Drinking from the Firehose:
Multicast USENET News
Paper Author: Kurt Lidl
Code Author: Josh Osborne
Code Author: Joseph Malcolm
Abstract
News transport and spooling systems of the last several years have
concentrated on decreasing the resource load on news servers. One
beneficial side effect has been the average decrease in time that a
news system spends on a given article. This paper describes a novel
USENET news transport protocol, which we call Muse. The two major
motivations behind Muse are to reduce the average propagation delays
of articles on USENET and to further reduce the resource load on a
centralized news server. Muse runs on top of the experimental Internet
multicast backbone, commonly referred to as the Mbone. Major design
and implementation issues are discussed. Security concerns of
multicast news are discussed and our solution is examined. The
problems of scaling news distribution to thousands of hosts are also
addressed.
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