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From: Måns Rullgård on 15 Nov 2009 16:56
Golden California Girls <gldncagrls(a)aol.com.mil> writes:

> Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> Golden California Girls <gldncagrls(a)aol.com.mil> writes:
>>> Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>>>> 'The law in the United States' has no more technical effects than any
>>>> other paper decree. And regarding 'inspectability' of the content,
>>>> there is no difference between content distributed using HTTP and
>>>> content distributed using NNTP: Both is possible, neither is
>>>> technically feasible because of the large amount of data.
>>> Don't lie.
>>
>> Assuming that I was wrong, who told you that I knew this and
>> intentionally wrote something other than the truth?
>>
>>> It is technically feasible. It is not economically feasible. If it
>>> wasn't technically feasible the data volume would have no bearing on
>>> the answer.
>>
>> It isn't technically feasible, except for really coarse-grained and
>> inefficient measures, because ultimatively, each particular set of
>> octets which make up a given content would need to be inspected by a
>> human prior to copying the data to the computer the requesting client
>> ran on and the latency introduced by such a cumbersome procedure would
>> remove all technical points in favor of not sending the content around by
>> snail mail.
>
> Thank you for confirming that is it economic rather than technical
> reasons. Obviously no one has the money to hire 99% of the planet
> to read it, not that there is any technological reason that it can't
> be done.

It wouldn't take 99% to do it. Clearly, as the number of censors is
increased, the number of authors decreases, reaching zero when 100% of
the population are censors. There must be a cutoff point where the
amount produced equals the amount reviewed. I suspect this is with
far less than 50% being censors, since 1) most people don't write
anything at all, and 2) writing takes longer than reading. 15% would
probably be sufficient. With a large portion of the world's
population living in low-pay countries, the mere hiring is not
entirely unrealistic. The real problem is that these countries have
poor Internet connectivity, making transfer of all the data to and
from the censors challenging. Hence, the reasons for not doing this
screening are, in fact, to some extent at least, technical.

--
M�ns Rullg�rd
mans(a)mansr.com
From: David Schwartz on 15 Nov 2009 18:55
On Nov 15, 6:14 am, Rainer Weikusat <rweiku...(a)mssgmbh.com> wrote:

> > The headers are intended to
> > be used and processed by the ISP. The payload of an HTTP transfer is
> > not. USENET content is destined for the ISP itself.

> This is wrong.

Unfortunately, your opinion doesn't have any special legal
significant. It really doesn't matter whether your comments are
technically correct or not, they are not the law in the United States.

> USENET content is replicated using NNTP and 'destined'
> for and created by people who use the service.

Sure, that's true of USENET content in general. But the issue is not
USENET in general but some particular message that was sent from one
news server to another news server and where that destination news
server is owned and managed by a particular ISP.

> The ISP is a mere
> passive infrastructure provider.

If that's true, then so are the customers. What do the customers do
that the ISP doesn't? The customers can look at the traffic but don't
necessarily have to. The ISP can look at the traffic but doesn't
necessarily have to. The customers don't look at all the traffic. The
ISP doesn't look at all the traffic. The customers select what
messages will be stored and forwarded based only on descriptions of
those messages. The ISP selects what messages will be stored and
forwarded based on only descriptions of those messages. And so on.

The distinction is that the nature of the content is readily apparent
from the contents of the packets and the ISP's machines are the
endpoints for USENET messages and they're not for HTTP messages.

I don't agree with the law as it is, and in a lot of areas the law is
unsettled. But it's simply not true that there's no technical
difference, nor is it true that the law could not or does not impart
legal significance to the technical differences.

DS
From: Scott Lurndal on 16 Nov 2009 13:07
Golden California Girls <gldncagrls(a)aol.com.mil> writes:
>Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> 'The law in the United States' has no more technical effects than any
>> other paper decree. And regarding 'inspectability' of the content,
>> there is no difference between content distributed using HTTP and
>> content distributed using NNTP: Both is possible, neither is
>> technically feasible because of the large amount of data.
>
>Don't lie. It is technically feasible. It is not economically feasible. If it
>wasn't technically feasible the data volume would have no bearing on the answer.

There are a number of small companies that construct appliances designed to
perform deep packet inspection on data streams at line rate (e.g. OC-192 or
OC-768).

scott
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