Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sun Mar 1 19:59:28 UTC 2015

Hey Barry - you ran some rather huge NNTP servers, back in the day, you 
have any comments on this?

Scott Helms wrote:
>
> Miles,
>
> Usenet was normally asymmetrical between servers, even when server 
> operators try to seed equally as being fed. It's a function of how a 
> few servers are the source original content and how long individual 
> servers choose (and have the disk) to keep specific content.
>
> It was never designed to have as many server nodes as you're 
> describing and I'd imagine there's some nasty side effects if we tried 
> get that many active servers going as we have customers.
>
> On Mar 1, 2015 10:25 AM, "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net 
> <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>> wrote:
>
>     Scott,
>
>     Asymmetric measured where?  Between client and server or between
>     servers?  I'm thinking the case where we each have a server
>     running locally - how do you get a high level of asymmetry in a
>     P2P environment?
>
>     Miles Fidelman
>
>
>
>     Scott Helms wrote:
>
>
>         Anything based on NNTP would be extremely asymmetric without
>         significant changes to the protocol or human behavior.
>
>         We ran significant Usenet servers with binaries for nearly 20
>         years and without for another 5 and the servers' traffic was
>         heavily asymmetric.
>
>         On Mar 1, 2015 9:11 AM, "Miles Fidelman"
>         <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
>         <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>         <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
>         <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>>> wrote:
>
>             Aled Morris wrote:
>
>
>                 Sadly we don't have many "killer applications" for
>         symmetric
>                 residential
>                 bandwidth, but that's likely because we don't have the
>                 infrastructure to
>                 incubate these applications.
>
>
>             Come to think of it, if USENET software wasn't so
>         cumbersome, I
>             kind of wonder if today's "social network" would consist
>         of home
>             servers running NNTP - and I expect the traffic would be very
>             symmetric. (For that matter, with a few tweaks, the USENET
>         model
>             would be great for "groupware" - anybody remember the Netscape
>             communications server that added private newsgroups and
>             authentication to the mix?)
>
>             Miles Fidelman
>
>
>
>             --     In theory, there is no difference between theory
>         and practice.
>             In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>
>
>
>     -- 
>     In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>     In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra