From: kadie@eff.org (Carl M. Kadie)
Subject: [aus.aarnet]  Re: Aarnet should not be pornographic!
Followup-To: alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk,aus.aarnet
Originator: kadie@eff.org
Organization: The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 04:41:36 GMT

[A repost - Carl]

From: kjm@buc.edu.au (Kevin Moore)
Newsgroups: aus.aarnet
Subject:  Re: Aarnet should not be pornographic!
Date: 13 Jan 1993 04:07:16 GMT

In article <1993Jan12.230320.25866@latcs1.lat.oz.au> baragry@amdahl1.lat.oz.au (Jason Baragry) writes:

>        A couple of years ago, I remember one of our system admins telling 
me
>why there wasn't an X-rated gifs on ftp-able locations anymore.

>        The story was that it used to be very simple to download these picts
>from numerous ftp sites and it was quite common. Anyway, 60 minutes (USA) got 
>ahold of this and beat it up saying that any 14 year old kid could dial up
>a BBS and ftp to his hearts content (assuming he knew what it was he was looking
>for). Supposedly, this led to a ban of some sort on x-rated gifs on ftp sites.

>        Is this true???

Yes and no. It's usually load, pure and simple. When ACSnet was first 
superseded by AARNet, several sites had such things, and word got around. 
The sites collapsed under the load of ftp requests. They got rid of the GIFs 
pronto. The 60 minutes thing put some political pressure on some sites in 
the US, but load is the usual problem.

Besides, there are plenty of privately operated porno GIF BBSes for the 14 
year old kids to get their stuff from.

>        Also, last year Peter Deutsch (sp?) came out here and gave a talk about
>Archie at NetWorkshop. After that he gave a similar talk where I was working
>and at the end of it he put a list of stats on Archie - the most popular
>requests. It was something like this:

>GIF             100 thousands,
>*.gif           ditto.
>sex             10 thousands
>SEX             ditto.
>girl.gif        thousands
>(big gap)
>*.zip           hundreds

That is really the point. The networks cope pretty well with traffic for 
useful items, like games and other work-related programs. Porn is a couple 
of orders of magnitude more popular, and the network would have to be 
upgraded to cope with it. 

>I would imagine that AARNet could not be to different to the rest of the 
>Internet. There seems to be a fair demand for the stuff that some people want
>to ban.

Indeed, but AARNet has limited resources, and overworked staff, who can't 
afford to have the system getting clogged up by porn hounds looking for the 
latest GIF of <insert favourite porno star here> attempting sex with a 
<insert favourite sex toy here>.

>Personally I don't subscribe to those groups but I wouldn't stop others from
>doing so...

Again, load is the problem. In the bad old days before ftp (remember 
fetchfile?) binaries newsgroups were a means of disseminating programs. They 
were UUencoded, which roughly doubled their size. They had to be split into 
smaller segments because some newsreaders have memory limits. A typical 
file of roughly 20k would translate into about five 1000 line news articles.

System administrators do not like binaries groups for this reason. Hundreds 
of news items of this size a day fill disks real fast. The figures for 
traffic on alt.binaries.erotica.* are phenomenal. System administrators on 
news servers are likely to take the view that leaving them out of their 
service allows them to keep old articles in other newsgroups longer, 
providing a better service for those who use news for work related 
discussion, especially given that ftp allows access to most useful programs 
these days.
******************************************************************************
Jesus loves me, this I know,			*
Torquemada tells me so 			  	*	Kevin Moore
And if I should disagree		        *     kjm@buc.edu.au
He gets his rack and he stretches me	Anon.	*
******************************************************************************
-- 
Carl Kadie -- I do not represent EFF; this is just me.
 =kadie@eff.org, kadie@cs.uiuc.edu =
Newsgroups: alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk