🚀 go-pugleaf

Y. Tony Lee (y-tony@acs.bu.edu) wrote:
: Hello,
:    I have followed this thread first with a bit of boredom, but now with
: some interests.  I have thought about this and now feel that I have a few
: things to say.  I know I am posting to all the places where bincancelled
: occurred because I believe, IMHO, my arguments will have relevence
: everywhere.  

: In article <ARMM-Report-220.a@redpoll.mrfs.oh.us>, red@redpoll.mrfs.oh.us
: (Richard E. Depew) wrote:

: > Binary posts do not belong in unmoderated discussion groups.

:    I find a problem right here.  What does "unmoderated" mean?  I thought
: "moderated" means that a person or a small group of people must authorize
: a posting before it goes public while an "unmoderated" newsgroup mean that
: authorization is not required.  With this bincancel bot, you are thus
: giving yourself autorization to moderated, albeit in a limited way.  I
: don't think any of these groups have given you permission to do this. 
: Each USENET group, in itself, is a kind of society that runs its own
: rules.  Do we now need to deal with you as well?

: > I have issued 31 cancels for large binary files (average size 195,741
: > characters - total size 6,067,999 characters) posted to 10 different
: > unmoderated discussion groups in the comp, misc and rec hierarchies
: > as follows:
:    
:    I am not sure of your time-line here.  I assume a week's worths of
: cancellations.

:    OK, you have saved us 6 megabytes of bandwidth.  Let's see how much
: this really saved us.  I have about 5000 groups here.  For estimates,
: let's say there about 1000 alt. groups, so total number of non-binaries
: groups is about 4000.  Estimate about 100 posts a week, each with a 100
: words, with 5 characters per word(including spaces and carriage returns). 
: I think I am underestimating here.  That is 200,000,000 characters, or 200
: megabytes.  So 200 + 6 = 206 megabytes worth of USENET data per week.  The
: percentage that is taken out of the total data from your bincancel bot is
: 6 / 206 * 100 = 2.9%.  Brilliant.


You are missing the point:

Someone always has to pay for a network feed, wether by POTS, ISDN, T-1,
or whatever.  Many companies and individuals would like to limit their costs
when using USENET news by not subscribing to groups that carry binary
posts, since a single binary post can be larger than a months worth of
rec.skydiving.

Luckly, the USENET news feed has a well-developed structure that classifies
posts by topic and content, so it is an easy thing to avoid groups that
contain mOStly binaries.  I should also note that it allows us here
in rec.skydiving to read about _skydiving_.  How many would be willing to
follow discussions if the rec.skydiving was instead rec.aviation
with 1000's of posts on all types of flight?  How many of us have that
kind of time?



:    My point is, do we really need this bincancel when most of us don't
: post useless binaries?  What if somebody was putting out a quicktime movie
: on a nifty but diffucult to explain skydiving move in rec.skydiving?  Or a
: nice graphics technique in another group?  

Speaking as someone who has administered a newsfeed on a site with 100's
of computers and 1000's of users.  YES, we really need bincancel.

As has already been pointed out ad-nausium, the cancel bots are not
preventing anyone from posting binaries, or spam messages.  What they do
is prevent people from posting large messages, or large numbers of a single
message, to groups where they don't belong.

Those of us like myself and Tony Lee can easily forget that bandwidth
isn't free or unlimited.  We are accessing USENET through *.edu connections
to the internet.  But USENET is not the same thing as the Internet.
Many USENET sites are still uucp connections.  As recently as a year ago
I had a consulting client that got their USENET feed through a
9600 bps modem.


: > If you must post a binary to Usenet, please post it to an appropriate
: > binaries newsgroup such as alt.binaries.misc.  Then, if you like, post
: > something in the appropriate discussion group telling people where to
: > find the binary in the binaries group (a pointer to the binary).  This
: > will permit news administrators and users to decide for themselves
: > whether to receive the binary files.


:    You may say, "but put it in alt.*.binaries."  Unfortunately not all of
: us have access to alt.* groups.  If somebody posts a 100K binary once
: every 2-3  months for important reasons and the binary in relevant to the
: groups, then you should allow it!  Does such a group need a *.binaries
: group for posting a 100k binary once or twice a month, or in the case of
: rec.games.bolo, small binaries that amount to 20-30k a month?  I don't
: think so.  Making a *.binaries group would hassle the end-users.  If they
: post 12 100k files a month,like:

Obviously you have very little experience in system adminsitration.  The
_reason_ many sites do not have access to alt.*.binaries groups is because
they cannot afford the bandwidth to carry them.  By posting the binary
files to non-binary groups, you'll evenually overload their network
connection, at which point that site will simply drop USENET.  It happens,
as a UNIX consultant I have personally disconnected two businesses 
from USENET at management request because of lack of bandwidth.

That's why the alt.*.binaries groups exist--to segregate the high-bandwidth
posts away from discussion groups so that sites with low-bandwidth
connections can still participate.

:    In the end, it comes down to who should moderate?  If everything were
: truly "unmoderated" then there would be truly too much havoc, including
: unwanted and irrelevent large binary postings.  The answer is that each
: group, as a whole society, moderates the group.  What happens when we
: actually do see an unwanted binary posting?  The USENET group gets
: together and flames the person and he/she usually learns the lesson.  What
: happened when those lawyers posted every USENET group for its own selfish
: advertising?  ALL of USENET flamed them and we have not seen too many
: since.

Well, the _reason_ you haven't seen anymore green card lawyer spams
has _NOTHTING_ to to with "ALL of USENET flamed them".  They were
willing to endure the flamage and in fact sued thier ISP for dropping
them (the volume flames kept crashing the ISP's system).

Sorry to tell you what stopped them was a cancelbot set up outside of
the US (and hence outside they reach of US law).  The cancelbot 
removed any further postings and fixed the problem.  Without the cancelbot
I assure you we'd still be reading green card lawyer spam every week
(and in fact they promised on several occasions to continue spamming).


:    I agree that bandwidth problems from binaries can be a problem, but
: there are better ways to do it.  Please reconsider what you are doing
: Richard.

Well, please enlighten us.  Obviously you must be _much_ smarter than
those of us that have been "on" USENET for the last 8 years (in my case).
I mean, you've already figured out that our classification system doesn't
work.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between anarchy and chaos.  USENET
is the former, but it does not have to become the latter.


[note:  I set followup to news.admin.net-abuse.misc]

/* Dale Southard Jr.    www.nd.edu/~dsouth     Sr. Rigger   VectorTM  */
/* Science Computing Associate                      AFF/I   SL/I      */
/* Notre Dame University, 202B NSH                   S&TA   D-11216   */
/* dale.southard.1@nd.edu   219/631-7326    "I'd rather be skydiving" */