Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

>> Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
>> satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away.
>> Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math
>> forever, but they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long
>> enough to tell the men with guns to go take your money.

> That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument
> I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do
> what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that
> their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time).

You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with
talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are
making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying
the laws are bad.

The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the
laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.

The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of
the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that
carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
let us know. Until then, we have to start with the laws the way that they
are right now, whether we like them or not, which makes carrying binaries
rather risky unless you have a lot of expensive infrastructure in place to
deal with the highly predictable consequences.

You can instead that Usenet server operators should engage in coordinated
civil disobedience because the laws are bad, but, well, good luck with
that. I'm not interested, at least.

> Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for
> their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text.
> Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
> them easy to drop completely.

Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were
segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time
convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and
anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.

(There are a bunch of other problems with Usenet being that one stop shop,
too, but we'll stick with that one for now.)

I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the
phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when
Usenet started running into trouble. I've not been around Usenet as long
as some of the folks here, but I've been using Usenet since 1993, and I
can tell you from personal experience that although copyright and legality
issues around binaries did show up early, Usenet had a mostly working way
of dealing with that and was still going very strong with widely-used text
discussion groups until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other
types of unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.
That was the challenge that was happening about the time that other social
media platforms started taking off, and that's when usage of Usenet
started dropping and the signal to noise ratio started dropping even
faster.

That spam was directly the cause of Usenet's decline is just my opinion
and there are a few other viable theories. But most of them are some
version of Usenet being outcompeted by other protocols that people found
easier to use and less annoying for whatever reason, whether that be
better moderation (my theory), better *text* message formatting, better
client software, better topic organization, shorter messages, more
convenient access, cost, etc. Or of course maybe a combination of all of
those things.

But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
the timing. Usenet's problems started back in the late 1990s and very
early 2000s, long before the iPhone, which is when non-text chat started
taking off for the average person. There certainly was some demand for
photographs around the time that Facebook started, and Usenet has always
been bad at that (even apart from the separate binary groups, Usenet
*software* has always been bad), so maybe it was a factor, but I think it
was too early for it to be the main factor.

*Now*, *today*, I agree with you that this is a huge missing feature if
one wanted Usenet to compete with, say, Tiktok, although there is also a
huge list of other features that Usenet is missing, one of which is (for
all that people love to complain about the algorithms) adaptive moderation
so that people can very quickly filter out shit they don't want to see.

>> What killed Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually
>> worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering
>> experiments that never quite worked right.

> There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to
> suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.

The large commercial social media services have whole teams of people,
often thousands of people, who are actually paid (admittedly often very
poorly) to get rid of spam and abuse. Usenet had a handful of volunteers
and a janky cancel system and therefore had a spam problem that became
orders of magnitude worse than the user experience on other social media
services. People will tolerate a small amount of visible spam. Usenet
did not have a small amount of spam problem.

> Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to
> greatly reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on
> why the abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory
> here).

Well, I was actually here then. UDP was used, and it didn't work. It
didn't greatly reduce the problem. The Usenet protocol makes that type of
enforcement nearly impossible, the amount of work required is
considerable, some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and
there was no consensus to cut them off, and what was able to be done was
completely unsustainable with a group of volunteers with no legal
protections and constant ongoing harassment. Due to the way Usenet works,
there was no governance system *capable* of making decisions; it was
essentially a free-for-all, which didn't work.

The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of
service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms
enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
working, in part due to the constant disagreement over who should have the
right to moderate Usenet. There were experiments with NoCeM (and indeed
there are ongoing experiments with NoCeM), but they never took off.

> Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
> problems decades ago.

I would also like to have cold fusion and perfectly efficient solar
panels. Doing spam control in a highly distributed system with no central
authority in the face of active harassment is very hard! Doing it with
almost no income stream to pay people is nearly impossible. Putting aside
the individual message moderation and focusing only on the necessary
adversarial software work, good platform abuse people are not cheap, and
it's not the sort of job that you do for free. It's not something you
implement once; it's something that you come in and do each day, every
day, against human adversaries who are adapting to your defenses. It's
not a *hobby*, which is part of why all the spam cancellers burned out.

It's quite hard even *with* the advantages that other social media
services have, such as central authentication and complete IP logging and
paid moderators. One could argue that a lot of them are still failing at
controlling spam, and Usenet is playing on a much harder mode.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

For your reference, records indicate that
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> However, I personally would rather juggle raw plutonium than spend any
> time handling that kind of legal evidence and therefore opt out of the
> entire problem by not carrying binaries, since otherwise I am legally
> obligated to spend whatever time it takes me to handle that data properly
> should any problem arise.

And that makes perfect sense, and *that* is why the world is so messed up.
The law creates an undue burden on the very people who could be providing
the evidence of criminal activity, driving the criminals into more and more
secret ways to further their criminal enterprise.

Same thing happened with Craigslist and prostitutes, I believe. It wasn’t
“Yay, let’s use this resource to catch the bad guys!” It was “You’re a bad
guy if a bad guy does bad things with you.” Classic victim blaming.

> Since personally I don't care about any of the
> binaries anyway (there are numerous better sources for any non-textual
> information I want than Usenet)

Well, sure, *now* that the damage is done! Google would love you to go to
YouTube to get ad-supported videos. Amazon would be happy to have you get
your favorite podcasts exclusively from their servers.
So much . . . better?

> You
> would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear, and, well,
> good luck with that.

We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have
“opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want
to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you harm?

> You can do various things to make it easier and various things to make it
> harder. One of the most effective things you can do to make dealing with
> abuse easier is to ban all non-textual media, because that takes a lot of
> the most annoying, dangerous, or horrific types of abuse off the table.

See above. I don’t connect with people who push that kind of stuff. The
content type is irrelevant. Sounds like you’re still not looking to solve
the right problems.

> I wanted to say that this is definitely not true, but I think I can see
> how one might see that this is true from a particular angle. It is true
> that in pursuit of profits, a bunch of companies have built network
> platforms that make abuse much easier, and are now desperately trying to
> play catch-up to filter out the shit that they don't want to carry.

Ha, no. Their abuse policies reflect their true intentions. They
discourage reporting by making you jump through so many hoops. They say
upfront you, the abused, MUST do certain things or they’re going to
ignore you. If they don’t reject you outright, your “response” will be
that they’ll take action *they* deem appropriate.

> But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage
> people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
> 100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.

My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying
customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.

> Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very
> expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
> try to get rid of shit like CSAM.

I have never been compensated one penny for any of the abuse that any cloud provider has sent my way. Usenet never sent me any article I never asked for (although I have requested some I ended up not wanting :-).

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

>> You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
>> and, well, good luck with that.

> We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have
> “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want
> to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
> yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
> harm?

Uh... Usenet? Usenet is that network? This is the entire way that it
works? People post articles that are flood-filled through a network?
They are therefore present on servers with no direct connection with the
person who posted it?

The whole point of Usenet is to talk about things with strangers.
Protocols for talking to strangers are inherently vulnerable to abusive
strangers and thus tend to have serious problems unless they're moderated
in some fashion. This is, like, social media 101. If I were only
connecting to people I want to engage with, I wouldn't have any of your
articles and we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)

https://xkcd.com/386/

More generally, this is inherently the challenge of *any* form of
community forum or commons. If something is intended to be open to
everyone by default unless they have done something wrong, some number of
those people will try to use it to do harm, and then one has to build some
sort of system that prevents or mitigates that harm by filtering it out or
removing those people. This is *inherently unavoidable*, and it's also
*inherently adversarial*. Whatever moderation system you build will be
tested by people who are trying to bypass it. And it's far more
challenging to write those systems on the internet where there is no
single authentication system (which would be bad to have for other
reasons, anyway) and it is trivially easy to create new identities.

>> But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively
>> encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is
>> absolutely 100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal
>> experience.

> My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying
> customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.

Okay, well, this makes it clear to me that you have absolutely no idea
what you're talking about and are just making things up based on your own
prejudices. So probably much to everyone else's relief, I'll try to stop
responding here, and you can have the last words.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

In article <87cz0i8920.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>,
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
>... Usenet had a mostly working way of dealing with that and was
>still going very strong with widely-used text discussion groups
>until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other types of
>unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.

I never found spam per se to be that big of an issue on Usenet --
although admittedly I had/have other people doing a lot of the work
on my behalf.

And you focus on "spam" in your further comments in the quoted post,
while I think these "off-topic trolling and other types of unwanted
messages that are even harder to moderate" is actually more on the
mark. The general anti-social behavior.

mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) writes:

> And you focus on "spam" in your further comments in the quoted post,
> while I think these "off-topic trolling and other types of unwanted
> messages that are even harder to moderate" is actually more on the mark.
> The general anti-social behavior.

Yeah, I think you're right. Particularly by the classic Usenet definition
of spam, that was to some degree the easy bit.

I don't think it was really under control (people tend to have a much
lower tolerance than I do for spam, judging from people's reaction to
email spam amounts that I would find trivial), but even if it was, the
moderation problem was much harder to solve.

Other protocols went with either a reputation system, human moderators who
could delete stuff (as opposed to Usenet's awkward everything-or-nothing,
no take-backs, easy-to-bypass system), or using the social graph as a
moderation mechanism to filter what you see (or all three). There were
attempts at the first two on Usenet, but the Usenet protocol and the lack
of any central point of control makes it rather challenging.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

In article <874jlu869u.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>,
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
>... the Usenet protocol and the lack of any central point of control
>makes it rather challenging.

Before I go back to lurking, if only for others reading this, perhaps
it's worth pointing out that what brought someone like me to Usenet
(in the mid-80s) is exactly what amplifies these social issues:
Aggregation. So it's great when it's possible to draw from specialists
around the world in order to discuss a topic.... But we're "drawing
from" all the sociopaths out there too, not that they're any more
numerous than before, but they can all come here to disrupt others'
conversations for whatever reasons they may have (which aren't only
monetary...). In other words, it's a hobby & passion for many of
the troublemakers, with all the energy that implies, as I'm sure
you're aware.

(Still, I also don't agree with any implication that the public
made a good choice by abandoning this sort of system for for-profit,
top-controlled platforms. It was an expedient choice, and predictably,
isn't going well.)

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) spake the secret code
<u9khe5$2ep$1@hope.eyrie.org> thusly:

>I never found spam per se to be that big of an issue on Usenet --

It used to be, when lots of eyeballs were looking at usenet. Spam
follows the eyeballs. Because usenet is largley ignored now, the spam
problem has solved itself. Should usenet ever see a resurgence in
usage by the average person, the spam will resurge at that time.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) spake the secret code
<u9kli3$4rs$1@hope.eyrie.org> thusly:

>Before I go back to lurking, if only for others reading this, perhaps
>it's worth pointing out that what brought someone like me to Usenet
>(in the mid-80s) is exactly what amplifies these social issues:
>Aggregation. So it's great when it's possible to draw from specialists
>around the world in order to discuss a topic.... But we're "drawing
>from" all the sociopaths out there too [...]

Agreed. The traditional solution was a moderated group, e.g.
comp.lang.c++.moderated, to keep out the trolls. The C++ programming
newsgroup remains somewhat active, but has the problem of trolls and
nuiscance posters. We've discussed resurrecting the moderated group
from time to time, but the whole moderation infrastructure on usenet
appears to have fallen into disarray from lack of use.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

In article <u9m77h$2lkb9$4@news.xmission.com>, Richard <> wrote:
>... the whole moderation infrastructure on usenet appears to have
>fallen into disarray from lack of use.

I'm one of the people who maintains the Usenet moderation system,
and I assure you that it does work as before. Prospective moderators
seem to have difficulty using the old (mostly shell-based) tools,
so it can be an issue to find someone, but it's not an infrastructure
problem.

For your reference, records indicate that
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with
> talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
> aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are
> making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying
> the laws are bad.

I’m not upset, I’m just drawing a connection between rolling over for bad
laws and the demise of Usenet. I’m just saying it should be obvious why
Usenet is not going to be the destination of people looking for an
alternative to Twitter or Facebook. They face the same legal hassles, too.

> The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
> The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
> or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the
> laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
> at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
> drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
> to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.

Again with straw man fantasies. All I’m saying is that the laws are a
known factor, and solutions are to be had within their framework. But
that’s not the direction Usenet went. And that’s why it’s a ghost town
today.

> The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of
> the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that
> carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
> let us know.

Why go to the bother when it is clear that *no* binaries are going to be
supported anyway? Again, you must *first* start supporting binaries in a
practical manner before there is any point in making a distinction
between legal and illegal data. I’m still looking to have that
discussion. But if that’s a non-starter, the whole thing is moot, and
people will use protocols other than NNTP to exchange their messages.

> > Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for
> > their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text.
> > Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
> > them easy to drop completely.
>
> Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were
> segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time
> convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and
> anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.

I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, excepting to have a
technical discussion on what it will take to turn Usenet into a modern
service. If nobody wants that, that’s fine, too, but then they shouldn’t
turn around and wonder why most people go somewhere else to engage in
group chats.

> I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the
> phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when
> Usenet started running into trouble.

There was no one thing that did it, it was *all* the innovations that were
happening with the Internet, yet Usenet experienced stagnation. Web forums
took away a huge chuck of traffic long before anything had become “social
media” yet. I maintain it was the ability to post messages with binary
content. You go to a web site about classic cars (or whatever) and get the
full multimedia experience.

Usenet’s answer to that was, at first, “No, if you want to talk about cars
you go to this one group, but if you want to post a picture of a cool car
you saw at a show, you have to go to this other group (never mind the whole
process of uploading and downloading) that has none of the conversation
context. Oh, you have a *video* of the car, well now you need to go to an
even *different* group and discover how much more of a pain large files
are!” Then even that option went away.

Yeah, spam was a bit of a problem, but it was another thing that was a
problem on *all* platforms that got popular. Nobody fled Usenet for some
platform that had solved the problem of abusive users. If anything, social
media ramped up the toxicity in a way that made the hassles of Eternal
September seem downright delightful!

> But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
> the timing.

Yes, it was early, but it was very much a case of “the writing is on the
wall”. Once people found the web, or once they received their first
attachment in an email client that supported MIME, the die was cast. I
forget if that was when I was stuck on a 2400 or 9600 baud modem, but the
direction things were going was obvious to everyone but Usenet. And to
be making the same sorts of arguments *today*, when I can get Gigabit
fiber and 8TB hard drives for silly small sums of money? Ludicrous.

> some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
> the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and
> there was no consensus to cut them off

Yet another “roll over” approach that made Usenet weaker rather than
stronger. Abuse is abuse; it’s not an equation to balance. I don’t care
how many insightful posts might be coming from Google Groups; they are
dead to me because they don’t do jack about the abuse. Same is true of
anyone who tries to use human shields as an excuse for allowing their bad
behavior.

> The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of
> service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms
> enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
> working, in part due to the constant disagreement over who should have the
> right to moderate Usenet.

Everyone has that right; it’s decentralized! On a healthy network, if you
don’t like what your upstream provider offers, use a different one. If
*nobody* wants to read your messages, then it’s time for a little
introspection.

> > Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
> > problems decades ago.
>
> I would also like to have cold fusion and perfectly efficient solar
> panels. Doing spam control in a highly distributed system with no central
> authority in the face of active harassment is very hard!

I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just saying that all evidence points to Usenet
being non-viable unless people *try* to solve these problems.

> Doing it with
> almost no income stream to pay people is nearly impossible.

If that is true, then there is no point in being here. If the Internet has
only become a playground for commercial interests, Usenet has no place to
exist. I don’t think that’s true, but I am of the opinion that it is
becoming *very* close to being true, if only because there are other open
source efforts that aren’t stagnating and making excuses why it’s a good
thing to be stuck in 1998.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

For your reference, records indicate that
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
>
> >> You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
> >> and, well, good luck with that.
>
> > We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have
> > “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want
> > to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
> > yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
> > harm?
>
> Uh... Usenet? Usenet is that network? This is the entire way that it
> works? People post articles that are flood-filled through a network?
> They are therefore present on servers with no direct connection with the
> person who posted it?

There is as much connection as we choose to make. I identify myself in
traditional ways in my headers. If need be, I could digitally sign my
messages, or use any number of other methods to connect my posts to an
identity. If all you’re saying is that Usenet is decades behind the
times . . . yup.

> The whole point of Usenet is to talk about things with strangers.
> Protocols for talking to strangers are inherently vulnerable to abusive
> strangers and thus tend to have serious problems unless they're moderated
> in some fashion. This is, like, social media 101. If I were only
> connecting to people I want to engage with, I wouldn't have any of your
> articles and we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)

Simply not true. There are all kinds of ways to establish connections
with “strangers” that can provide an anonymous identity (if need be).
Don’t act like the world hasn’t been making progress without Usenet.

> More generally, this is inherently the challenge of *any* form of
> community forum or commons. If something is intended to be open to
> everyone by default unless they have done something wrong, some number of
> those people will try to use it to do harm, and then one has to build some
> sort of system that prevents or mitigates that harm by filtering it out or
> removing those people. This is *inherently unavoidable*, and it's also
> *inherently adversarial*.

Again, just not true. Perhaps that very framing is what prevents you from
devising working solutions. Consider instead that there are no bad guys
or, at the very least, there is no agreement on who the good guys are.

> Whatever moderation system you build will be
> tested by people who are trying to bypass it. And it's far more
> challenging to write those systems on the internet where there is no
> single authentication system (which would be bad to have for other
> reasons, anyway) and it is trivially easy to create new identities.

Stop building shitty systems like that. On my Internet, being “tested”
involves having an IP address, and there are a limited number of those,
even with IPv6. Yeah, cloud providers have crapped things up enough to
make it fairly easy to get a new IP address from them. My secret?
Firewall their whole damn network. There’s absolutely no reason Usenet
best practices couldn’t mandate that, and a slew of other anti-abuse
measures that are easy and effective. Kiddie porn doesn’t just magically
appear on anybody’s server.

> > My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying
> > customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.
>
> Okay, well, this makes it clear to me that you have absolutely no idea
> what you're talking about and are just making things up based on your own
> prejudices. So probably much to everyone else's relief, I'll try to stop
> responding here, and you can have the last words.

I appreciate that, I guess? Seems like a silly way to disengage, though,
by acting like commercial interests aren’t hugely motivating factors, when
in another post you were arguing that Usenet doesn’t have the money to
tackle the problem of abuse! You have it all backwards. Spam simply would
not exist if nobody took money to allow it to exist.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
> Usenet’s answer to that was, at first, “No, if you want to talk about cars
> you go to this one group, but if you want to post a picture of a cool car
> you saw at a show, you have to go to this other group (never mind the whole
> process of uploading and downloading) that has none of the conversation
> context. Oh, you have a *video* of the car, well now you need to go to an
> even *different* group and discover how much more of a pain large files
> are!” Then even that option went away.
>

I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it. Makes a lot more
sense to post a link, be it to Youtube or some other hosting option
(self-hosted if you're bold). If one wishes to be a grumpy protocol
contrarian there's no reason it has to be an HTTP link either, by all
means go wild and use FTP or gopher or 9p or *something* that makes more
sense for distributing large files than the Net News Transport
Protocol. Are links ephemeral? Yeah sure, but so are the expiration
rules on Usenet servers, especially once you start bringing in binary
posts.

Your vaunted web forums usually don't host their own images or videos
either, or if they do host images they are much restricted (1 image per
post, max 200KB, only viewable by signed-in members etc.) Reddit famously
outsourced image hosting to imgur and videos to sites like
gfycat. Something Awful has image uploads but you can only do one per
post, which led people to use outside hosts like Waffleimages (which
went down and broke tons of threads) or photobucket (which changed its
policies and broke tons of threads) or imgur (which deleted a bunch of
images and broke tons of threads).

john

Hi Jesse,

> GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
> network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
> Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix
> announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to
> GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most
> opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
> and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4
> years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer
> or adjust feeds with them.

Strange that the Giganews folks don't even bother responding to their
peers who ask them some feed adjustement. They claim to have a 24/7
support team... but not for their peers! Maybe they should be contacted
via their support team instead of their peering address?

FWIW, in relation with this thread, they are using a special 451 NNTP
response code when an article cannot be found because it was removed as
part of a DMCA request:
https://support.giganews.com/hc/en-us/articles/9952660678285-What-are-errors-430-and-451-

This discussion is pretty interesting, and helped in improving my
knowledge of the states and cities of the USA :)

--
Julien ÉLIE

« – Connaissez-vous la différence entre l'ignorance et l'apathie ?
– J'en sais rien et je m'en fous. »

On Sun, 30 Jul 2023 01:26:46 -0000 (UTC)
Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:

> I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, excepting to have a
> technical discussion on what it will take to turn Usenet into a
> modern service.

Something like this is actually happening in the newsgroup,
rocksolid.nodes.help. They are devising encrypted messaging via NNTP
that obfuscates sender from public disclosure but with less complexity
than a mixnet.

Have a look see at the last two weeks of messages in
rocksolid.nodes.help. Two hackers are turning the Rocksolid Light engine
into a quasi-social platform with some social features and encrypted
messaging built-in, on a NNTP backend. I'm sure they would appreciate
some more PHP coders and crypto-chango artists helping it along.

Think of the end goal as 'fediverse' without the 'fed' and without the
PC censorship so prevalent on the fediverse.

SugarBug | https://sybershock.com

For your reference, records indicate that
John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> wrote:

> I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
> different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
> reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.

I agree. As I have said in other posts, it points to the fact that
store-and-forward is no longer a practical way to build a distributed
network. It may have made sense in the early days of Usenet when
reliable connectivity wasn’t a given. We’re at least a decade past when
that was the norm.

> Makes a lot more
> sense to post a link, be it to Youtube or some other hosting option
> (self-hosted if you're bold). If one wishes to be a grumpy protocol
> contrarian there's no reason it has to be an HTTP link either, by all
> means go wild and use FTP or gopher or 9p or *something* that makes more
> sense for distributing large files than the Net News Transport
> Protocol.

I still don’t understand why people act like NNTP cannot be updated to
something that actually supports “links” internally. I mean, really, all
we’re talking about here is the idea that a server can refer to a message
ID that it may not be able to provide. If it simply tracked a “source”
server, it could either then later store-and-forward on request, or
instruct the client to directly fetch it from that server itself.

I’m all ears for better solutions than that, too. What I’m tired of
hearing is “Oh, Usenet didn’t do that in 1998, so it can’t be done.”

> Your vaunted web forums usually don't host their own images or videos
> either, or if they do host images they are much restricted (1 image per
> post, max 200KB, only viewable by signed-in members etc.)

Well, “vaunted” is not how I think anyone describes web forums, but the
fact remains that the *user experience* is what allowed them to eat
Usenet’s lunch. People don’t really care about the nuts and bolts of
the technology. They just want to be able to write a message with some
binary content. They can do it in emails, and that’s why people are
still using email daily. I don’t think them expecting similar from
Usenet, by whatever means it gets accomplished, is too big an ask.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com>:
>For your reference, records indicate that
>John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> wrote:
>
>> I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
>> different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
>> reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.
>
>I agree. As I have said in other posts, it points to the fact that
>store-and-forward is no longer a practical way to build a distributed
>network. It may have made sense in the early days of Usenet when
>reliable connectivity wasn’t a given. We’re at least a decade past when
>that was the norm.

The people who run CDNs would likely disagree with you. Sometimes it
makes sense to store copies of the content near the users, sometimes
more sense to have everyone fetch it from one place.

E-mail has the same problem, when someone sends a message with a large
attachment to a distribution list. It would make a lot more sense to
send a link that can be fetched as needed. Back in 1996 RFC 2017 defined
the MIME message/external-body type intended to do that, but it never
caught one. People I know in the IETF are thinking about updating it, with
more modern URLs, and also a hash so you can be sure the file you fetch is
the one you expect, and a decoding key so the file can be stored encrypted.

If they do that, which seems likely, it wouldn't be hard to retrofit to
usenet since we use the same MIME types that mail does.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Aug 5, 2023 at 12:36:38 PM CDT, "Doc O'Leary ,"
<droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:

> I still don’t understand why people act like NNTP cannot be updated to
> something that actually supports “links” internally. I mean, really, all
> we’re talking about here is the idea that a server can refer to a message
> ID that it may not be able to provide. If it simply tracked a “source”
> server, it could either then later store-and-forward on request, or
> instruct the client to directly fetch it from that server itself.
>
> I’m all ears for better solutions than that, too. What I’m tired of
> hearing is “Oh, Usenet didn’t do that in 1998, so it can’t be done.”

This is essentially what the commercial providers do with resellers. Some
resellers have their own frontends, but they simply point to the source
provider's backends. What type of agreements and how they "bill" for this kind
of access I have no idea. If you take a look at Diablo's dreaderd code/configs
it makes it easy to setup frontends that fetch articles by Message-ID from
distributed backends.