From: peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.gopher,comp.archives.admin
Subject: Re: Information Services Etiquette (was Re: Gopher directories)
Date: 13 Apr 92 23:52:27 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: McGill University Computing Centre

Aydin Edguer writes
> peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes:
> >> ... My own thinking on this matter at this point is that we should
> >> approach this in somewhat the same way as DNS--not everyone gets  
to
> >> set up their own domain nameserver, these things tend to be done
> >> cooperatively both within and between institutions, and there are  
> >> individuals who are ultimately responsible for their function.
> >
> > Sorry, I couldn't disagree more. This would put information  
services under
> > the direct control of a small hierarchy of power brokers.
> > Certainly, McGill has the right to limit my ability to use their  
facilities,
> > but that does not mean that the entire net should participate in  
the
> > censorship or control of information flow.
> 
> I fail to see how you jumped to this conclusion.  The original person
> [Joel Cooper] did not propose network censorship!!

Perhaps you should go back and re-read the previous paragraph of
his reply:

[* Joel writes: *]
%> .  .  .  Also I have heard some concern expressed by individuals at  
%> several academic institutions about "just anyone" being able to set   
up their own 
%> Gopher server and start serving up whatever. .  .  

I understood this to mean that he was advocating control over
who would be qualified to set up a gopher server, and (given
that he was replying to my plan for a resource information service)
who would be allowed to have an entry put into the "phone
book" of services. Sounds like a pretty obvious case of potential
censorship to me. 

If this doesn't bother you, ask yourself this - how would
you feel if I brought up my RIS, and then announced that I 
wouldn't accept entries unless their contents and operational
policies had been approved by a committee formed from the
official university Gopher community?

I see it as censorship whether _I_ do it, or whether the
Gopher community does it to themselves. The issue is who will
be allowed to serve information to the net and who decides who
is allowed.

BTW, the reason we need some control over who operates a DNS server 
is because if you operate such a server at level N and such a
server goes away then it can impact upon the operation of those
registering at level N+1. Thus, if "mcgill.ca" is broken, then
"cc.mcgill.ca", "physics.mcgill.ca" and "maths.mcgill.ca" all go
away, too. We need accountability and control over this information
to prevent denial of service attacks, so some authority is granted.
A hierarchial model works in this case.

ANd BTW, I would be very disturbed if someone told me that the
people in charge of DNS top level registrations had started
limiting who would be allowed to register in DNS to prevent
"just anyone" from gaining entry. We need authority, but we
don't need this kind of control.

And in the Gopher world, or more generally, in the world of
generalized Internet service providers that I see coming into
existance in the next year or two, you do _not_ need or want to
maintain a strict hierarchy of services. I believe that what we
will see is a "mesh" of service providers and consumers. We may
impose a taxomony (or two, or three) to help find things, but we
may also allow archie-like indexing services as well.

In such a mesh of service providers, some people may or may not
choose to point their users at my server and if you don't, it's no
skin off my nose, or anyone else's. And if you _don't_ point your
users at my service, why should _you_ care what I am offering, or 
whether anyone else can find me, as well? You don't need authority
over my ability to bring up another service of the type you are  
offering.

If we have no _operational_ need to limit access, why condone people
putting arbitrary  restrictions on who would be able to operate such 
a server? That _is_ what is being proposed here, limiting who can
offer this service, or information about this service.

Would you accept limitations on who could publish newspapers?
Limits on which newspapers could be displayed on the counter of the
store? I would think that limiting who can run a server, or who can
publicise such a server, would scare the willies of at lease
some people. It certainly rang alarm bells with me.


> Do you block out certain replies by the nameserver?!  If not, why  
would you
> block out replies by the "service" server?

Exactly. What was proposed was that the maintainers of the Gopher
network would not _allow_  "just anyone" to begin offering information
through a Gopher server. In context, it was being suggested that we 
should not be willing to publicize "bootleg" servers (really, read it 
again). Joel does this for the best of motives, but it is still the 
equivalent of limiting access to the printing presses to "official"
printers and the dissemination of information about what is in print.
To me this is censorship and I am against it.


> What I see being proposed is the very reasonable concept that  
information
> on resources should be a distributed service. .  .  .

No, what was proposed was that we limit who would be allowed to set
up and operate Gopher servers. Now, I'm all for distributed
information services, where appropriate. I'm against the idea
that we would limit who would be allowed to offer any particular 
Internet services.

> .  .  . IMHO, centralizing information
> may be easier in the short term, but is limiting in the long term.
> Think back to the days of the hosts.txt file or a single archie  
server.

Actually, we still have a centralized archie service. It's just that
today we mirror or duplicate its information to multiple sites to 
handle the workload of an estimated 50,000 queries a day. There is
(modulo mirroring and update problems) one copy of the archie database
being offered by a number of different servers. A distributed service
(a la DNS) would have different portions of the 2,100,000 filenames
scattered among multiple machines. We have them all in one giant
database. And it still works pretty well, thank you very much.

For what it is worth, we _are_ advocates of decentralization, in 
certain cases, and the next release of archie _will_ allow a greater
degree of decentralization, in the form of additional databases
and collections. I just don't think that is what was being advocated
in Joel's letter and was not what I was talking about in my last
posting.

  .  .
> Distributed information management is a better solution.  But  
distribution
> requires some sort of authority.  This is the idea behind the domain  
name
> server.  And COULD be the idea behind a resource information server.
> It would not involve the entire network in the control of information  
flow,
> but could involve domain administrators with the control of  
information
> flow from their domains.  This is a good thing.

Sorry, I don't agree. We need the concept of authority in DNS because
we want control over the information offered. In the case of DNS, this
is not wholely unreasonable. In the case of Gopher, I believe it _is_
unreasonable.

Any RIS I operate would not restrict who could operate or publicize
services as proposed. I wouldn't allow someone to claim to be, say,
Sun's official Gopher server unless they clearly were, but I wouldn't
deny them the right to provide a general Gopher server just because
they weren't "approved" by the "official" Gopher hierarchy (Can
you say "I allow the alt news groups"? I knew you could! :-)

> > A site may not want to include pointers to all of them, but that  
doesn't
> > mean other people wont want to find and use them...
> 
> Huh?!!  If a site does not want pointers to a resource then they  
should not
> have to deal with "other" people using "their" resources!  Services  
should
> be at the convenience of the provider.

We really appear to be talking at cross-purposes here.

What I was trying to say was that if a specific site wants to bring
up a Gopher server, and wants an entry into my RIS directory, I will
not disallow such an entry on the grounds that it is not an "official
Gopher server", endorsed by committee and entered into the directory
of Gophers served by the Minnesota Gopher server as root of the 
official Gopher tree.

Now, Minnesota is free to not include the server in _their_
menus, (obviously) but neither they, nor anyone else should be in
a position to prevent the new server coming  from coming on-line.
And sorry guys, I am not implying for a moment that the truely
nice people in Minnesota would ever even try this. I am trying
to clarify my concern with Joel's concern proposal and acertain
to what extent Joel's view is shared by other Internet service
providers).


Okay, I hope I have clarified and better stated my concerns. I have
received a brief piece of email from Joel promising to follow up to
Usenet soon. Perhaps he can better address my concerns than I have
been able to do.


					- peterd
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk