really aren't. The costs are real, especially in an era when paying per minute for even LOCAL phone calls will be the norm in a few years for both businesses and residential users. But even worse, dialup systems, as we've seen the hard way with Usenet, can suffer badly when we're dealing with large numbers of sites and large amounts of data. I won't detail the problems here unless someone really wants me to--I assume we're all familiar with the problems of coordinating and operating such systems once they get beyond a small scale. They just don't scale upward well. For mail, dialup systems tend to sometimes be a comparatively economical choice since we're usually dealing with only one or a very limited number of recipients. The uucp network really does work very well for mail. But for items (like netnews) that we really want to send to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, dialup systems introduce too many problems. Costs, coordination, data volumes, time-lags, etc. are all major problems with dialup systems in netnews type operations. The issue of time-lags is critical for systems that plan to operate on a moderated basis, since the moderation process itself by definition introduces lag above and beyond that already inherent in the distribution system. The time-lag inherent in dialup systems, combined with moderation, make a bad problem even worse. Some people point at packet networks as a help... but in reality they are just another form of dialup system in terms of their operational characteristics. For simple cases, you still have to dialup the network nodes, deal with the networks' usually lousy throughput and other undesirable characteristics, and face the spectre of sudden fee/rate changes, sudden influxes of other network users that degrade network performance or tie up non-leased line access ports, etc. The access port problem can be helped by using (usually higher speed) leased connections, but these entail significant costs, telco hassles, and other problems, and STILL don't help with the overall network throughput and other problems associated with having to ship materials to lots of distributed sites on a one-at-a-time basis. In any case, it's clear that the same time-lag and coordination problems occur with these packet networks as with more "conventional" dialup systems. Another range of issues revolves around centralized vs. distributed systems--this also relates to the time-lag problem. Many of Usenet's problems have been heavily related to something we often consider to be a positive attribute--its distributed nature. This distributed characteristic has led inevitably to time-lags and coordination problems, for a variety of reasons which I can discuss if people so desire. Most of the somewhat "successful" discussion systems in use now are highly centralized, rather than distributed (they're also usually moderated to some degree, and are always "watched over" to avoid distribution of illegal or "nonsense" materials). Models of these are the systems like Compuserve and the like. But these systems have major problems as well. The volume of calls hitting these systems have crippled not only the serving computers, but also the data networks and even the phone networks processing the calls. Service to other customers (data and phone) have obviously suffered as a result. So centralized systems have lots of problems as well. So, I've now condemned both distributed and centralized systems. I've condemned both dialup and packet switched distribution systems. Gee whiz, Lauren, what's left? Ah hah! You know where I'm going! Up, up and away, into deep space of course! I feel very strongly that the solution is to make the best possible use of something that is still available to us and that has actually been moving along very well (though I haven't been talking about it publicly very much, for the same sorts of reasons that this mailing list is not a newsgroup!) I'm referring to Stargate of course. Stargate still spins. In fact it spins very well, indeed. The reasons you haven't heard too much lately are twofold... One, there are various negotiations going on regarding funding, organization, operations, etc. that by their very nature can't go on with too much wide public fanfare. Two, there have been some technical holds while mass production of decoders, and uplink software to handle those decoders, was being developed and installed by the carrier. I'm pleased to be able to say that the decoders are now becoming available--I hope to have a few of the new ones within the next month or two and switch the test data feed from the old decoders to the new ones. Other good news: a prototype "buffer box" (which will be quite inexpensive) is being built as I speak, and will apparently be offered to Stargate at cost. (The buffer box takes the output from the Stargate decoder, stores and processes articles (error correction, etc.), feeds them to the local "mainframe" computer, and performs various other useful tasks.) On the non-technical side, project funding sources are still being solicited, and perhaps some of the persons/companies involved in this list would like to participate in helping in this aspect of the project! Also, I may shortly be able to offer a number of new decoders to a number of sites for testing. I have been contacted by /usr/group in regards to helping to fund part of Stargate. There is hope that Stargate will help to create a joint forum in which Usenix (which has funded the experiment up to now), /usr/group, and other organizations can all work together to bring to pass the "alternative" information service that I've proposed Stargate should be. Remember, it has been my intention that Stargate, as an operational service, would be an alternative to Usenet. Some of the same topics might be discussed, and there might even be some very carefully controlled crossflow with Usenet. But in general Stargate would be a separate information service, with moderation (to one extent or another, depending on user desires and other requirements) being the standard mode of operation. Stargate's big advantage over all other means of distributing material is obvious, of course. It can distribute material to an essentially unlimited number of points (by cable TV or cheapo satellite dish) simultanteously, and on a 24 hour/day basis. A continuous data stream to carry whatever information we see fit, hitting almost everywhere that satellite Superstation WTBS can reach. Facilities would need to be made available for sites who could not receive satellite WTBS to receive appropriate materials by other means, but by and large it's becoming obvious that the number of points that can receive WTBS (through one technique or another) is very large and will become even larger over the near future. And that's the key--Stargate is BROADCASTING of material--which avoids the time-lag, dialup and packet network saturation, coordination, and many other problems inherent in systems other than Stargate. The satellite uplink people are still very enthusiastic about Stargate, and are still willing to make a TERRIFIC deal when it comes to satellite bandwidth. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It is unlikely that we'll ever have a comparable opportunity. The installation I made at the WTBS uplink has been running on WTBS for almost a year now, and it's time to start moving toward broader testing and onward toward a real service. The uplink folks think that the sort of plans I've outlined for an information service will work well, and they are serious about helping Stargate. I would like to solicit your help in making such a service a reality. Now's the time for me to go back to the satellite people, and to the organizations who have offered support of the project, and say, "Look at all these additional people and companies who want to participate! Look what we can accomplish!" Everything is set for a gigantic leap forward--but I need your help to make it happen. I'll need some test sites quite soon, but I need help with organizational issues involving the operational aspects of such a service, moderation and moderators (choice of moderators, control of moderators, moderation levels and guidelines, etc.) Technical issues involving software on the receiving sites and at the uplink, the best way to handle delivery of materials from users to moderators and from moderators to the Stargate uplink, and a wide variety of other topics, including funding, payments to moderators, organizational issues of all sorts, etc., all need to be discussed. I can't carry on such a discussion in the wide public forum of net.news.stargate. I want Stargate to be that "alternative" of which I've spoken many times. A high quality alternative to Usenet that could benefit a very large number of people and could grow without running into the sorts of technical and cost limitations that cause problems for other technologies when they attempt to scale up. I'd like Stargate to be able to grow and expand without running into such problems, and I think it can. But I can't proceed entirely by myself any longer. I need your input, and I'm hoping that this forum can work with me toward making this a reality. I hope you'll be willing to help shape Stargate into something that will be of benefit to a large and rapidly growing community, something we can all be proud of. Care to participate? Please let me know. Thanks. --Lauren-- From cbosgd!cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP!mark Sat Dec 7 20:17:31 1985 Received: from cbosgd.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA14197; Sat, 7 Dec 85 20:12:38 EST Posted-Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 18:16:30 est Received-Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 20:12:38 EST Received: from cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (cbpavo.ARPA) by cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (4.12/UUCP-Project/11.09.85) id AA04015; Sat, 7 Dec 85 18:16:37 est Received: by cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (4.24/3.14) id AA01007; Sat, 7 Dec 85 18:16:30 est Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 18:16:30 est From: mark@cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (Mark Horton) Message-Id: <8512072316.AA01007@cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: questionnaire Status: O [This is a remailing - apologies in advance if you get two copies.] I'd appreciate it if each of you would take a couple minutes and fill this out. It will help me get a feel for some of the gut reactions to some of the issues that people have. After you fill it out, please feel free to discuss things on the list, and then perhaps if we don't have a concensus we can do another poll. Thanks, Mark This questionnaire is to help determine the primary structure of the organization to be formed. For each of these questions, please give an indication of your thoughts. Some possible responses are included, but feel free to make up your own. More than one answer is possible, you can edit this message and delete the answers that do not apply. None of these constitute a committment to you or your organization, this is just to get ideas about the direction to proceed. (1) What direction would you like to see the successor to Usenet go? (a) No change - just keep the existing net. (b) Form a formal organization (e.g. elected positions) of volunteers. There would be no funding and no money for expenses. (c) Form a non-profit corporation which has funding from members and a few salaried employees. (d) Form a for-profit business intended to make money. (e) Join up with CSNET and use their structure and organization. (2) What resources do you think your organization could provide? (a) People to help administer the net (e.g. moderators, consultants) (b) People to write and support software. (c) Significant telephone calls (e.g. you call other sites with UUCP.) (d) Use of other long-haul data networks (e.g. X.25, ARPA-like.) (e) Money for equipment (e.g. modems, gateways) and leased lines. (f) Money for membership dues in the organization. (g) Possible source of a grant to get the organization started. (3) What activity would you like to do with the new network? (a) None, I'm an interested bystander. (b) Administrative (troubleshooting, helping new sites, planning, etc.) (c) Technical (software development, support, etc.) (d) Editorial (e.g. moderator, reader of other sources of postings.) (4) What sort of involvement with this new network would you personally like? (a) None, I'm an interested bystander. (b) Volunteer, putting in perhaps 1-5 hours/week (c) Part time paid. (d) Full time paid, but remaining in my current home. (e) Full time paid, willing to relocate to the headquarters. (5) To what extent do you think the new newsgroups (or whatever get created) should be moderated? (a) No moderation whatsoever. (b) Moderation only for a few key newsgroups, as in the current situation. (c) Moderation of perhaps half the groups (d) Moderation as the default, with a few unmoderated groups. (e) Moderation of everything. (6) How do you feel about etiquette on the new network? (I'm talking about public postings ala netnews, rather than private mail.) (a) Ignore the issue, let people flame if they wish. (b) Have articles like net.announce.newusers to educate people. (c) Have a "Network Drivers License" that people must qualify for before they can post. (d) Like c but the license can be revoked after some formal process. (e) Like d but even stricter: copy the Japanese style of always being very polite and respectful of other people and very humble about yourself. Repeated bad manners in public are grounds for revocation. From research!icarus!jj Sat Dec 7 23:37:31 1985 Received: from research.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA16262; Sat, 7 Dec 85 23:17:41 EST Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 23:17:41 EST From: Posted-Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 23:17:41 EST Received-Date: Sat, 7 Dec 85 23:17:41 EST Message-Id: <8512080417.AA16262@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: Comments on Status: O the questionaire from Mark, etc. I havent' said much to date, because I'm NOT a site admin, I'm nostly a participant, and I have no "real" net power. (other than argument) I liked most of Mark's questionaire, but I did find a few points that I felt were not carefully designed in the questionaire. In particular, I think any new attempt at a net should be 1) Set up so that if necessary, disciplinary measures CAN be taken BY the net. 2) I think that initially, participants should be allowed the priveledge of posting, and that the assumption should be innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around, as Mark's questionaire seems to presume, i.e. the "net driver's liscense" idea. Clearly, any first time poster should read an etiquette document, stating quite clearly that "flaming", personal attacks, AA violations, etc, are VERBOTEN before they post, but I think that such can be done via simple software, i.e. keep a list on the machine and put up the etiquette document for those who haven't posted in n weeks, or what-have-you. (When you post.) 3) New sites should understand that their admission is predicated on good behavior, old sites likewise. I.E. a failure to self-police can lead to disconnection. I don't have any feel for the business end of making a new net arrangement work, so I will not speculate. A comment about the current state of nutnoise: The point that flaming is NOT ACCEPTED hasn't been made. The semi-deletion of nut.flame has NOT convinced people, partially because it was only a semi-deletion. ihnp4, in particular is holding net.flame together for a lot of us, and the newsgroup is starting to reconstruct itself as people realize that it still gets around. While this is somewhat supply/demand showing up, there has to be a strong point that flaming is NOT acceptable anywhere to a great proportion of the backbone. That point is very hard to realize right now. JJ From ulysses!burl!rcj Sun Dec 8 14:46:15 1985 Received: from ulysses.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.0.GT) id AA02694; Sun, 8 Dec 85 14:45:01 EST From: Posted-Date: Sun, 8 Dec 85 14:25:11 est Received-Date: Sun, 8 Dec 85 14:45:01 EST Received: by ulysses.UUCP; Sun, 8 Dec 85 14:25:11 est Date: Sun, 8 Dec 85 14:25:11 est Message-Id: <8512081925.AA06198@ulysses.UUCP> To: ulysses!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Re: questionnaire Status: O (1) What direction would you like to see the successor to Usenet go? (b) Form a formal organization (e.g. elected positions) of volunteers. There would be no funding and no money for expenses. (2) What resources do you think your organization could provide? (b) People (probably 2 on a very parttime basis) to write and support software. (c) Significant telephone calls (e.g. you call other sites with UUCP.) -- only other AT&T sites, unfortunately. (3) What activity would you like to do with the new network? (c) Technical (software development, support, etc.) (4) What sort of involvement with this new network would you personally like? (b) Volunteer, putting in perhaps 1-5 hours/week (c) Part time paid. -- (would be nice but doesn't jive with my answer to (1)) (5) To what extent do you think the new newsgroups (or whatever get created) should be moderated? (c) Moderation of perhaps half the groups (6) How do you feel about etiquette on the new network? (I'm talking about public postings ala netnews, rather than private mail.) (b) Have articles like net.announce.newusers to educate people. (c) Have a "Network Drivers License" that people must qualify for before they can post. (d) Like c but the license can be revoked after some formal process. UNFORTUNATELY, (c) and (d) would be completely unenforcable; even given extensive software support most users have several logins to use -- and we can't count on local support to stop postaholics either -- look at Rich Rosen. The only way to make this enforcable is to (a) support it in software, and (b) make it the responsibility of the site admin to make sure his/her people stay in line -- if they don't then cut off the site itself. I find that both unrealistic and detrimental to what I consider the spirit of the net, but if it is a choice of losing the net (Usenet I or II), I'd even support the site-responsibility idea. The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj From seismo!polaris!herbie Thu Dec 12 01:45:00 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA00157; Thu, 12 Dec 85 01:37:34 EST From: Posted-Date: 11-Dec-1985 21:10-EST (Wednesday) Received-Date: Thu, 12 Dec 85 01:37:34 EST Received: from polaris.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Wed, 11 Dec 85 22:50:03 EST Message-Id: <8512120350.AA03621@seismo.CSS.GOV> Date: 11-Dec-1985 21:10-EST (Wednesday) To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: stargate Status: O well, no-one has said anything for a while, so here goes. Lauren and others have mentioned both here and in net.news.group that stargate is a valid alternative for broadcasting news. it is inherently a good medium for that. my concerns with using stargate are: 1) how do you get news to the earthstation that talks on the uplink to the satellite? or do you have everyone that's a backbone site buy a transmitter and use a collision detection protocol up there? this only works if no-one else is using the satellite for anything. if you don't have a special way for the backbones getting to the earthstation this idea leaves you at square one, propogating news along via best possible means until it reaches stargate. 2) who pays for the hardware? it is a capital expenditure that is larger than most monthly phone bills, but smaller than a new CPU. selling the idea to management may be more difficult than asking them to buy higher speed dedicated modems because the latter is an 'upgrade' rather than a change in technology. if this has been discussed before in net.news.stargate i missed it because i unsubscribed about 3 weeks after it was created. Herb Chong... I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble.... VNET,BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: HERBIE AT YKTVMH UUCP: {allegra|cbosgd|cmcl2|decvax|ihnp4|seismo}!philabs!polaris!herbie CSNET: herbie.yktvmh@ibm-sj.csnet ARPA: herbie.yktvmh.ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa ======================================================================== DISCLAIMER: what you just read was produced by pouring lukewarm tea for 42 seconds onto 9 people chained to 6 Ouiji boards. From ulysses!burl!rcj Thu Dec 12 11:27:19 1985 Received: from ulysses.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA04154; Thu, 12 Dec 85 11:15:36 EST From: Posted-Date: Thu, 12 Dec 85 10:45:22 est Received-Date: Thu, 12 Dec 85 11:15:36 EST Received: by ulysses.UUCP; Thu, 12 Dec 85 10:45:22 est Date: Thu, 12 Dec 85 10:45:22 est Message-Id: <8512121545.AA19922@ulysses.UUCP> To: ulysses!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Re: stargate Status: O If handled properly from a "wouldn't this be great PR" angle, the capital expenditure for the Stargate hardware could probably be squeezed out of management rather quickly. " today announced that it will be joining in a world- wide satellite-based computer news network designed to provide rapid dissemination of pertinent issues to companies and universities world-wide. The network, called Stargate, will...." I know the above is cheesy, but you get the idea. The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj From clyde!watmath!rjwhite Fri Dec 13 06:26:18 1985 Received: from clyde.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA02178; Fri, 13 Dec 85 06:09:29 EST Posted-Date: Fri, 13 Dec 85 05:24:10 est Received-Date: Fri, 13 Dec 85 06:09:29 EST Received: by clyde.UUCP; id AA20220; 13 Dec 85 06:09:13 EST (Fri) Received: by watmath.UUCP (4.12/4.7) id AA03545; Fri, 13 Dec 85 05:24:10 est Date: Fri, 13 Dec 85 05:24:10 est From: RJ White Message-Id: <8512131024.AA03545@watmath.UUCP> To: clyde!cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT!gatech!mark, clyde!cbpavo.cbosgd:att!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Re: questionnaire Status: RO (1) What direction would you like to see the successor to Usenet go? (b) Form a formal organization (e.g. elected positions) of volunteers. There would be no funding and no money for expenses. (c) Form a non-profit corporation which has funding from members and a few salaried employees. (d) Form a for-profit business intended to make money. (e) Join up with CSNET and use their structure and organization. ie : DONT keep the existing net (2) What resources do you think your organization could provide? (c) Significant telephone calls (e.g. you call other sites with UUCP.) (d) Use of other long-haul data networks (e.g. X.25, ARPA-like.) (3) What activity would you like to do with the new network? (b) Administrative (troubleshooting, helping new sites, planning, etc.) (b') Local Administration. (4) What sort of involvement with this new network would you personally like? (a) None, I'm an interested bystander. ( with 17 VAX's to support, I have little time for news ) (5) To what extent do you think the new newsgroups (or whatever get created) should be moderated? (c) Moderation of perhaps half the groups (d) Moderation as the default, with a few unmoderated groups. (e) Moderation of everything. ie : MORE moderation (6) How do you feel about etiquette on the new network? (I'm talking about public postings ala netnews, rather than private mail.) (b) Have articles like net.announce.newusers to educate people. (c') software to easily prevent specified users from posting. I dont think that (c), (e) or (f) would work (Network Drivers licence) From seismo!vortex!lauren Fri Dec 13 20:11:25 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA13388; Fri, 13 Dec 85 20:03:17 EST Posted-Date: Thu, 12-Dec-85 19:02:49 PST Received-Date: Fri, 13 Dec 85 20:03:17 EST Received: from vortex.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Fri, 13 Dec 85 18:24:47 EST Date: Thu, 12-Dec-85 19:02:49 PST From: seismo!vortex!lauren (Lauren Weinstein) Subject: Re: stargate Message-Id: <8512121902.2359.1.VT1.00C@vortex.UUCP> To: vortex!gatech!seismo!polaris!herbie Cc: vortex!gatech!usenet-II In-Reply-To: Your message of 11-Dec-1985 21:10-EST (Wednesday) Status: O Short form answers follow. I'm under the weather at the moment (food poisoning? bubonic plague?) > 1) how do you get news to the earthstation that talks on the > uplink to the satellite? Via the most direct paths possible. My personal model is that direct dialup to the moderator's machines (which might well be a Stargate funded centralized machine or machines) would be the most efficient. Remember, only ONE copy of a message needs to be sent this way--the original message. It turns out that 800 numbers (and/or similar mechanisms) may well be viable if deemed desirable. While messages COULD still be submitted by multi-path hops, direct input would keep the input time lag to a minimum. The really nice part is that OUTPUT time lag is VERY small, since the broadcast cycle reaches all receiving sites simultaneously. More details on request. > 2) who pays for the hardware? it is a capital expenditure > that is larger than most monthly phone bills, but smaller than > a new CPU. I did a variety of surveys on this topic. There are many sites for whom the capital expenditure would be trivial. In fact, I got a number of sites saying, "Where do I send my money to order a Stargate receiver?" even based on initial info about the experiment. For sites who cannot justify the expenditure (which, by the way, should drop considerably in amount as time goes by and mass equipment production goes up) my plan is that equipment rentals would be available. So, sites would have the option of either buying the equipment and paying only the monthly subscription fee, or of renting the equipment also. In either case, the intention is for the overall monthly costs to be quite low. Stargate represents a continuous 24 hr/day data flow! The cost per byte will be very low and the ability to reach all receiving sites simultaneously and rapidly will be very great. More details when I'm feeling better or upon request. --Lauren-- From rsk@asc.purdue.edu Mon Dec 16 23:07:52 1985 Received: from CSNet-Relay.CSNET by gatech.GTNET with PMDF (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA06382; Mon, 16 Dec 85 22:42:43 EST Posted-Date: Sun, 15 Dec 85 21:25:25 est Received-Date: Mon, 16 Dec 85 22:42:43 EST Received: from asc.purdue.edu by CSNET-RELAY.ARPA id a028646; 15 Dec 85 21:26 EST Received: by pucc-j; Sun, 15 Dec 85 21:25:25 est Date: Sun, 15 Dec 85 21:25:25 est From: Wombat Message-Id: <8512160225.AA14417@pucc-j> To: usenet-II%gatech.csnet@csnet-relay.csnet Subject: Posting restrictions Received: from CSNet-Relay by Gatech; 16 Dec 85 21:53:14-EST (Mon) Status: O If you would like a copy of our local hacks which restrict who-can-post- to-what-newsgroup, I'd be happy to run some diffs for you and send them along (we run 2.10.3, but the same code worked under 2.10.1). In short, we maintain a file, /usr/local/lib/news/restrict, which is of the form (in fact, this is it!): net.test network,news,acu,rsk net.all network,news staff,consult,operator mod.all network,news pucc.news network,news staff pucc.staff network,news staff pucc.consult network,news staff,consult control network,news,root,acu,rsk The first field is the newsgroup(s); the second is a list of users who are allowed to post; the third is a list of groups who are allowed to post. The actual determination of whether or not a certain person is determined by the union of fields 2 and 3; i.e. I'm in group staff, and may therefore post to net.all, pucc.news, pucc.staff, and pucc.consult; but I'm rsk, and may therefore post to net.test and control. I can't post to mod.all. (without su'ing to news, at least.) Rich Kulawiec, Purdue University Computing Center From spaf Tue Dec 17 01:44:36 1985 Received: by gatech.GTNET (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA08419; Tue, 17 Dec 85 01:30:43 EST Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 01:30:43 EST From: Gene Spafford Posted-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 01:30:43 EST Received-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 01:30:43 EST Message-Id: <8512170630.AA08419@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-II Subject: Re: Posting restrictions Status: RO I wrote the code in 2.10.3 news (at least it is in the beta4.3 version) which is defined by the symbol FACIST in the defs.h file. When this code is present, it looks up user names in an authorization file and limits the groups to which someone can post. The syntax is similar to the fields in the "sys" file which determine which newsgroups get passed. Furthermore, the FACIST symbol itself can be used to assign a default set of postable groups to all users. Selected users can be granted wider posting authority by including an appropriate line in the authorization file. If you have a 2.10.3 test version, see if the symbol FACIST is in your code. --gene From seismo!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece Tue Dec 17 13:06:05 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA13880; Tue, 17 Dec 85 12:49:06 EST Posted-Date: 17 Dec 1985 08:26-CST Received-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 12:49:06 EST Received: from uiucdcs.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Tue, 17 Dec 85 10:32:58 EST Received: by a.CS.UIUC.EDU (UIUC-5.31/9.4), id AA12955; Tue, 17 Dec 85 09:15:59 CST Date: 17 Dec 1985 08:26-CST From: seismo!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece (Scott E. Preece) Subject: Re: Posting restrictions To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Message-Id: <503677616/preece@fang> Status: O Notes has a built in access control system that allows granting reading/writing/responding/director access to specific users, groups, and systems, either by inclusion or exclusion. On a file-by-file basis, of course. Only users with director access can change the access list. We've also extended our local notes system to know about 'monitors' -- users who are notified by mail of all new postings to a notesfile. As an example of the way we use this, we use notesfiles to maintain bug reports. We have utilities allowing users to build a bug report and mail it to the appropriate bug notesfile. Everyone can post things in the notesfile, but only the director (who would be listed as a monitor and would be notified by mail of incoming bug reports) can read it. The director vets the incoming bug reportsfor duplication, foreknowledge, and completeness, attaches an analysis of the likely nature of the problem and its priority, mails a copy of the report and analysis to the person who originated the bug report, assigns the bug to someone for resolution, and moves the note to a different notesfile, where everyone can read it and respond to it. The "director message" toggle (which is visible from the index display as well as when viewing a particular note) is used to mark bug reports which have been resolved. It can be set only by the director. When the fixer has posted the resolution of the problem, as a response to the bug report note, the director toggles the flag and mails the resolution note to the originator of the bug report. We've found this works pretty well. -- scott preece gould/csd urbana arpa: preece@gswd-vms uucp: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece From spaf Tue Dec 17 13:28:00 1985 Received: by gatech.GTNET (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA14327; Tue, 17 Dec 85 13:20:38 EST Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 13:20:38 EST From: Gene Spafford Posted-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 13:20:38 EST Received-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 13:20:38 EST Message-Id: <8512171820.AA14327@gatech.GTNET> To: usenet-II Subject: Fowarded Status: O [I was asked to forward this to the list, and it got buried in my mailbox. I only read my mail about twice a week, when I need a break from the thesis work. My apologies if I take a while to answer your mail (or forward items to the list) -- the thesis has to come first right now. Anyhow, greatly delayed.... --gene] I'd like to have an idea of how Usenet-II mailing list participants are working with Usenet as it exists now. Toward that end, I'd like you to send me a copy of your own personal ".newsrc" file (or whatever its equivalent is on your system); I'll create a summary showing what groups are and aren't being read, and I'll send the summary to list participants. Since there aren't too many folks on the list, the summary might look something like: Respondents 00000000011111111112222222222333333333344444444445 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 Have Read ... net.flame !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 50 0 net.income ::::: !! :! : : 11 3 ... with the (obvious?) meaning. (I envision that respondents would not be identified by name, although someone with a knowledge of who is on the list and of what "local" groups show up only on certain systems might deduce the identities of some respondents.) So. . .if you'd send along a copy of your ".newsrc" file to me at the address below, along with suggestions on the form a summary might take, I'd appreciate it. -- UUCP: ..decvax!seismo!elsie!ado ARPA: elsie!ado@seismo.ARPA From seismo!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece Tue Dec 17 13:30:15 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA13880; Tue, 17 Dec 85 12:49:06 EST Posted-Date: 17 Dec 1985 08:26-CST Received-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 12:49:06 EST Received: from uiucdcs.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Tue, 17 Dec 85 10:32:58 EST Received: by a.CS.UIUC.EDU (UIUC-5.31/9.4), id AA12955; Tue, 17 Dec 85 09:15:59 CST Date: 17 Dec 1985 08:26-CST From: seismo!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece (Scott E. Preece) Subject: Re: Posting restrictions To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Message-Id: <503677616/preece@fang> Status: O Notes has a built in access control system that allows granting reading/writing/responding/director access to specific users, groups, and systems, either by inclusion or exclusion. On a file-by-file basis, of course. Only users with director access can change the access list. We've also extended our local notes system to know about 'monitors' -- users who are notified by mail of all new postings to a notesfile. As an example of the way we use this, we use notesfiles to maintain bug reports. We have utilities allowing users to build a bug report and mail it to the appropriate bug notesfile. Everyone can post things in the notesfile, but only the director (who would be listed as a monitor and would be notified by mail of incoming bug reports) can read it. The director vets the incoming bug reportsfor duplication, foreknowledge, and completeness, attaches an analysis of the likely nature of the problem and its priority, mails a copy of the report and analysis to the person who originated the bug report, assigns the bug to someone for resolution, and moves the note to a different notesfile, where everyone can read it and respond to it. The "director message" toggle (which is visible from the index display as well as when viewing a particular note) is used to mark bug reports which have been resolved. It can be set only by the director. When the fixer has posted the resolution of the problem, as a response to the bug report note, the director toggles the flag and mails the resolution note to the originator of the bug report. We've found this works pretty well. -- scott preece gould/csd urbana arpa: preece@gswd-vms uucp: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece From ulysses!burl!rcj Tue Dec 17 15:08:53 1985 Received: from ulysses.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA15803; Tue, 17 Dec 85 15:02:14 EST From: Posted-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 14:50:03 est Received-Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 15:02:14 EST Received: by ulysses.UUCP; Tue, 17 Dec 85 14:50:03 est Date: Tue, 17 Dec 85 14:50:03 est Message-Id: <8512171950.AA00680@ulysses.UUCP> To: ihnp4!seismo!elsie!ado, ulysses!gatech!usenet-II Subject: Re: Fowarded Status: O I don't really see how getting the .newsrc from all the usenet-II folks will have any bearing on reality re: a new world-wide usetnet-II -- perhaps I missed something? Seems to me that what the administrators choose to read should have little or (preferrably) no bearing on usenet-II. Comments? The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj From bukys@rochester.ARPA Thu Dec 19 23:09:55 1985 Received: from CSNet-Relay.CSNET by gatech.GTNET with PMDF (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA20614; Thu, 19 Dec 85 22:55:55 EST Posted-Date: Thu, 19 Dec 85 10:46:20 est Received-Date: Thu, 19 Dec 85 22:55:55 EST Received: from rochester.arpa by CSNET-RELAY.ARPA id a009944; 19 Dec 85 10:46 EST Received: from ur-seneca.rochester.arpa (ur-seneca) by ur-cayuga.rochester.arpa id AA28250 (4.12u); Thu, 19 Dec 85 10:46:28 est Received: by ur-seneca.rochester.arpa id AA12762 (4.12u); Thu, 19 Dec 85 10:46:20 est Message-Id: <8512191546.12762@ur-seneca.rochester.arpa> Date: Thu, 19 Dec 85 10:46:20 est From: Liudvikas Bukys To: usenet-II%gatech.csnet@csnet-relay.csnet Subject: Re: Posting restrictions Received: from CSNet-Relay by Gatech; 19 Dec 85 21:29:34-EST (Thu) Status: O The FASCIST option is still pretty helpless against people who know how to uux a remote rnews command. But it's a start. It's also no help in cutting off abuse from other machines. A successful future-net should provide admins enough control over their own machines to be able to cut off abuse by people like Rich Rosen. (Whatever you think of his opinions, consistent consumption of ~10% of total news bandwidth is unreasonable.) Liudvikas Bukys rochester!bukys bukys@rochester P.S. Why is it that nobody can spell "fascist"? Thanks, Rick, for fixing that, though you'd better check again, as 4.3beta contains a mix of "fascist" and "facist". From ut-sally!im4u!jsq%zotz.UTEXAS.EDU Fri Dec 20 20:35:19 1985 Received: from ut-sally.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA01001; Fri, 20 Dec 85 20:21:16 EST Received-Date: Fri, 20 Dec 85 20:21:16 EST Received: by sally.UTEXAS.EDU (4.22/4.22) id AA28546; Fri, 20 Dec 85 17:56:12 cst Posted-Date: Thu, 19 Dec 85 09:29:29 cst Received: from zotz.UTEXAS.EDU by im4u (4.22/4.22) id AA21341; Thu, 19 Dec 85 09:36:46 cst Date: Thu, 19 Dec 85 09:29:29 cst From: ut-sally!im4u!jsq%zotz.UTEXAS.EDU (John Quarterman) Message-Id: <8512191529.AA20278@zotz.UTEXAS.EDU> Received: by zotz.UTEXAS.EDU (2.0/4.22) id AA20278; Thu, 19 Dec 85 09:29:29 cst To: usenet-II@gatech.GTNET Subject: moderators and transport mechanisms Cc: jsq@ZOTZ.UTEXAS.EDU Status: O A few opinions on moderators and transport mechanisms for the new network. It's become clear that if the new network is to be of the same scale as the old one as far as human participants that most of the newsgroups will have to be moderated. This is because so few people understand the responsibility inherent in anarchy: too many want to force somebody else to bear the costs of transport and administration. (Most of the participants of this list don't understand anarchy either, judging by what they've written, but that's another discussion.) However, of the terms available, such as host, moderator, leader, catalyst, facilitator, editor, censor, inquisitor, etc., moderator is not an especially good one. I (and presumably others) think of a moderator as being more or less equivalent to a talk show host, and only one step more formal than the old model of USENET as a continuous cocktail party. To many people the word moderator is unfamiliar and they think it means censor (we all know it doesn't, but...). When I mentioned the idea of USENET-II to a faculty member here, he immediately thought of it as a publishing medium. Newsgroups would be analogous to journals. There might be several of differing slants, quality, formality, etc. on the same subject, just as there are CACM and JACM (or UNIX World and UNIX Review). People would consider it prestigious to write articles suitable for the higher quality ones, yet could probably be published more easily in the others. The person to whom one would submit an article for such a newsgroup should obviously be called an editor. Everyone who reads a newspaper or journal is familiar with it. It seldom bears connotations of censorship. It is a term of the print media, not of verbal discussions, and would thus help steer the new network away from one of the problems of the old: the misconception that posting an article to the network is no different from joining in a verbal discussion over lunch. Another of the problems of the existing network is UUCP. I don't know about the rest of you, but I spend more time fiddling with UUCP connections to get them to work than I do making the news software work. This is not a fault of the implementation (thanks, Rick, et al) but of the design of UUCP and the dialup nature of the links. No doubt UUCP will still be common for transmissions of city-wide distances, i.e, where there's no existing LAN but not far enough for the telephone bills to justify anything better. However, for long distance links it's a real lose on several accounts. I understand Henry's point that UUCP is readily available and all, but TCP/IP dialup links using SLIP are becoming as easy to set up, and don't require anything bigger than a workstation to use do so. I think they are the way to go for long-distance mail links, and such long-distance news links as still are land-bound. Given the above publishing model for the new news network, Stargate is a good fit for a transport mechanism. I think we should use it. Even when we have to start paying for the uplink service (we can't assume SSI will be generous forever), it should be cheaper to collect fees from those with receivers (who would collect from those they locally redistribute to) than to support the current telephone networks. It would certainly be easier to run. The new network needs a new name. If we use the publishing model and the Stargate transport mechanism, those will make it technically different. But we need something else to emphasize the differences and make users who nothing of the technical issues know that this is not USENET anymore. The new SLIP-based CSNET offshoot is called Cypress. We could be pompous and call ours Ygdrassil (the tree which supports the world in Norse mythology), but nobody could spell it. I propose the name Banyan: a large tree with one trunk, many widespread roots, and far reaching branches. From seismo!vortex!lauren Sun Dec 22 01:42:30 1985 Received: from seismo.UUCP by gatech.GTNET with UUCP (4.30GT/6.2.GT) id AA10406; Sun, 22 Dec 85 01:28:28 EST Posted-Date: Sat, 21-Dec-85 11:43:22 PST Received-Date: Sun, 22 Dec 85 01:28:28 EST Received: from vortex.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV with UUCP; Sun, 22 Dec 85 00:46:46 EST Date: Sat, 21-Dec-85 11:43:22 PST From: seismo!vortex!lauren (Lauren Weinstein) Subject: Stargate Milestones Message-Id: <8512211143.1206.0.VT1.00C@vortex.UUCP> To: vortex!gatech!usenet-II Status: O Several important events have occurred recently regarding Stargate, all of them good. First of all, SSS is now about ready to switch the Stargate feed from the expensive old decoders to the cheaper, newer decoders which are now becoming available. I hope to have a number of them shortly for distribution. Next, word has arrived from the decoder manufacturer that work is proceeding on the next generation of decoders, which will be even less expensive than the "current" new ones. The next generation will combine the cable demod with the data decoder in one little box instead of having them separate in two little boxes (which is the current design). Very good news: You've all heard me speak of the Stargate "buffer box." This is the little gadget that would sit on the output of the decoder and handle flow control to mainframes, error correction and message updating, message selection/control, and various other functions. Quite some time ago, a commercial firm hearing about Stargate (who felt that as a non-profit enterprise Stargate deserved support) gave me a call. They were designing a prototype standalone 68000 box (which would cost them very little to build--and would be even cheaper if it got into Far East mass production). They wanted to know what changes they could make in the initial design that would make it more usable for Stargate, and offered to make them available to Stargate AT COST if they got into fullscale manufacturing. Well, I've j