...disk.

NCF email is delivered to /mailbox rather than a spool directory. The primary reason is to avoid a monstrous spool directory, and at the same time keeps all the users' disk space usage in one place. This is done with a program called m2mbox which is run via the user's .forward file

...ratio

The number of active users is much smaller than 30k, sothe ratio is much better, but lets imag ine that every user is active, certainly an ultimate goal for NCF

...future.

Without WWW access, freenets count in that list

...signatures

The biggest difficulty with crytographic signature technology in the NCF context is that the secret key should not be uploaded to a public system. The user would then be left with signing all their messages on their system and uploading them. Upload being a current problem, this makes it near impossible. However, many client email/news software, and several text editors have the ability to interface to PGP and other software. Microsoft apparently has licensed NT's entrust system, so cryptographic software may be standard equipment in a year or two

...filtering

simply denying packets with SYN flags set to travel to the user would be sufficient, but that might disable FTP clients unable to use PASV. In CISCO-speak, this is equivalent to using the ``established'' keyword

Michael Richardson
Sun Apr 21 00:24:31 EDT 1996