Re: lamers on IRC

[Thomas Lord]

> > Can you explain the terms host and upstream in this context?

Although individual posts flow in both directions between peers,
in practice, some nodes emerged, the main function of which was
to form a kind of high bandwidth backbone carrying all the
net-work wide popular groups, and offering peering to many peripheral
nodes.

To continue the example: at the little start-up I worked at,
they didn't try to carry all the groups available at the time.
They carried some obvious groups (such as comp.lang.c, about the
C programming language) and, beyond those core groups, they would
add anything someone asked for and that the big "upstream" peer had.

The big upstream peer got most of its very large set of groups to
choose from by peering with other big hosts.  They also carried
back posts from "edge nodes" to the rest of the world.

The p2p software - that today might easily be replaced with something
close to rsync(1) - saw peers as symmetric.   The IRL social network
operating netnews recognized the big-iron/big-pipes/serves-many
"upstream" as different from the local hosts/low activity/selected 
groups
"downstream".   Maybe a bit like how the logical functions
of Internet routers are symmetrical, but an upstream/downstream
topology emerges on the basis of the physical network and who
is connected where.

> I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
> multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular use
> since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX rated
> movies - to the extent it ate up most of the bandwidth while
> there still wasn't a monetary incentive to keep providing the
> service, from the ISP's POV ...

My initial encounter with net news did not involve ISPs or
the IP protocol.   It was company X's computers running
a cron script to dial up and log in to computers at company Y.
(Some others at the same time were already peering over the
Arpanet.)

But porn. Yes. There were mostly-multi-media porn groups that
were about anything but instant gratification.   Because of
limitations to 7 bit ASCII and posts of short sizes,
big images, etc. were broken down into pieces, each piece
encoded in base 64, and a series posted of message like:

   Subject: tee hee, naked person pic 1/42
   Subject: tee hee, naken person pic 2/42
   .... etc.

and of course it was always possible for posts to get
dropped in transit so a user might end up collecting
all but 2 of the "tee he, naked person" posts and
thus be unable to reconstruct the compressed file that
when manually reassembled could be viewed to see what
people look like naked.

That probably has something to do with the popularity,
back then, of alt.sex.stories -- kinky short stories written
in plain ASCII.

The limitations on message formats and size were more a
feature than a bug.   Net news ran robustly and well over
fairly low bandwidth connections.  It did not require
the Internet (but could easily use the Internet).

And yes, hosts could censor - e.g. just decide not to
receive or forward the porn groups.   This was impossible
to prevent and so nobody tried to prevent it.  It was
common in practice (for example, blocking porn from a
workplace).   The answer to censorship was for more
liberal people to create more peers -- to "route around" the
blockages if that's what someone wanted to do.

Editorializing a bit:  the anarchic operating procedures
and resilience enough to work over p2p dial-up, terminal
wires, whatever seem to me like extremely desirable features
for communications infrastructure in precarious times
when it wouldn't be *that* surprising to see major disruptions
of the global Internet, of the big commercial servers, etc.

-t


On 2022-05-28 08:08, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Thomas Lord wrote:
>
> > Example from real life. In high school I interned at a dinky
> > little start-up that was a net-news edge node. The system
> > administrators at that little company set up an internal net
> > news host the same way someone might bring in an old ping
> > pong table - to improve the work environment.
> >
> > That company dialed out to a more established company down
> > the road that, as a regional industry courtesy, not only
> > hosted its own internal net news host but connected to even
> > bigger fish upstream and casually offered peering to local
> > small companies.
>
> Can you explain the terms host and upstream in this context?
>
> A host is a computer connected to Usenet and upstream is where
> the data has been already, i.e. the servers?
>
> > > > Google used its economic power and social influence to
> > > > first centralize what was left of mainstream netnews and
> > > > then to kill it off.
> > >
> > > Well, you can tune into nntp.aioe.org with Gnus this very
> > > instant and see how useful it is. But killed - no.
> >
> > Yes, I am being a bit absolutist there.
> >
> > I suppose to be a little more accurate I would say that they
> > killed it as a way of sharing groups that had developed into
> > widely used global connected social media (relative to the
> > scales of its day).
> >
> > To be sure, the not-really-multi-media email-style message
> > format didn't exactly help sustain interested in net news.
>
> I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
> multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular use
> since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX rated
> movies - to the extent it ate up most of the bandwidth while
> there still wasn't a monetary incentive to keep providing the
> service, from the ISP's POV ...