Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1993 10:17:51 -0600 From: mkapor@KEI.COM(Mitchell Kapor) Subject: File 2--Another Stupid Rumor Bites the Dust We have never contemplated removing CuD from the EFF ftp archive. We have believed and continue to believe it is important to let all voices be heard and we are happy to do what we can. It astounds me and saddens me the extent to which unfounded rumor propagates on the net. People need to have a little more faith, and, oh, maybe, ask us what we're doing before jumping off in paranoid fantasies of EFF selling-out. Here are the facts. EFF's carriage of Phrack, not CuD, was costing us $1,000 per month in additional transmission charges. After an internal review, we decided we could not justify absorbing this rather substantial expense for a single publication. Monthly downloads of Phrack constituted 2 gigabytes or more. We have communicated with the editor of Phrack who has accepted our decision and has arranged for an alternate site. An analysis of the past year of traffic on eff.org revealed an interesting pattern. Roughly 40% of the total byte flow was due to a single publication -- Phrack. Another 40% was due to all other FTP traffic from CuD and other publications. The remaining 20% included all of our email, FTP from the EFF archive, USEET, etc. EFF contracted with UUNET to provide what is called low-volume T-1 service. That is, our instantaneous bandwidth to the net is a T-1, which enables fast through-put, but the $1,000 per month we pay is only intended to give us an average bandwidth of 128 kilobits. UUNET measures the 5 minute average load in every segment and sends statistics to its customers. Because of the growth of traffic over the past year, EFF has been running at as much as twice our contractual limit. UUNET has been billing us a surcharge of another $1,000 per month and was about to permanently convert us to a full T-1 customer at $2,000 per month. We felt we couldn't justify this expense, as the $12,000 per year could pay for nearly half of a full-time staff member, for instance. The solution we chose was to make a decision that we will stop carrying Phrack in the near future. This will enable us to continue to provide all the rest of the services on our server for a good long time without causing us more in the way of expenses. People tend to think of FTP as a "free good". It isn't. Both storage and transmission cost money. Maybe it's time Phrack started charging? Mitch Kapor Chairman, EFF Mitchell Kapor, Electronic Frontier Foundation Note permanent new email address for all correspondence as of 6/1/93 mkapor@kei.com Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253