[2018] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Dialog
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Fri Jan 17 20:40:54 1992
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 92 20:39:56 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: emv@msen.com
Cc: daveh@csn.ORG, com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Edward Vielmetti's message of Fri, 17 Jan 92 11:19 EST <m0l4wHm-000HyaC@heifetz.msen.com>
>From: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
>Try 'ftp world.std.com' and go look at the Open Book Initiative stuff.
>Part of the internet can get to it, part can't. We can argue whether
>the reason is as a result of NSF policy or something else, I'm sure
>there's plenty of reasonable answers to be given.
Let there be no ambiguity, it is a result of NFS policy.
If that NFS policy has been misinterpreted at this end (and I don't
believe it has based on specific conversations with people who should
know) that's a different matter. But that's the only motivation for
the routing limitations.
>I suspect that the reasons why both world and Dialog are only partly
>reachable are different.
I don't think substantively, there are always details I suppose.
>I just wouldn't buy a connection from a network
>service provider that didn't let me use it to connect to the whole
>world.
[we are the whole World, so you're hosed, heh heh, joke.]
Well, that's not quite a necessary attitude, in my view, though I
appreciate the sentiment. But we do have a problem to grapple with
(all of us.)
We can get to about 75-80% of the network (and vice-versa) via CIX. I
am not happy with the current situation, I do think the situation is
in transition, and I do think what we are doing here is still
worthwhile and important as the first-ever public access system on the
internet (though no longer the only.)
Going back to the OBI issue, that is a specific and nagging problem.
I get on the order of 3-10 requests per day from people wanting to
know why they cannot get to OBI and/or various attempts at chatter and
suggestions (most useless of course not that I damn them for trying.)
And probably an equal number of requests here as to why someone can't
get to host XYZZY, but that's less problematic to this audience.
OBI is currently a large text archive of about 150MB of mostly
compressed texts*: Bibles (KJV, Q'uran, LDS), novels (Dickens, Austen,
Conrad, Doyle, etc etc), standards documents (RFCs, SCSI, graphics
formats, etc), humor, rants (e.g. UFO's), Computer Science technical
reports, etc etc etc. Everything, to the best of our knowledge, is
freely redistributable. We are continuously putting new texts up,
either through location of already on-line texts or putting them up
ourselves (typing, scanning, etc., tho I can't think of much etc.)
* Yes we are aware of Gutenberg and other similar projects, Michael
Hart and I communicate regularly. This is a huge sort of undertaking
and the more the merrier (I say this because mention of OBI usually
elicits 50 or more "do you know about Gutenberg?" messages, thanks!)
Some texts in our collection are from Gutenberg and vice-versa, which
is great as far as I am concerned.
-Barry Shein
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