🚀 go-pugleaf

lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:

> There are enough machines out there providing anonymous UUCP access 
> to software archives that use of BITFTP from UUCP sites is no longer
> justifiable. If you want the software, you can bloody well pay your own
> phone line charges to pick it up. Maybe you didn't want that software so 
> badly after all ...

     True for system-related software.  There are tons of places to get
EMACS and Perl and pathalias and so on.  But emphatically *not* true for
other kinds of software -- in particular scientific software, which is
one of the principal justifications of the Internet, and BITNET, and
BITFTP.
     Let's say your site gets a bionet.all feed and you want to keep
your copy of the GenBank genetic sequence database current on a daily
basis using bionet.molbio.genbank.updates.  The New York University soft-
ware to do this is available by anon-ftp from goober.phri.nyu.edu.  Can
you think of an anon-uucp source for this?  (LONG pause while the man
thinks....)  The same is true for an IMMENSE amount of other scientific
software written by researchers and put up for anon-ftp and only anon-ftp.
If you shut down BITFTP you're screwing all the legitimate users along
with the abusers, including every small college and small research enter-
prise in the Known Universe which can't afford a leased-line Internet
connection.  There must be a more intelligent way!  I say THANK YOU to
the folks at Princeton through whose good offices outsiders are permit-
ted to use BITFTP.  
   (P.S. Thanks also to DEC for the same thing.  BITFTP isn't the only
ftp-to-mail gateway, as you may know.  And thanks to the archive-server
sites, though they're a drop in the bucket compared to what's available
via ftp.)


> As an example of making the user pay, about a year ago I decided to
> stop carrying the comp.binaries groups here at AU. There were a number
> of reasons for doing this: potential viruses and cost in modem time and
> disk space being two of them. When we informed the user community of
> the change there was no end of howling and bitching from the PC users
> who were used to getting all this "free software" from the net. We
> pointed out that it was not "free," as the university was paying
> line charges (both leased lines and LD dialup) to transfer these
> files, most of which were of little or no use to the operation of
> the university. In essence, we said that if they *really* *wanted*
> the software, they could dial up any number of BBS's (from home on
> their dime) and pick it up that way.

     That's a very good example of cutting down nonessential use with-
out at the same time stomping on the researchers you're there to support.
There's a major difference between students who want games for their PCs
and faculty members who want software for gene sequencing or amino acid
analysis or Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics or numerical taxonomy or gas
chromatography or carbon-14 dating of palaeolithic strata or photoelectric
photometry of variable stars or....  I'll bet there are people at your own
university who have used BITFTP to obtain software of the latter types.
After all, you weren't always on the Internet.
    



merce@iguana.uucp (Jim Mercer) writes:

> how much of a net.lobby do we have to do to get pucc.princeton.edu to shut
> down BITFTP?
>
> can we at least get them to limit responses to systems that can be verified
> as being on BITNET (as i assume the system was intended)?

     I absolutely agree that there's no reason to try to get EMACS through
the mail.  But the list of things that are both big enough to cause trouble
and easily available from uunet and other big anon-uucp sites is short enough
(e.g. the GNU collection, TeX, X windows et al.) to write into a compact list.
In fact, why not just *use* uunet's filelist?  If you want to lobby Princeton
for something, ask them to check all the GET commands against such a list, and
bounce disallowed requests.  Shutting down BITFTP would solve your mail prob-
lems, but so would shutting down iguana. There are more thoughtful solutions
than either of these!



lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) continues:

> What you describe is an unfortunate side effect of running a large
> mail relay site. I've run a few of them in my time and I've dealt
> with this problem before. I find the best way to deal with it is
> to make it very clear to the system administrators of any site you
> provide e-mail connectivity to just what sort of traffic you are
> willing to forward. Let them know that any violation of those guidelines
> could (and probably will) result in the termination of their feed.

     Amen!  This is a problem that site admins are qualified to solve
(and paid to solve) on a site-by-site basis, by configuring mailers and
by having explicit arrangements with the sites to which they connect,
*before* the problem becomes a problem.  Every single admin I have ever
met has wanted to be considered clever; just saying "Nuke Princeton" is
not the way to impress people with your skill in your job.


> How you deal with abuses is up to you. I prefer a solution that
> doesn't penalize users who did not contribute to the problem.

     Double amen!  Those of us stuck out here in uucp-only-land thank you!

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