Re: Using NNTP

["Rael Dornfest" <rael@oreilly.com>]

Howdy,

Bill Kearney wrote:

> Is there any reason NNTP isn't used in this whole weblog, headlines,
> news scenario?

There was a brief discussion on the topic raised on RSS-DEV by Dan Brickley:

"""
I have in mind a
lightweight, distributed, scaleable, standards-based infrastructure to
support XML service and datasource discovery for B2B and P2P apps,
middleware and n-tiered acronym generation.

Let's start a Usenet newsgroup.
"""
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/message/663

While his focus was initially on RDF and using the traditional news
hierarchy, alt.*, the ensuing discussion might be of some use in this
thread.

Would one post:

  * A full RSS snapshot
  * Individual RSS items
  * Simply notification

> Granted, a traditional NNTP server with usenet feeds
> is probably not ideal.  However, one that allowed individual user
> creation/deletion of groups would be interesting.  The idea being joe
> user would get a nttp://server/users/joe tree of newsgroups.

This would be a nice way to go so long assuming critical mass of
participating news servers.

An obvious concern raised is the possibility (read: probability) of
spoofing.  Would digital signatures be the order of the day?  Perhaps
providing only notification of new RSS items would do it.  Of course one
could spoof this too, resulting in everyone suddenly visiting your server
despite the fact that you haven't made a change in 3 months.

Rael

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  Rael Dornfest                                 rael@oreilly.com
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