Reducing Usenet Bandwidth

Jonas M Luster jluster at d-fensive.com
Fri Feb 8 19:14:42 UTC 2002


Quoting Vadim Antonov (avg at exigengroup.com):

> In other words - USENET cannot be fixed with technological improvements as 
> long as the root problem (admission control) is not solved.  Improving 
> transmission or storage systems would only let spammers to send more spam 
> for free.
> 
> Therefore, i'd say it is time to declare USENET defunct. It was fun while
> it lasted.

Usenet. That's the sum of all systems exchanging data via RFC1036.
Usenet, that's not the Big5 or, even less so, alt.ALL. Declaring
Usenet defunct because a part of it, using its structures, has failed
to exercise the righth measures, is about as logical as declaring the
Web defunct just because Slashdot is.

Usenet's traffic is to some 98% comprised of binaries. A huge amout of
them (some 85%, actually) is repeat traffic, IOW the same picture
maybe with a different slogan attached to it or a different URL
superimposed over it. By limiting Usenet back to something that can be
read with more in /var/spool/news, you reduce traffic and storage
requirements. Usenet, also, ist not Outlook Express or something one
should read with multipart-reassemblers, one hand on the mouse.

Let's face it. Usenet is not defunct. It works quite well, and that
for more than twenty years, whereas the Web still lies in its infancy
and already shows sings of decay. Its users may be defunct. Its
adminitative mechanisms may be defunct. But Usenet is not.

But, and here i aggree with you, unless clue-midgets such as Cable and
Wireless start having an abuse department, unless Joe A CIO learns
that networks are more than just cables to bring his website to the
masses, Usenet will have no chance to remain what it once was - a
bandwidth friendly, system agnostic, blazing fast communications
medium.



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