Slashdot Mirror

There actually is such a thing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off.

No story about Usenet Is Dying would be complete without Russ Allbery's excellent rant. An excerpt:

Sure, I've been involved in Usenet politics for years now, involved in
newsgroup creation, and I enjoy that sort of thing. If I didn't, I
wouldn't be doing it. But I've walked through the countryside of Maine in
the snow and seen branches bent to the ground under the weight of it
because of Usenet, I've been in a room with fifty people screaming the
chorus of "March of Cambreadth" at a Heather Alexander concert in Seattle
because of Usenet, I've written some of the best damn stuff I've ever
written in my life because of Usenet, I *started* writing because of
Usenet, I understand my life and my purpose and my center because of
Usenet, and you know 80% of what Usenet has given me has fuck all to do
with computers and everything to do with people. Because none of that was
in a post. I didn't read any of that in a newsgroup. And yet it all came
out of posts, and the people behind them, and the interaction with them,
and the conversations that came later, and the plane trips across the
country to meet people I otherwise never would have known existed.

That's what this is all about. That's why I do what I do.

People.

Do you know what it's like to see something that you've put your heart and
soul into creating grow and flourish and *become* one of those
communities? What it feels like to give back to someone, someone just
discovering the Internet, those same feelings of wonder and awe and warmth
and community and friendship that you found? To receive, not the welcome
random bit of thanks here and there, but the far deeper and more wonderful
knowledge that you've built and maintained something that people are
*using* and using to do things and see things and think things that they
otherwise would never be able to do or would have no outlet for?

Do you know what it's like to have a friend of yours randomly on a whim
decide something in a newsgroup you created is interesting and engaging
enough to post to Usenet for the first time? And then to experience the
horrible, sinking knowledge that with that post he's likely to get his
mailbox flooded with spam? Or the raw fear that he'll then never post
again, scared away, when this place that has given you so much could give
that to him as well, and that he could give the same to other people? And
that, damn it all, he's one of the cool people in this world, and you
don't know what these groups are all for, in the end, but if they're for
anything at all, they should be for people like him?

Do you know what it feels like to know that your news server, despite the
fact that it's some of the best hardware you can get with your available
resources for an application that most people just don't care about, is
running a backlog? That you're dropping incoming articles? That
somewhere, *somewhere* there are things being posted which you are not
receiving? They could be junk, they could be beautiful, well-expressed
pieces of someone's soul, and you DON'T KNOW, you CAN'T KNOW, because
legions of fucking vandals are throwing so much *CRAP* at your news server
that it's running flat out trying to process it and delete it and just
can't go any faster?

Let me tell you this: there's a rage in that. There is a cold rage that
you feel at that because, God damn it, it is not acceptable, it is NOT
FUCKING ACCEPTABLE for a *single* post that is from a *person* talking to
other *people* to be deleted, to be dropped on the uncaring floor to make
room for machine generated spew.

Period.

Fortunately most of Usenet is such a cespool that really they can only make it better.

OK, well I'm one of those old fogeys who actually care about Usenet. I've been using it for twenty years and I still think it's a great thing. Admittedly a lot of groups are losing their vibrancy and vitality, and spam is an increasing problem. But Usenet is still a great way for communities of people with common interests to foregather and hang out with one another, bounce ideas around, solve technical problems and exchange ideas, irrespective of geographical distance.

Usenet, also, because of its primitiveness, is one of the parts of the network revolution which is most resistant to interference. It doesn't need the Internet; it can propagate happily over ad-hoc UUCP links on dialup lines. So even if the corporates come to control the Internet and dictate what we can do with it, even if governments put carnivore boxes on every router, Usenet is still ours and can still route around it.

It has it's problems. It was conceived in a more innocent age. We do need a successor.

But please, not Microsoft, the inventors of default top posting. This is one of the things which is making Usenet increasingly difficult to use. Microsoft do not have our interests at heart - only their own. If you want to see a new and better Usenet, look at projects like Usenet2.

I dunno, I think Russ Allbery's rant about malicious and unremitting crapflooding is a lot more salient, not to mention inspirational. True, I have no idea what's up with Usenet2, but it gives me a warm fuzzy to see someone who still takes (or took) that kind of pride in their work.

--grendel drago

Usenet, unfortunately, has no ejection mechanism.

No, but Usenet II does. Of course, I'm not sure if Usenet II is active or not. The web pages are old, but the idea seems sound. Does anyone know the status of Usenet II?

From: schneier@counterpane.com (Bruce Schneir)
To: reader@slashdot.org (Nutcase)
Subject: Monthly Cryptogram newsletter

The February 2003 newsletter is out!

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0302.html

1. Instead of blasting out 20K messages to all of the recipients at once, he blasts out a bunch of 1K messages, cutting down on his 95th percentile bandwidth. People will come back to read the articles, and when they do, web caching servers/software between users and his server will cache anything static. Eg: 5000 AOL users will get the article from the AOL caches instead of his site, but a bug in the HTML will get a 1x1 gif from his site directly.
   
2. Everyone sees exactly the same newsletter as Bruce intended to publish it (he probably doesn't make exceptions of Opera 7 ;^) instead of worrying about hoiw to accommodate HTML into everyone's broken mail reader.
   
3. It keeps from filling up countless mailboxes for something we'd probably go to his website for anyway.
   
4. If he has advertisers that want to post on his website, they get more eyeballs, and it's less annoying than being sent an ad as part of your mailbox. Conversely, like Slashdot, subscribers can pay Bruce not to put ads into the newsletter by giving him the annual subscription fee.
   
5. Bruce can tell exactly how many people read his article (web logs).
   

Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.

Screw that. I refuse to hide or obfuscate my email address. I've been using the Internet for 15 years. I remember the time when the Internet was mostly spam-free, and people rarely forged email addresses even though everyone knew how to.

My real email address is deven@ties.org -- this is my primary personal email address, not a spam-trap address. I know that the spammers are harvesting address from Slashdot and everywhere else. I don't care. Let them have the address. I've never hidden it, and I never will. I'm stubborn that way. (It's akin to refusing to change your lifestyle in response to terrorism, even when you know you're at risk...)

Of course, since I don't hide my email address, I get tons of spam, along with "Joe job" bounces/replies for spams forged in my name, plus more bounces copied to postmaster, since I receive postmaster mail for several domains. Bring it on! It just provides me with a larger corpus of bogus email to use for Bayesian filtering, or whatever other technique I may experiment with...

I firmly believe that a technical solution will be required to solve the spam problem. Legislation won't prevent the virtually-untraceable international spams, and may not even prevent local ones if it's not zealously enforced. Social controls haven't been effective. We need to prevent the spam from being delivered in the first place, or at least mark it as suspicious so legitimate mail doesn't drown in the noise so easily.

Beyond basic filtering like SpamAssassin and Bayesian filtering, there are other technical solutions worth exploring. Human validation techniques like TMDA might help. Finding a way to punish spammers and drive up their costs, such as E-Stamps or selling interrupt rights (original paper: HTML or PDF), might be effective. (But likely a higher barrier to legitimate mail.) Some sort of PGP-style Web of Trust might be very effective if done well, but it would be difficult to build. Perhaps some "soundness" principles could be borrowed from Usenet II to create a similar system for email...

Let's cross our fingers and hope to find a truly effective solution (or combination of solutions) in the near future!

It bothers me more than I can say - that the whole spam debate has now been hijacked by spammers. I've even seen the DMA described as 'legitimate marketers'. God help us.

But even that isn't as disturbing as the fact that erstwhile
real spam-haters are accepting this redefinition of what spam is, and what is objectionable about it.

For me the issue is really very simple. There is speech by humans, meant for humans, and there is speech by machines, just trying to shout loud enough to make a human hear them, and one type really is worth more than the other. The Internet has become the scene of that great battle described in The Terminator, between robots and humans.

And currently the robots are winning.

Try this link for Usenet 2.0. Don't use ricochets unless your desired link is truly obscure; especially on /., which can generate lots of newbie-ish traffic for third party's whose web page is suddenly the lazies' bookmark file.

Perhaps if it was a text only forum, cull MIME, UUencode and anything else that looks like it might be a binary attachment. Cull RTF and HTML formatted posts as well. Hell, at least it'd be easier to spool and read

You're thinking of Usenet II. Finding a feed can be difficult, though.

This could be an opportunity to fix some of the things that are broken about the current DNS. If we don't want .US abused as badly as .COM has been, it's critical to do something more sane this time. If done right, a revamped .US could serve as a model for revamping top-level domains...

Let's not have .com.us, okay? (For the myopic people suggesting .co.us, remember Colorado already has that.) If we had a free-for-all in .com.us, it would be abused as badly as .com is. The concept of having a single "commercial" category is absurd. It would be better to have a ".misc.us" as a last-resort option for anything that can't be categorized.

Because .com, .net and .org are often treated as synonymous (how many companies automatically register all of them?), replicating that mess under .us wouldn't help anything. Instead, it makes more sense to consider what purposes people use domains for. Create a domain structure with more purpose, and enforce reasonable usage. Have non-profit organizations manage the registry. Create "domain czars" a la Usenet 2's hierarchy czars with responsibility for DNS subtrees.

First, recognize that sex sells, and that sex sites aren't going away. Accordingly, create a .xxx.us domain dedicated to the purpose. (Just think how easy those domain names would be to filter out!) Don't allow the sex sites to register under inappropriate domains.

Second, deal with trademarks explicitly -- create a .tm.us for trademarked names. (Maybe .sm.us for service marks also?) Create sub-domains under .tm.us for the trademark categories. Require proof of trademark ownership to register under .tm.us, and don't try to police trademarks in the rest of the DNS hierarchy. Allow top-level registrations under .tm.us only for those "well-known" trademarks that cross boundaries. (e.g. coke.tm.us)

Next, come up with categories that would better represent the things people want to do with .com/.net/.org, and create a proper hierarchy. Use .misc.us as a fallback if necessary. Don't allow free-for-all .com.us registrations like .com registrations. For example, The Matrix should be "thematrix.movie.us" instead of "www.whatisthematrix.com".

Allow obvious non-commercial domains like ".non-profit.us" (maybe ".org.us", but ".org" has been abused) and ".personal.us" for personal sites. (Could these be categorized?)

Basically, any organizational structure that might be proposed at the top level should be viable under .us as well, and .us would be a good proving ground for any proposal for gTLD's...

Another thought I had was to charge VERY nominal fees for the first domain or three, but rapidly increasing fees (e.g. doubling each time) to hold many domains at once -- that would keep some of the .com abuse in check. Massive cyber-squatting would be too expensive, and dumping all products into the DNS space (think Kraft) would be prohibitively expensive for even an enormous company, so they'd have to do something more reasonable.

The base fee should probably be determined by the depth of the registration -- free for 5 levels deep, cheap for 4, medium for 3, expensive for 2, exorbitant for 1. If something like ".ibm.us" were allowed, it should cost them millions of dollars annually to hold it...

There already is a Usenet II. It's basically a bunch of servers who agree to be "sound" (not rogue, and not propogating articles from rogue neighbors).

IMO, because the reach is just a bit too limited. I'm not saying they need to relax the rules, necessarily; I'm just saying that the fact that many otherwise clueful people don't even know Usenet II exists suggests that the strictness does have a negative side effect.

I'm a fairly long-time Usenet user (since 1990), but I don't use Usenet II, because it's just too restricted.

New XFMail home page

The only thing that worries me is, it looks like it might be a breech birth, full of extra pain and difficulty. At least one major ISP has announced it has no plans to participate. Also complicating the transition will be the fact that Usenet II requires a valid e-mail address to post, meaning that spammers with read access can still do what they do.

Then again, in its early days, Usenet was often an unauthorized service provided by site admins while management turned a blind eye.

The only thing that worries me is, it looks like it might be a breech birth, full of extra pain and difficulty. At least one major ISP has announced it has no plans to participate. Also complicating the transition will be the fact that Usenet II requires a valid e-mail address to post, meaning that spammers with read access can still do what they do.

Then again, in its early days, Usenet was often an unauthorized service provided by site admins while management turned a blind eye.

You want a Usenet 2?

Oh ... all right. I spent a few minutes on it just now and whipped one up for you.

There is a UseNet2: UseNet2.

I first started posting on Usenet back in '93-'94 or thereabouts; in the rec.arts.anime groups and some of the soc.history forums. Even then there was the occasional jerk but you could just ignore them, and there was *nothing* like the level of spam that exists now. After getting flamed one too many times last year and having to shut down my yahoo account because of all the spam (despite the filtering I tried)--no more. It's worthless now. Sad, because it used to be so very cool. I only use moderated mailing lists and forums like this nowadays. Hopefully, though, the people at Usenet II can make a better version which will reach it's full potential.

> I left the Usenet for this reason, a while later I found slashdot. Now I'm happy.

Have you looked at all into Usenet II? It's an attempt to Do It Right this time.

[...] Internet2 [...]

Um, I don't think Internet2 is quite what you think it is. See the FAQs for more information -- it seems to be centred more around `gigaPOPs' and faster backbones rather than a better distributed naming service/directory infrastructure.

Now Usenet II, on the other hand... time for October indeed.