I'm thinking about putting together a new spec for a Usenet/Gnutella type service. I hoped you guys might give me some feedback here before I proceed any further with the idea. I was less than sober when I first thought of this, so I wanted a sane mind to look at the idea and see if it sounds worthwhile.

Problem: my ISP sucks and wont let me download hundreds of MB of naked women from my favorite newsgroup. In fact, they don't carry ANY binaries groups at all. Whats it mean? Usenet access has become too restricted and it needs to be less centralized.

Solution: Use Gnucleus as a framework, and add a new extension to the Gnutella protocol to handle usenet-style features.

I think I have a workable plan to implement a newsgroup-like system that runs over existing Gnutella networks. I think a system like this would be much more difficult to restrict because it doesn’t rely on centralized servers sitting at your ISP.

Anyone have any comments? Criticisms? Other ideas? Links to someone else considering the same thing?

Sounds good, especially since this is one of the nice things you can do with Gnutella. Not only binaries, but usenet posts or generally uncensored news (for, say, countries where the government would restrict factual content). And it should actually not be too hard to implement without compromising Gnutella's current functions for the sake of compatibility...

Yeah, one could develop services, that use gnutella as an underlying protocol/network.

I've also thought of something like this but slightly different.
i thougt that the users could write add a description to a file and the gnutella client exchange discriptions related to that file so that after some time every body get's every bodies description or somehow discuss about that file. who does this sound?

your idea is great but where do the news will be saved? i mean when i have some news on my pc and go offline. or are you thinking of multiple copies of the same posted news on more than one computer? i like to know more about it.

some suggestion : if you are a good programmer write a patch for the opensource gnucleus and the swabby (author) will add it . i know him he's fun i'm making icons for that programm

101 ways to rain on your parade

1. Usenet works because each server takes lots of groups and stores ALL the messages, without censoring them. It's hard to restrict content without someone screaming censorship because of the total content of all the groups.
2. Files are broken up and you complete them on your end, another argument to censorship.
3. You can do this on gnutella now, just nuber your files part 1,2,3 and put them in "rar" format or something like that.
4. Usenet needs T3 connections and a central server because of the massive content that moves around.
5. Files on usenet don't stay for more than 24 hours, they get pushed off the storage drive for newer messages, thus it's hard to sue anyone to remove them, because they are already gone.
6. You can do that on gnutella now, just remove the files every other day or rotate them every few days. If idiots would just run Linux instead of some lame worthless OS, they could easily write a perl script and make it a cron job every day and do this automatically. Would take like 20 minutes to write the program. But instead you have to sit and wait so you can pay some geek out there to make a program for you to do this and pay him $20 for it, really stupid. No, it's really, really way too stupid.
7. There are uncensored usenet feeds available for a small fee, from sources outside your ISP and your ISP can't do anything about it.
8. If more people took files off of usenet and put them on gnutella, plus leave their crashalot OS up for more than 2 hours, you might have a nice collection of files on gnutella.
9. Sorry, but I am tired of you people holding back gnutella and other real good computing things we all could be doing because you are running a crappy OS. Even Apple went with a unix style OS, they know a good thing when they see it. When will you people figure it out? What is it going to take?

I've put together a bunch of docs offline and will post them here soon for you guys who want more detail. I've already implemented the handshake protocol in gnucleus. I appreciate all the feedback.

As for the 101 ways to rain on my parade, I also appreciate these concerns because it keeps me on the lookout for potential pitfalls.

Anyways, here's my response to those comments.

1- Agreed, but unless I feel like paying for yet another internet service, I can't get all the groups I want. So, my newsgroups are very effectively censored already.

2- I'm not sure how this rains on my parade. My system will preserve the functionality of multipart files while adding additional protection against censorship.

3- Same as 2

4- My system wont need T3 connections because each user will only have to support the traffic of the newsgroups he subscribes to.

5- This functionality can be implemented in my system as well, I haven't considered this yet, but I'll design it in tonight.

6- Similar to 5, but the message expiration CAN be automatic in my system as well if the users desire. No 3rd party software required.

7- I'm a starving artist and don't want to blow more cash on a service I'm already paying for.

8- there IS a nice collection of files on gnutella! =)

9- I'm not a big fan of *nix zealotry. My win2k machine gives me MUCH less technical problems than my linux machine, so thats what I'll be using for now.


I'll try to post a preliminary protocol doc here within the next week... stay tuned.