Skips/Fades, Sometimes Why Unknown, Sometimes Really Obvious Why

[Beck38]

Now, I watch these servers with (probably, maybe, certainly?) a bit too much, but one thing I've noticed with ALL of them (pretty much) is that the socket errors and such happen with clock-like regularity *at the top of the hour*.

Now, I get to wondering exactly where in the transmission path it's being yanked. My ISP? Some fiber link? Now, if it was that, and the interuptions occured right at midnight on the path I know my data is taking, it might make sense. Two o-clock in the afternoon? No. And this is VPN/encrypted traffic, so the ISP has no idea whatsoever what it is or where it's going, except it 'looks' like it's going to a commercial server farm that has nothing whatsoever to do with usenet, P2P, or anything else except business data.

These folks yanking others chains are just typical greedy bastards. You can fine the heck out of them, they don't care, that's the 'cost of doing business'. There is only one thing that gets their attention - the SuperMax. Toss a fiew of them in there, they'll get the hint 'real quick'. We might wish it, but too many judges and procecuters are 'on the take' for that to happen.

Sooner or later, the only thing that will actually work is exactly what worked in the 1930's.

[zot]

It would not be hard to improve the NNTP protocol by adding additional checking/verification so that uploads would not get corrupted in transit (and servers would constantly check and back-fill from each other, but that's another story).

The big question is who will do it? There's really not much of a central authority anymore. Last year Duke University -- where Usenet was born -- finally shut down its NNTP server and related operations, and the academic community had largely abandoned usenet years earlier.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/18/2342241/Duke-To-Shut-Down-Usenet-Server

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05...-Usenet-Server

Companies like Giganews, Highwinds, Astraweb, etc, could certainly get together and crank out an improved protocol that would be optimized for transferring files (as NNTP was never designed not intended to do) but I think the biggest obstacle by far is the political/legal considerations. Designing an improved usenet system that makes it easier and more efficient for the public to infringe copyright is virtually guaranteed to land these companies in court -- a situation they'd definitely want to avoid.