Re: Public News Servers

[Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 10:38:55PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>     Shimpei> I might have lost my BOFHish edge from all the non-techie
>     Shimpei> work I've been doing in the last few months, but doesn't
>     Shimpei> an open news server automatically imply a broken news
>     Shimpei> server?
> 
> Not that I ever heard, unless I'm missing your point.
> 
> I don't think it's a bright thing to do, but I don't think it's broken
> by definition.  It's been a while since I read the standards, though.

In the post-Green Card Lawyer spam-happy era, an open Usenet server is a
disservice to the Usenet community, and must be considered as broken as an
open mail relay. I don't care what the standard says; news is broken by design
in this (anti-spam) respect, and conscientious news server ops should be going
above and beyond what the standard says in order to protect his users and the
rest of Usenet.

Of course, some would argue that Usenet is already dead, so it doesn't matter
anymore. I'd have a hard time arguing against that point--while Usenet isn't
going to go the way of Gopher anytime soon, I doubt it'll do any better than a
long, slow decline into irrelevance. The sad part is that there still isn't
a true replacement for what Usenet has been doing....[1]

[1] One of the big problems with Usenet--the need for ISPs to maintain a
kick-ass server just to do news--might be solved with a Napster-like system
for articles. ISPs can hold articles in proxy for non-persistent dialup users,
which still requires a server, but it will be much less painful for the ISP
than an NNTP server cycling through tens of gigabytes of JPEGs and warez
every day. ISPs or IP addresses can be used to filter known spammers, as it's
much harder to cover your tracks this way. I don't know about scalability,
though. Just one of my idle ideas....

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita                               http://www.shimpei.org/