Group Proposes Usenet2 Consortium rallies to can the Spam on bloated Usenet By Larry Lange, EETimes Mountain View, Calif. -- An ad hoc group of network administrators is proposing a way to rescue the Usenet, the Internet's virtual bulletin board, from the glut of extraneous postings that threatens to bury it. Usenet2, a small consortium founded by Usenet veterans working as system administrators for midsize Internet service providers (ISPs), is promoting an additional Usenet hierarchy-- called net.*--that Internet news administrators can request as a feed over the Network News Transfer Protocol. The result, which is akin to other popular Usenet news feeds such as comp.*, alt.*, sci.* and rec.*, is designed to ban Spam, the moniker Netizens use for cross-posted messages. "Spam is completely irritating--it wastes so much bandwidth and disk space across the nation," said Gregg Lahti, a senior design engineer at Intel Corp. (Chandler, Ariz.). "No one wants it, yet the morons are persistent about sending it." Nevertheless, there are certain conditions to becoming part of the new network that are causing concern. Special monitoring software, while not required, is designed to block Spam over the net.* hierarchy. Then there are the rules, a set of regulations that participating system administrators must follow to keep their users in line, in the hope of returning to the early Internet values of cooperation and respect among users--ethics that are all but lost in today's massive online block party. "Sound" is the term Usenet2 backers uses to describe correct practices on the network. "It's all based on that--if you can run a sound site, then you can participate in U2 [Usenet2]," said committee member Russ Nelson, president of Crynwr Software (Potsdam, N.Y.), which makes TCP/IP software. "The ISP has to get users to abide by the rules of U2, and deal with the ones who don't." The rules require the mandatory inclusion of real return e-mail addresses in postings, which could halt Spammers who post with fake ones; and the banning of binary files, which make up images and applications. "At the moment, [Usenet2] is a subset of Usenet," said Ron Echeverri, a systems administrator at Best Internet Communications Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) and a member of the Usenet2 Steering Committee. "We're not trying to put Usenet out of business--although if that were to happen, we wouldn't be crying in our beer." At the same time, Usenet veterans like Lahti--who follows the comp.lang.* (computer programming language) newsgroups as part of his work--express concern about the Orwellian potential of Usenet2. "Who's going to make the decisions on when and if the rules are being followed?" asked Hoyt Hudson, vice president of information systems at InterAccess Co., a Chicago ISP. "Usenet2 sounds like a Big Brother scenario." Engineers who frequent the Usenet have long been familiar with the relentless mix of posts from the expert, the enigmatic and the extraneous. But recently, even a cursory look at the comp.sys.intel or sci.electronics.design newsgroups reveals fewer useful technical posts than ever in Usenet's 20-year history. Instead, they are clogged with unsolicited messages, mostly commercial posts for dubious products or services, including porn and get-rich-quick schemes. With a name picked up from a Monty Python sketch, Spam floods the Internet with many copies of the same message. Some say it accounts for as much as 80 percent of all Usenet posts on a daily basis in an estimated 20,000 newsgroups. The Usenet population is estimated to be about 10 million a day. The Usenet2 initiative has already recruited several ISPs, such as midsize Panix Public Access Network in New York City, as well as large Internet search firms Deja News and Inktomi (which created HotBot). Other backers include universities, such as Stanford and Penn State, and related Usenet news divisions of corporations like IBM, Sun Microsystems and NASA. Worldwide, Internet news administrators from the U.K., Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Korea are also taking a look. "It's an idea whose time has come," said Victoria Fike, news administrator at Panix, which has adapted the net.* feed. "There are a lot of people who have been using the Internet a long time who stopped using Usenet altogether, because the garbage ratio was so high." Fike referred to "a truly incredible amount--we're talking hundreds of thousands of articles on a daily basis that come in." Multiply that by tens of thousands of ISPs, and Usenet2's solution starts to look promising. (Next article) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

© Copyright 1995-2000, The Motley Fool. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of The Motley Fool. The Motley Fool is a registered trademark and the "Fool" logo is a trademark of The Motley Fool, Inc. Contact Us

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..