Re: News on AIOE's outage

On Fri, 10 Mar 2023 04:00:39 -0600, Imagine More Meat <[email protected]> did
make me awaken from my chaotic existentialism when they didst announce:

<snipped>
>
>> I don't think it'll ever be the same as it was, but I'm glad that it's still
>> here in some form or other.
>
>What if you made it better than it ever was?

Ok, I'll bite....

>What is stopping you anons from getting together and making the code to 
>improve it?

The fact that to do so would require reinventing the technology stack from the
protocol level on up. 

>There are many things that could be improved to make NNTP a frictionless 
>experience for users and admins. Friction is death bane for software.

NNTP was largely "frictionless" by design

To create a group, you simply send a control message to your server and all
interconnected servers, by design, would replicate the group's feed.

This was the original purpose of the NNTP protocol.

The protocol is not "at fault" here.....

ISP/IAP's aka "server owners" are to blame.

Once ISPs were leaned on by their Corporate Overlords, many admins (aka internet
provider companies) started messing with their feeds to exclude groups they
didn't like or want to carry on their servers for political, or financial
reasons (warez, pr0n, politcal opposition, etc).

This resulted in different groups being carried by different servers around the 
world which effectively breaks the "frictionless" experience of the NNTP design.

There's nothing wrong with NNTP. It's the way it's currently implemented.

The fact is that governments around the world didn't like USENET because of the
freedom to post information that gets globally promulgated automatically. 

Corporations hated it because IP was consistently leaked to USENET and globally
propagated, resulting in massive copyright theft.

<snipped>
>
>Improve the client. Fork a GUI client and make it better.

There are many great GUI based clients out there. Sure, the look and feel could
do with being updated, but with how few NNTP services there are currently on the
global internet, and how few the user base is, it would not make fiscal sense
for companies to invest in updating the clients they currently offer.

There isn't any driver for the open source community to make a more modern
looking interface either, in that it would be a lot of work for only a very
small subset of people who access the internet. 

>Improve the server and client so that configuration of accounts is 
>always automatic and not prone to user error or arcane options causing 
>failures.
>
>
>Improve the server. Make it a point-click install experience. Make it so 
>mere mortals can be up and running in no time.

This is outside of the NNTP protocol itself. There would need to be a new RFC
which would require the buy-in of the companies currently hosting servers to
work towards creating a new standard for account creation and authorization.
That would take time and resources to be assigned to it. 

It would require investment. 

See where I'm going with this?

>Imagine a NNTP server with a GUI configuration and a setup wizard to get 
>all the options right.
>
>Imagine a NNTP server that automatically generates TLS keys and ensures 
>all connections are encryption.

Sure. Imagine ISPs and hosting companies that are still in the game, all pouring
money into first creating a new internet standard for NNTP authentication, and
then imagine them pouring more money into design and implementation of the new
RFC.

There are also legal hurdles, which I'll touch on below.


>Imagine extra features like hidden newsgroups, secret newsgroups, and 
>author message cancellation.

Now you're touching on the protocol itself. This would require a commpletely new
protocol and standards in and of itself. See above arguments for why this is not
possible (RFC, global agreement of provders, investment....).

The reason NNTP was once so widely implemented, was because of its SIMPLICITY.
You post to a group. It gets replicated. You create a new group, it gets
replicated. It was all automatic, and required little "care and feeding". USENET
was CHEAP and required little to no investment to host.


>Imagine high-level spam handling in the GUI interface.
>
>Imagine keyword and sender filtering at the server level.
>
>It looks like RetroGuy at RocksolidBBS.com is already on this track. You 
>could fork his code and hack away and push back improvements.

I have a lot of respect for RetroGuy's skills and dedication. But without
creating new standards (RFC) and without IAP/ISP buy-in, what he's creating is
simply a hobbyist network. If it catches on, maybe it could grow past that, but
there are several other factors that would likely prevent that or stop it.

I think it's important to look outside of the technical possibilities, and take
a look at the cold, hard reality.

Since 2001 the relationship between governments and ISP/IAPs, have resuled in a 
cadre of different laws around the world on what can/cannot be posted to the
internet or made available online, either globally, or within each government's
jurisdiction.

Some of these are due to the rise in global terrorism, others are due to the
global war on drugs, others are due to closed regimes not wanting external
information to be made available to their populations, and others are due to the
very neccessary laws on child protection.

It is likely that if a new network of USENET servers came online offering strong

encryption, hidden/closed groups, etc, and seemed to be poised to expand well
outside of the hobbyist community, governments and ISP/IAPs would react.
Strongly.

We would likely see legal requirements effectively legislate them out of
existance, and/or ISP/IAPs blocking any traffic to or from those servers. Most
of the justifications for doing so would be because of the POTENTIAL for IP
theft, child porn, and/or domestic/international terrorism, which would have
widespread instititional, corporate, and public support.

Again, I have a lot of respect for RetroGuy, but I'm sure even he doesn't see
any potential in this outside of a mostly closed space for hobbyists and
like-minded individuals.


--
OldbieOne [TM]
The One Who Tells It Like It is!
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