On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 12:06:03AM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > Why is using a newreader on Debian machines strictly
> > forbidden? (Incidentally, on IRC, Jason and AJ insist that the
> to a misconfiguration[2]. Thus, you are limited to using news servers
> provided by your ISP. News server access is typically limited by only letting
> people in a given IP block or in a given domain access the news server.
> If you want to read news and your ISP has a rotten news server or no news
> server, your alternative is to get a login on a computer that has access to
> some other news server (or arrange for someone to feed you news, which
That's not the case so much anymore - various companies now offer
password controlled access commercially for those that want or need it.
Using those from Debian boxes would (AFAICT) be OK.
> I guess this must not be clear to people who don't administer news
> servers but it seemed very intuitivly obvious to me when I first read
> the DMUP (and I was glad to have that point clarified, as I was at the
> time looking for a good news feed).
I guess the point is that our sponsors may not always be willing to
accept responsibilty for random Debian people using their servers or
(more likely) might not always wish to handle the extra load that could
occur. There could also be some concerns about local groups which are
intended to be private.
> [1] I have no idea why, and I think usenet would be a better place if
> this were not so. Except it would probably generate even more spam
> and even more abuse of binary newsgroups.
RFC 977 dates from the mid 80s. I don't know what bandwidths were like
at that point, but I would expect that reading from a server not on the
local network would give terrible interactive performance so people didn't
consider it a sensible idea and didn't include any authentication
mechanism. Remote bandwidth and latency are still an issue for a lot of
sites today. There's also the inertia factor.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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