Observer's defense of "Internet Pornography" article

If you haven't overdosed on the Observer articles yet, you can read
their defense on http://www.observer.co.uk -- it is rather self-serving,
but it could have been worse.

The only revelation is that Demon (the major Internet provider) plans
to block access to some newsgroups/sites.

Also, assuming I read between the lines correctly, Demon receives three
billion (with a "b") e-mail messages per day. I can never remember whether
British usage is "thousand million," or "million million", but the numbers
seem a bit large in any case. Perhaps they mean "3 billion bytes of e-mail."
(Assume ten million Demon subscribers and three thousand million e-mail
messages. This implies that the average subscriber receives 300 e-mail
messages per day. Are they all subscribing to Cypherpunks?)

Some other numbers:

-- 180,000 newsgroup articles received per-day (per server).
-- "tens of terabytes of data, (each equivalent to 750,000 floppy
   disks) move across a network of about 10 million machines." This
   seesm to refer to all of the Internet.

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com

Martin Minow wrote:
> 
> The only revelation is that Demon (the major Internet provider) plans
> to block access to some newsgroups/sites.

The only reason I ever used to use them was their lack of censorship. 
If they go ahead with this blocking, I doubt I'll ever use them again.
Of course it's the principle, not the fact that I have nothing better to
do all day long that download porn :-)

> Also, assuming I read between the lines correctly, Demon receives three
> billion (with a "b") e-mail messages per day. I can never remember whether
> British usage is "thousand million," or "million million", but the numbers
> seem a bit large in any case.

They'll mean 3,000,000,000 (Brits hardly ever use billion to mean
million million).

> Perhaps they mean "3 billion bytes of e-mail."

I doubt it.  A friend of mine, a demon subscriber, sends over a Gig of
email every day.

> (Assume ten million Demon subscribers and three thousand million e-mail
> messages. This implies that the average subscriber receives 300 e-mail
> messages per day. Are they all subscribing to Cypherpunks?)

I think there are in the order of 100,000 subscribers, so this would
make the average 30,000 email message - definately not realistic.
 
Gary
--
"Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better
than what we have now."  -- Unknown.

pub  1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22  Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com>
Key fingerprint =  0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D  1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06