Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC830713); site vu44.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!teddy!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!mcvax!vu44!jack
From: jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Need for Stargate screening?
Message-ID: <560@vu44.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Jan-85 16:54:38 EST
Article-I.D.: vu44.560
Posted: Tue Jan  8 16:54:38 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Jan-85 07:07:00 EST
References: <1917@sun.uucp> <498@vortex.UUCP>
Organization: The Retarded Programmers Home, VU, Amsterdam
Lines: 43

First, let me state that I do not doubt Lauren's good intentions,
or the need for a better distribution, but I do have some
doubts about the way the Stargate project is going.

The current idea seems to be to abandon all phone connections for
nation-wide distributions, and have everything sent via stargate.
I believe that it would be a much better idea to have both
distributions in parallel, for the following reasons :

- If you miss an article because of local trouble, you don't have
to ask for re-transmission, you just wait for your telephone-neigbour
to send it to you (or you ask him to send it).

- Since stargate is sent through one machine, if that machine goes
down for a couple of days, all news machines on the net will have
a real hard time catching up with, say, one week of news in one day.

- If we destroy the current infrastructure, and the carrier decides
to drop the project (I *know* that that's not likely, but you never know)
it'll take a long time before we can recover from that.

- Even though the current screeners are completely trustworthy,
and will only remove duplicates, etc. who garantees us that this
will be the case forever? I can imagine a situation where all
screeners are eventually employed by a kind of "usenet, inc." as
"electronic editors". As soon as that happens, there is someone
who can control what we see (I *know* this is paranoid, but I
think that a little paranoia can be good at times).


I think we can have both distributions in parallel with only modest
effort. The only thing that is needed is something like the 'ihave/sendme'
protocol, used only on articles that have 'stargate' in their path.
This way, an article would travel to stargate following the
phonelines (via news, not via mail) and would then be screened
and transmitted. All the sites that are near the originating site
would probably have the article already, but I think that that is only
an advantage, since long distance calls are where the money goes,
not local calls.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack
	or				       ...!vu44!htsa!jack
If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.