Drinking from the Firehose: Multicast USENET News

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.