Re:The Internet origin story you know is wrong
by Animats on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @01:33AM
(#31832396)
For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship.
Yes. That comment was actually made about USENET, not the ARPAnet. Because USENET really did that. When two USENET nodes connected, they compared lists of message IDs, and each one requested any messages the other had, but they didn't. The result was distributed flooding - everybody eventually got everything in any group to which they subscribed.
If someone censored the messages going across a link, that would prevent the message traveling over that link. But if any other possible path existed, two nodes would eventually compare messages lists, note the missing ID, and transmit the missing message. So censorship was only possible if you controlled all possible connections between two networks.
This came up at Stanford in the 1980s, when some IT administrator (Ralph Gorin?) tried censoring rec.humor.funny. But there was one professor (McCarthy?) who had his own USENET node both on the Stanford network and connecting to the outside. It didn't have much capacity, but as long as there was even one low-bandwidth path, any censored messages would eventually take the slow path and arrive. So censorship was futile.
Yes. That comment was actually made about USENET, not the ARPAnet. Because USENET really did that. When two USENET nodes connected, they compared lists of message IDs, and each one requested any messages the other had, but they didn't. The result was distributed flooding - everybody eventually got everything in any group to which they subscribed.
If someone censored the messages going across a link, that would prevent the message traveling over that link. But if any other possible path existed, two nodes would eventually compare messages lists, note the missing ID, and transmit the missing message. So censorship was only possible if you controlled all possible connections between two networks.
This came up at Stanford in the 1980s, when some IT administrator (Ralph Gorin?) tried censoring rec.humor.funny. But there was one professor (McCarthy?) who had his own USENET node both on the Stanford network and connecting to the outside. It didn't have much capacity, but as long as there was even one low-bandwidth path, any censored messages would eventually take the slow path and arrive. So censorship was futile.
But so was spam filtering.