🚀 go-pugleaf

Henry Ware (hware@bronze.coil.com) wrote:

: It is very simple:  Kibo (hi Kibo!), who is just an exceptional
: but normal person scans all newsgroups for references to himself.  He is not
: particularly well connected.  I'm paying $US 20 a month for a similar
: account.

You scan all newsgroups for references to yourself? Even Xibo isnt that
egotistical. Of course Kibo is (hi kibo!) but he's a doorhead. (heh.) (whatever
a doorhead is, Justin)

: good government?  Usenet is c. 50 Megs a week.  But a week is over 600 000

50 megs a week? Wrong. Its more like 400. 50 megs a week is what I'm sposta
get to my little puny machine over 14.4 UUCP.

Ack evem I am wrong. Here's a quote from news.lists:

------- begin included text

Message-ID: <2o7snd$4su@rodan.UU.NET>

589088 articles, totaling 1293 Mbytes (1620 including headers),
were submitted from 42518 different Usenet sites by 145665 different
users to 7576 different newsgroups for an average of 92 Mbytes
(116 including headers) per day.

-------- end included text

So I'm wrong too. Your numbers are a bit off, by a order of magnitude I spose.

: seconds.  That is 88 characters a second- a i486 runs at about 20 _million_
: instructions per second (depending on clock speed, system etc.).   So,
: given a good program and a decent feed, it's likely that most people reading
: this could do scan all of Usenet and do so ON THEIR OWN DESKS.  All the time.
: Regularly.

Plus hardrive access (since Usenet isnt store in a machine's memory, or do
you think that?) plus tossing and processing news.

In the words of Jim Mercer (or was it Henry Spencer who said this?) "News
kills hardrives." - the sheer amount of r/w and crunching going on is
sometimes scary to me. I fear I'll have to replace my HD next year with
about 7 megs/day of traffic.

: Its not too paranoid to imagine NSA and similar minded folk of all nations
: and occupations scanning all international traffic.  We know they get paid
: to do things with a lot lower potential return.  Heck, all this stuff is in
: some digital form.  Very nice to scan when compared to voice or hardcopy.

This is why we must defend our rights to say whatever we want. For precisely
that reason. Speeding is easy to get away with - posting banned Homolka
info on usenet without someone important noticing is hard.

: Blocking everything is more problematic.  The people who designed our
: nets tended to trust each other. (If only they knew this case would come up!)

Oh, dont need to block. Just throw the poster in jail. That works better.

: Perhaps you are a special person with special powers of insight and know
: what the rest of us should be kept in the dark about.  Perhaps.

I never said this - where are you drawing this conclusion from of what I said?

/kc
--
Ken P. Chasse -- Sysadmin, Sonic Interzone   "Carrying netnews does not a
Public Access email/Usenet -- 416-968-7292    publisher make." - something
spooge@sizone.pci.on.ca --  Toronto CANADA    I'd like to see. Support it.