Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993 00:26:59 EST From: mkovacs%mcs.kent.edu@KENTVM.KENT.EDU Subject: File 3--Internet Talk Radio (fwd) Originally from nis@cerf.net via Bernard.A.Galler@um.cc.umich.edu Reprinted with permission from ConneXions, ConneXions--The Interoperability Report is published monthly by: Interop Company 480 San Antonio Road, Suite 100 Mountain View, CA 94040 USA Phone: (415) 941-3399 FAX: (415) 949-1779 Toll-free (in USA): 1-800-INTEROP E-mail: connexions@interop.com Free sample issue and list of back issues available upon request." Internet Talk Radio Carl Malamud (carl@radio.com) Over the past few years, two trends have come together to present an opportunity for a new type of journalism. On the one hand, the trade press has focused on marketing and product reviews, leaving an ever-larger gap for a general-interest, technically-oriented publication focused on the Internet. At the same time, the Internet has made great progress in supporting multimedia communication, through standards such as IP multicasting and MIME messaging. Internet Talk Radio attempts to fuse these two trends and form a new type of publication: a news and information service about the Internet, distributed on the Internet. Internet Talk Radio is modeled on National Public Radio and has a goal of providing in-depth technical information to the Internet community. The service is made initially possible with support from Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates. Our goal is to provide a self-sufficient, financially viable public news service for the Internet community. Head: Flame of the Internet The product of Internet Talk Radio is an audio file, professionally produced and freely available on computer networks. To produce these files, we start with the raw data of any journalistic endeavor: speeches, conference presentations, interviews, and essays. This raw information is taped using professional-quality microphones, mixers, and DAT recorders. The information is then brought back to our studios, and edited and mixed with music, voice overs, and the other elements of a radio program. The "look and feel" we strive for is akin to "All Things Considered" or other programs that appeal to the general interest of the intelligent listener. Our goal is hit the topics that don't make it into the trade press. Instead of SNMP-compliant product announcements, we want to present descriptions of SNMP. Instead of articles on GOSSIP, we want to describe the latest Internet Drafts and place them in perspective. Instead of executive promotions, we want to give summaries of mailing list activity and network stability. Instead of COMDEX, we want to cover the IETF. Head: Town Crier to the Global Village The result of Internet Talk Radio's journalistic activities is a series of audio files. The native format we start with is the Sun Microsystems .au format, closely related to the NeXT .snd format. This format consists of the CCITT Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) standard of 8 bits per sample and a sampling rate of 8000 samples per second, using the u-law [ed. use greek letter mu] encoding (a logarithmic encoding of 8 bit data equivalent to a 14 bit linear encoding). A half-hour program would thus consist of 64,000 bits per second or 15 Mbytes total. Programs are initially spool on UUNET, the central machines of the Alternet network. Files are then moved over to various regional networks for further distribution. For example, EUnet, a commercial network provider for Europe with service in 24 countries, will act as the central spooling area for the European region. The Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) company will provide the same service for Japanese networks. The goal of coordinated distribution is to reduce the load on key links of the network. Transferring a 15 Mbyte file over a 64 kbps link does not make sense during peak times. On the other hand, a leased line has the attribute that a bit unused is a bit forever gone. Transferring large files at low priority in non-peak times has little or no incremental cost. Files thus move from the UUNET central spool area, to regional spools, to national and local networks. We anticipate most of this transfer to be done using the FTP protocols, but some networks are discussing the use of NNTP news groups and MIME-based distribution lists. It is important to note that Internet Talk Radio is the source of programming and does not control the distribution. These files are publicly available, subject only to the simple license restrictions of no derivative work and no commercial resale. Distribution is controlled, as with all other data, by the individual networks that make up the Internet. We intend to work closely with networks all over the world to ensure that there is some coordination of distribution activity, but ultimate control over this data is in the hands of those people who finance, manage, and use networks. We don't believe indiscriminate use of anonymous FTP is the proper method for distributing large archives. Previous experience with ITU standards, with RFC repositories, and with large software archives such as the X Windows System indicates that setting up a top-level distribution hierarchy goes a long way towards alleviating network load. Even with a top-level hierarchy, however, there will always be anonymous FTP sites and there will always be people that go to the wrong FTP server. This behavior is largely mitigated by setting up enough "local" servers and publicizing their existence. Like any large distributor of data, we are mindful of the load on the transcontinental and regional infrastructures and will take aggressive steps to help minimize that load. Head: Asynchronous Times, Asynchronous Radio Once files have made their way to a local or regional network, they are moved to the desktop and played. Once again the individual users of the network decide how to present data. We hope to see a wide variety of different ways of having our files played and only list a few of the more obvious methods. The simplest method to play a .au file on a Sparcstation is to type "play filename." If the file is placed on a Network File System (NFS) file system on a central server, the user simply mounts the file system and plays the file. Alternatively, the user copies the file to a local disk and plays it. More adventuresome playing of files uses multicasting. A simple multicast program called "radio" for a local Ethernet is available from CWI, the mathematics institute of the Netherlands. A more sophisticated approach, IP multicasting, allows a program to reach far beyond the confines of the Ethernet. IP multicasting might be used on a local basis, or can have a global reach. There is a consortium of regional networks that have formed the Multicast Backbone (MBONE), used for audio and video programming of key conferences such as the Internet Engineering Task Force. Internet Talk Radio does not assume use of the MBONE for playing files. Needless to say, the operators of the MBONE are free to play Internet Talk Radio files (and we would be delighted if this happens), but it is up to the local network affiliates to determine how and when they distribute this audio data. In many cases, people will want to play files on a wide variety of different platforms. The Sound Exchange (SOX) program is a publicly-available utility that easily transforms a file from one format to another. Using this utility, the Macintosh, Silicon Graphics, DECstation, PC, and many other platforms can play Internet Talk Radio files. Head: Geek of the Week In the spirit of dignified, conservative programming, the first production from Internet Talk Radio is dubbed Geek of the Week. Geek of the Week features technical interviews with key personalities on the Internet. Some of the people who have agreed to appear on Geek of the Week include Daniel Karrenberg of the RIPE NCC, Dr. Marshall T. Rose of Dover Beach Consulting, Milo Medin of the NASA Science Internet, and Daniel Lynch of Interop Company. Geek of the Week focuses on technical issues facing the Internet. This initial program is sponsored by Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates. Their support makes it possible for Geek of the Week to be produced professionally and then to be distributed at no charge. One of the issues that Internet Talk Radio faces are the vestiges of Appropriate Use Policies (AUPs) that linger from the original ARPANET days. While Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates view Internet Talk Radio in terms of an investigation of on-line publishing, of multicasting, and other engineering issues, we feel it important that our sponsors are given due credit in the programs. At first glance, this smacks of the crass and commercial. Indeed, it smacks of advertising. Jumping to that conclusion, however would be a simplistic mistake. The Appropriate Use Policies were formulated to guarantee that networks are used for the purposes envisioned by the funding agents. In the case of an AUP-constrained networks such as the NSFNET, this means that use of the network must benefit U.S. science and engineering. We feel that an in-depth interview with Internet architects clearly falls within the purview of all AUP policies. However, we understand that certain networks may not accept certain types of programming. For this reason, our central spool areas are carefully picked so they are AUP-free. This way, if a network feels the programming is inappropriate, they can simply inform their users not to obtain or play the files. It should be noted that one advantage of supporting the professional dissemination of news and information up-front is that the user is not directly charged. Somebody has to pay for information to be produced, and the sponsorship model means that copy protection, accounting, security, and all the other complications of a charging model are avoided and that high-quality news and information becomes increasingly available on the Internet. Head: The Medium is the Message While Geek of the Week is our flagship program, we intend to intersperse mini-features throughout. The Incidental Tourist, for example, will feature restaurant reviews and other travel information for sites throughout the world. The Internet Hall of Flame will highlight non-linear behavior on mailing lists, and we will have periodic book reviews by Dan Dorenberg, one of the founders of Computer Literacy Books. The logical extension to Geek of the Week is to begin coverage of industry functions. To date, we have received permission to tape for later rebroadcast sessions and presentations at the European RIPE meetings, the IETF, and at the INTEROP Conferences. We are negotiating with other industry forums to try and establish permission to cover additional conferences. Our hope is to begin providing news summaries of these key conferences. If you can't make it to the IETF, for example, Internet Talk Radio would like to provide a half-hour news summary describing what happened on each day. The next logical step is to begin producing analysis of key technical topics. Here, we look at in-depth (e.g., 15 minute) summaries of technical topics such as MIME, proposals for the next IP, SNMP v. 2, or the architecture of the Global Internet Exchange (GIX). We would also furnish analysis of political topics, such as the POISED effort to reorganize the Internet standards process, or the background of the IPv7 debate. Eventually, our hope is to combine all these reports together and form a daily news broadcast to the Internet. When you walk in and start reading your mail, you simply click on the "radio" icon and listen to Geek of the Week while deleting messages from the more hyperactive mailing lists. Head: Tomorrow is the Future The "radio" metaphor was carefully chosen. We wanted an alternative to plain ASCII files, yet did not feel that the Internet infrastructure was ready for regular video feeds. Production of video or true multimedia required an order-of-magnitude higher investment in production facilities. After all, we know bad TV since we see so much of it. Eventually, Internet Talk Radio wants to go beyond the confines of the simple radio metaphor. Already, we describe the service as asynchronous radio, recognizing that our listeners can start, stop, rewind, or otherwise control the operation of the radio station. As a multicasting infrastructure gets deployed throughout the Internet, we see the opportunity to expand the radio metaphor and begin the creation of a truly new news medium. Multicast groups and videoconferencing tools allow the creation of an Internet Town Hall, a moderated forum with a very wide reach or games shows like Name That Acronym where everybody gets to play. Because we are on the Internet, we can add a wide variety of different programming techniques. While listening to a series of interviews about MIME messaging, for example, you might also scroll through a series of Gopher menus that hold more information about the MIME standards, or search a WAIS database for a biography of the speakers. We hope that Internet Talk Radio will be the first of many such information services on the Internet, supplementing the random anarchy of news and mailing lists with professionally produced news and information. Indeed, we hope that Internet Talk Radio forms the first of many "desktop broadcasting" efforts. Internet Talk Radio debuts at the Columbus IETF at the end of March. Stay tuned for more information. Head: For More Information Guido van Rossum, FAQ: Audio File Formats, ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/AudioFormats2.10. An excellent introduction to audio formats, encoding, and other information about sound files on different platforms. This same site also has copies of the SoundExchange (SOX) program for translating files into different audio formats, and the Radio program for playing a sound file on an Ethernet. Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253