Deja For Sale

yet another coward writes: "According to a story in Internet Week, Deja.com is for sale. The company plans to sell the Usenet archive and the buying guide separately. This move might mean a comeback for the archive." So what's the going rate for 1,000,000 MMF posts?

Comments

VA Linux Needs to Buy Deja

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Deja's sale has been inevitable since they changed the name from DejaNews. I've been thinking, if anyone were to buy Deja, VA Linux would probably be one of the best choices.

So far VA hasn't screwed up Slashdot any worse, right? I think Deja's database would fit right in with VA's move to be a content provider.

Re:VA Linux Needs to Buy Deja

[Zico]

Yeah, and buying 1,000,000 MMF posts would fit in well with VA Linux's earlier purchase of 1,000,000 "Mae Ling Mak naked and petrified!" posts. :)

Cheers,

Re:WTF is MMF?

[ahodgson]

make money fast

Re:So you would rather...

[Wildfire Darkstar]

Because they're making money off of something they have no moral right to. I have never bothered appending "x-no-archive" to my Usenet posts: I don't mind what I write being archived so that others may find it useful/interesting/not particularly harmful. However, if some company decides to make money off of my words without my explicit consent, I feel completely justified, and I will, scream bloody murder.

Re:Spam database

[MustardMan]

silly person, i wasnt trolling, i was being silly. There needs to be more sillyness in this world. Sillyness for all, I say!

Re:ebay

[SuperLiquidSex]

bleh, maybe they'll be able to keep your service up....

Re:Selling USENET Archive?

[iktos]

Collecting tapes with the old articles took work which should be worth something. I don't know, but they possibly even had to pay for them.

And it's not like it costs nothing for a news server to receive articles.

As I see it, Dejanews is like any usenet news provider, only with a much longer expire period. (Unless they'd do things like edit articles to make words in them become hyperlinks and the like.) So yes, of course they can sell the database just like any other provider could.

Re:I see good and bad

[SeattleDave]

Why would a spam company need to buy it? They can already grab everyone's email addresses.

Re:Hopefully . . .

[zencode]

"Hopefully, whoever buys the Usenet archive will 1)Keep the service free, and 2)Hire some programmers."

Yeah, like anyone would pay for something if a free, better thing wasn't available.

Uh, wait...

My .02,

I see good and bad

[Alan]

1 - spam company buys it, suddenly has access to the emails of, well, everyone who has ever posted to the usenet.

2 - a comback for dejanews.com which was a decent site without the portal junk.

Personally I'm voting for #2, because I have enough problem getting off the linux-ipsec list and getting off every spammers list with my muliple email address would surely drive me (more) insane...

Re:Open Content Usenet initiative

[krokodil]

Most serious ISPs have USENET service
access to which is free for their
customers. Netcom, AT&T @HOME, come
to mind as examples.

I have nothing against WWW interface to USENET
as yet another access method. What I do not
like is being fed BS about expensive USENET
software. It is cost of storage and bandwith
which makes USENET expensive for ISPs. So,
you putting all your USENET articles into DB engine,
and serving them over HTTP will save you neither
disk space not bandwidth. (In fact it will take
more bandwith, due to HTML decorations and "sponsor messages").

AOL bids for Deja.Com

[clickety6]

AOL would like to buy Deja.Com

Me too!

And me!

Add me to the list!

Me too!!!!

Me as well!!!

a mental picture...

[hugg]

Hadden, the old rich guy from "Contact", buys deja.com ... "Why buy one floundering web site when you can have two at twice the price?" :)

One last defense of my gender on /.

[Anne Marie]

I've gotten sick of defending myself and my gender time and time again, but I'll do so one last time. Just because most people on slashdot is male doesn't make me male, just as having most people on slashdot be of a certain race or nationality or religion doesn't assure that any single individual shares those characteristics. But I can cope, since in the greater scheme of things, it's no big deal that a few ACs continue to have their doubts.

There is a bigger problem, though. Go ahead and look at my previous comments. Nearly every one of them has one or five AC replies to the effect of "suck my dick" or "I want to fuck you in the ass". Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created. And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot. For all I know, you yourself are one of those same ACs.

Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate. Ask yourself that question when you scurry off for your nightly porn fix. Ask yourself that question when you insult and harass people on slashdot.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Cantor]

Anne-Marie, it's sad but I think you're right. Many readers of Slashdot favour porn, and it really isn't something to improve male-female relationships. Any user of pornography does degrade women and supports their abuse - those who say it's ok should meet women whose marriage has been destroyed due to husbands addiction to pornography. There are many of those. I have the unlucky priviledge to know such close couple personally.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[DaPhreaker]

That was the most over-generalized, "This is what I have seen in my infinitesimal experience of the world, therefore it is true the universe over." statement I have ever seen. I would refer you to the movie "Orgasmo", even though you probably wouldn't watch it and even if you did your brain would go into offended mode and completely shutdown unable to see the social commentary it presents in places. One such thing is an exchange between Ron Jeremy and the supporting female role. Of course she goes on and on about the "Evil Perils of Porn " tirade and Ron Jeremy retorts that men are equally degraded and exploited in porn. Which the female replies that men are always the one in a position of power. Ron Jeremy counters with the fact that it is mostly men who want the product, so it exploits men's desires. See now someone with your narrow viewpoint of the world would never parse that exchange because your brain will not rationalize past your pre-established thought process. And you know what, I wouldn't want to meet any wymyn who let porn break up their marriage, I don't associate with wymynz who would blame me personally for Joan of Arc's demise and every other "atrocity" that has befallen wymynz in the ages. I am not even gonna go into the nauseating victimz stance you are promoting. If you are weak enough to let pictures break up a marriage you got other problems more important that porn sistah. Read my sig, be one with my sig, live my sig.

DaPhreaker- Downloading usenet one piece or porn at a time

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Taurine]

I don't support the abuse you have suffered on /. but ask yourself for a moment if you are in any way helping the situation with your nick.

Look at the nicks used by pretty much every other poster here. The closest anyone else gets to revealing any information about their identity is to run their initials together with their surname, from which you cannot infer their sex. Your nick leaves no doubt what sex you are (or wish to portray yourself as).

I know someone who enjoys bloking, which is to say he assigns himself a female nick then logs on to IRC. He gets all the abuse, and finds it funny. There are a lot of people out there that do it, and it leads me to be skeptical about anyone who advertises their sex, as your nick does.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog" I believe the cartoon frame once said (probably Farside?). Your previous post was great, I really enjoyed it, I didn't look at your nick because it isn't and shouldn't be relevant. But to the trolls, its just an open invitation. If your nick was BlackGeek they would call you a nigger. If it was Gay&Proud they would call you a fag. If it was SchoolNerd they would torment you about your age. If it was AMWhateverYourSurnameIs they would only be able to abuse you for the contents of your posting.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[gunga]

It's very strange what your telling her.

If I'm not mistaking, you're saying that she should hide the fact that she's a woman, or else it's some kind of provocation...

Think about it for a minute, if some people call her name because "she advertises her gender" (as you wrote) and not because of the content of her posting, it's their guilt, not hers.

"On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog?" Not at all, on the Internet, everybody assumes you're white, male and lives in the US. Why should you hide the fact that you're not?

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[arcade]

I've gotten sick of defending myself and my gender time and time again, but I'll do so one last time.

Why do you do it all? I for one didn't take notice of what you *wrote* in your signature, before you defended yourself against that troll. I don't care wheter your male or female. I don't care wheter your short, tall, good-looking, ugly, black, white, male, female or *whatever* as long as you write intelligent things.

The only thing you should do when someone attacks you, is to *ignore the idiots*. Don't answer the obvious far too stupid trolls. They'll go away, eventually, hopefully. :)

Until then, ignore'em. They're not worth your time. Intelligent people don't care about your gender when they discuss with you.


--

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Moofie]

I'm a man here on Slashdot, and I'm pretty sure I've never spat upon, threatened, battered, or gangraped anybody. You get no sympathy from me by accusing me of these things. You're certainly entitiled to your views, but I'm also entitled to believe that they are twisted and misanthropic.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[MrEfficient]

Ignoring them is the best thing to do. No, it won't make them go away. There will always be trolls, here on Slashdot and everywhere else in the world. When the current crop of trolls grows up (most of them anyway), there will be more to take their place. Unfortunately, the stupid people far outnumber the intelligent.

A troll only wants one thing, to be fed. Replying to them or their ignorant remarks only feeds them and makes them grow. Browse at +1 or +2 and don't worry about it.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Taurine]

Her nick is like advertising because its one conspicous feature is that it screams 'I am female' at you, where as most nicks don't present any information about the owner at all.

On the Internet, I make no such assertions about the identity or attributes of people I meet there. I certainly wouldn't ever default to white male USian. The only time I come into contact with people that fit that category are at work and on /. Indeed, almost everyone I have ever met purely on the Internet came from Scandinavia.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Casca]

Don't be a dumbass. Porn doesn't destroy marriages, people that can't control their own behavior do. I suppose you believe guns kill too???

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[laborit]

I think you're making an erroneous assumption about the replies you receive -- unless I should conclude from the numerous "RMS is a goat-f****er" replies I've gotten that someone is persecuting me for my (heretofore unrecognized) inter-species yearnings.

- Michael

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[chrischow]

forget them, they're just tossers who can't get laid

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[Dr. Scott]

And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot. For all I know, you yourself are one of those same ACs.

Typical feminist rant: hysterical, defamatory, and false. I'd be surprised if there are any gang rapists on slashdot. And history is lots, lots longer than the few years slashdot has been running... or the few tens of years that slashdot readers have been alive.

Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate.

Good question. Now, the only contribution I've seen to the climate of fear and hate is Anne Marie's article. I read at +2, so I don't see the ACs, and I wouldn't see this "all slashdot readers are rapists and that's all they are" nonsense if the moderators would be just a little more thoughtful. Folks, there's no shortage of feminist screeds on USENET. Is that really what /. should be for?

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[smack_attack]

Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate. Ask yourself that question when you scurry off for your nightly porn fix. Ask yourself that question when you insult and harass people on slashdot.

Women look at porn too. BTW there's a reason so many men look at pr0n these days instead of going out and trying to meet people... they are afraid they will run into a self-righteous, bra-burning, womens liberation person like yourself. I have enough problems in my day without getting an earful of PMS because I have an extra appendage between my legs... Don't generalize, it's rude.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[_xeno_]

Go ahead - defend it. It still goes against what most people think of as "common sense." Want a comparison?

I play (too much) Counter-Strike over the college LAN. Almost all Counter-Strike players are male. There are apparently as many as four women who actually play on the LAN, although most don't play frequently. (Actually, I think we chat-flamed one away... Same problem you're running into.) However, there have been players known to pretend to be women for whatever reason. (I know one who claims he's still trying to fool people, so everyone who claims to be a women on the local Counter-Strike servers finds that I immediately assume that she is he.) Same basic thing applies to Slashdot - almost everyone posting to Slashdot is male. Therefore, I doubt anyone who claims that they are not part of that majority, simply because probabilty states that a given user is most likely male. (I have no statistics to decide whether someone claiming to be female is female, though. I expect that most people who say they are female on Slashdot actually are (assuming that it can be decided they are not trolls).)

Basically, yeah, people will doubt you. So you really have two choices - live with it, or ignore it. I, personally, will believe you until I have reason not to - as you said, it really doesn't matter at all.

Re:One last defense of my gender on /.

[ghoti]

Do these posts surprise you? I mean, just look at all the crap that is posted here: f1rst p0sts, flames, goatsex, etc. There is a certain percentage of morons even here (and it's much worse one most other boards, not to speak of most usenet groups, to say something on-topic ;-), and they seem to have found another target ...

I know enough computer-savvy women to believe you, but that doesn't seem to be the case for many other readers here. And people with experience in IRC etc know that there are men that claim to be women everywhere, so they kind of have a reason. I also believe that there are a few women here that just hide behind gender-neutral names, so they are treated equal.

But I agree, the way women are treated on many services like /., IRC, ICQ, etc does not give them a good reason to stay. But I hope you do, so the guys here get a chance to come to grips with the fact that there is another gender and maybe learn to behave in a more respectful way.

Re:The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting an important part. You don't just have to archive the posts. You also have to provide efficient search capabilities.

How do you search 10 terabytes of data in a few seconds? I dare you to do it with 50,000$ worth of equipment.

Even if you restrict to title and e-mail, say, 20 bytes/message, it's still 20 GB. The only way you can do this is to have many computers each searching a piece of the archive concurrently.

So, 200 computers each searching 100 MB of data? That still takes a few seconds. And that's a few seconds *per search*.

Yes. I'd love to buy a copy of the archives. Whoever buys deja may want to market DVDs full of usenet posts (they may run into copyright issues since all posts are copyright of the authors).

Building a fast search engine is always the problem.

Re:Not the same incentives

[aidan skinner]

In general, there has been a move away from Usenet and towards other fertile discussion forums within the last four years© I expect this trend to continue well into the next five years© Today, Usenet is nothing like what it was ten years ago© It'll be even less so, tomorrow©

People keep predicting that usenet will die© People have been saying that usenet's been in decline for the last five years for at least as long as I've been on it ¥early 95©

Usenet won't die because it's easy to use ¥news readers are a very mature technology, it's informative and there's a real sense of community there© No matter what happens in terms of technological advances, you'll never get those communities shifting en-masse to somewhere else©

And ultimately that's what usenet is about, communities© I met my first girlfriend, my wife, a good portion of my close friends from one newsgroup© I learned Everything I Need To Know about programming from some uber-intelligent people on another©

I was off usenet for while recently, 6 months© I missed it terribly© I'd been checking usenet probably 355+ days a year© I missed the sense of community©

Until you kill that, until you remove all my friends internet connections, take away their newsreaders and burn the servers, news will survive© It's the most succesful form of online community, it always has been and it always will be© When IRC is ancient history, when ICQ, AIM etc no longer exist, I'll still be checking news©

- Aidan

Re:Older Archives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, deja seems to have 'shrunk' the number of years they go back. It used to go back to 1994, now it seems only to go back to 1999

Who else has usenet archives?!?!! Arg!!! I feel my complacency in letting them manage this has bit us all in the ass.

Make it your new screensaver!

[brassman]

Instead of running SETIathome, adopt a text group and back it up. We could call it the "Search for Intelligent Life on Usenet."

Re:Make it your new screensaver!

[nbvb]

Problem is, you'd get the exact same results as SETIathome: No intelligent life found. :-)

Buy specific branches

[uradu]

It would be cool for some IT-oriented company such as IBM to buy the comp.* and alt.comp.* branches, slap on a real search engine that lets you perform actually useful searches, and put it back on the web. The wildcard capabilities need to be greatly enhanced, as well as searching for special characters. I used to live in deja for developement research, and it's still my first stop even today, even though my expecations are greatly lowered.

It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc. Make it part of their developerWorks and keep it really fast to show off their stuff.

Re:Buy specific branches

[thogard]

If its for sale, and its the only one of its kind, M$ will buy it.

Re:Buy specific branches

[b1t r0t]

It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc.

After all, that was the whole point of Altavista, back when it was still altavista.digital.com -- it was intended to show off DEC's hardware.

At least Altavista is still useful for its original function. Sure, they've crowded the window with crappy flashing ads, and put all the keyword crap in (search for "flying buttmonkeys", and it'll give you a link to "Comparison shop for flying buttmonkeys"!), but it still works as a web search site.

New URL

[Detritus]

http://www.deja.nsa.gov

Re:New URL

[Goonie]

I know you're being funny, but I'm sure that the TLAs have as complete of an archive of USENET, public mailing lists, web sites and the like as they can possibly get. For a lot of interesting (to a government) topics you could get all the intelligence you'd ever want with some clever search techniques and decent analysts.

Re:So you would rather...

[dogmac]

Hmm.... Let me know when you sue what was RemarQ then. I am sure there are a few other people who would like to be on it. When RemarQ went commercial, I was pretty certain that deja would follow in the near to immediate future. (Off to start abusing my ISP for their crappy usenet server. Obviously vital now) Cheers Di

NOOOOOOOOO

[Anonymous Coward]

now he knows there is a fast way to get rich!!! damn you!!

My Offer

[jonfromspace]

Here is my offer for Deja

3 Cans of Spam
1 used Napkin (paper)
My Slashdot and ICQ accounts
The Head of Rob Malda

Re:My Offer

[Felipe Hoffa]

I hope that Napkin wasn't used after reading alt.erotica at Deja.

Re:Spam database

[B1ood]

yeah, i'm going to buy a massive database of usenet that costs me out the anus to buy and maintain - solely for email addresses. no thanks.

B1ood

Deja should respect privacy laws like toysmart did

[Anne Marie]

When we all posted to usenet, it was under the implicit contract that our personal information wouldn't be bought and sold like so much cattle when the parent company was itself sold. Will Deja respect those promises now that they are under the knife? I'm personally surprised slashdot isn't raising a bigger stink about this; they sure did when toysmart was slapped by the FTC for similar behavior.

Re:Spam database

[blahblahblah_blah]

It's not just NOSPAM, you would also have to account for the /N[a-z0-9]+O[a-z0-9]+S[a-z0-9]+P[a-z0-9]+A[a-z0-9] +M/ as well as the /at/\@/ and /dot/\./ translations but none the less, currently usenet is not much more than a farm for spammers

Re:Profit vs Tragedy of the Commons

[LL]

You can probably work out the cost of archives as $n/Terabyte/year (not including capital costs of servers + storage). Not to mention costs of hiring at least one techie to keep the system running and the bandwidth charges. If your attitude is widespread, then the services is probably better off dead (as in dismembered) and the hardware given over to a more useful purpose and the people reassigned to more useful tasks. If a service can't justify itself as a valued social function or serve a market need then it will just degrade beyond recognition. If some entrepreneur keeps it alive and through their own efforts makes it functional (though you may consider their approach stupid or souless) why should you complain? After all you were not interested in keeping it around anyway or much less considered it relevant. A combination of idealism plus half a clue could ressurect the system but finding those type of people is hard (especially the half a clue part).

TANSTAAFL

LL

misanthropic?

[streetlawyer]

Sorry, but I think you mean "misandristic". "Misanthropic" means "having a dislike of the entire human race"; it is not the mere polar opposite of "misogynistic".

Obviously, "misanthropic" would be the opposite of "nisgynistic" if we were prepared to abandon the stupid convention that "men" means "people" rather than "men" (believe me, I'm no happier than you with an abortion like "misandristic"), but since it seems difficult to get any force behind non-phallo-generic language, you need to distinguish between misanthropy and hatred of men.

Re:misanthropic?

[Moofie]

Actually, I do NOT mean "misandristic". Anybody with the attitudes expressed above can't have a very high opinion of any human.

It's interesting to learn the complement of "misogynistic", but that's not the word I was looking for.

As far as non-phallo-generic language, I'll leave that to somebody else to break their teeth on. Changing all the languages (well, at LEAST all the romance languages) to suit one's political agenda is, in a word, futile.

"ebay up for auction"

[enneff]

Now that's a headline I'd like to see. ;)

What Next? eBay.com For Sale?

[istartedi]

What Next? eBay.com For Sale? They could auction themselves off on... um... somewhere.

Copyright? D@mnright!

[redelm]

It's not FUNNY. My posts to USENET are in DejaNews. AFAIK, I still hold copyrights whether I marked them (Copyright 2000 ) or not. So does everyone else unless the copyrights in their country of posting don't give them copyright. Maybe even then, because US law does. IANAL.

There are exemptions under copyright for the intended transmission, and reduced damages because I don't mark my posts (C), but they're still copyright. If DejaNews or whomever buys them starts charging, I want a cut!

That said, other posters have commented on how an archive should be funded, and I agree it's a thorny issue. Much as I dislike gov't involvement, this seems a natural for the Library of Congress. Or maybe you would like an ICANN spinoff?

Re:Older Archives?

[Ralph Bearpark]

I asked them about this back in August and received the following reply:

Recently we moved the Deja.com servers to a new facility in order to provide greater reliability and performance. The move is now complete and we thank you for your patience.

Please note that currently our Usenet Discussion Service only retrieves messages from the past year (back through June 1999). As announced, we are reconfiguring the service that provides messages posted more than 1 year ago in order to provide greater reliability and performance. This will take some time though, possibly a few months. Have no fear: We're committed to bringing these messages back online as soon as possible.

... which doesn't say much really.

Regards, Ralph.

Search Deja with less spam

[Saberwind]

I have an alternate interface to the Deja power search; with this the subject headers and posters' names won't be truncated, and the search results can be displayed in a nested format. Spam-Free Deja Power Search

Re:Older Archives?

[Astastrafal]

Might not be what you're looking for, however...

Alan Cox posted this link to LKML a few months ago. It contains the early LKML posts, dating back to 1993. This prompted a post from tytso, who gave out this link to even earlier posts.

Save DejaNews

[dccase]

Their Usenet archive is THE most useful resource on the internet. It may be the only really useful resource on the internet.

As someone who has to constantly solve problems involving a wide assortment of hardware and software, I can't begin to estimate the value af being able to go to a single web site and find the answer to almost any problem within minutes.

It is the only web site I would consider paying a monthly fee to use.

On the other hand, their me-too product ratings have no value to me at all. No doubt it will sell for a lot more money and be around for ever.

The Pricelist

[11223]

Spam: $0.01 a.b.p.erotica posts: $0.10 The perfect troll: Priceless

Error

[glowingspleen]

"I have the weirdest feeling I've seen this article somewhere before..."


To continue browsing the archives, please log back into the NYTimes.com website


(The Average Slashdotter's Nightmare)


-------
Our Fish Keep Dying! Try not to laugh at the results!
http://udel.edu/~jgephart/fishcounter.ht m

Hey....

[MWoody]

I've got some posts in that archive, I'm sure... Maybe I should sue for part of the asking price? ^_^
---

Re:What if MS buys it? Anti-windows articles remov

[MR.Gates]

You are right it probably going to be hard to find that sort of archive, but even if micro$oft did buy deja I dout they would go to the extreme that you mention.

NOW WHERE DO I GO FOR KIDDIE PORN?

What about GPL'ed code sent on newsgroups?

[jmv]

Seriously, I'm pretty sure there are many posts that cannot be sold so easily... Let's say I write a piece of GPL code and send it on comp.os.linux.whatever (or alt.sex.goat if you prefer!) with the license. If any company wants to redistribute it, they have to make it available for free download. Not knowing it's GPL is not an excuse (posting any copyrighted material would be).

To me, the simple fact that they ask that you pay to access copyrighted information (GPL or not) that they don't own, seems illegal.

Re:What about GPL'ed code sent on newsgroups?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Uh, hello McFly?!!

In short, the GPL says that if you give someone the binary, you gotta give them the source code. If the code was posted and Deja sold it, then by definition the buyer now has a copy of the code.

Re:What about GPL'ed code sent on newsgroups?

[RabidMonkey]

but ..

you most likely pay for your internet access, don't you? By your logic, that too is illegal, because they are charging you to access GPL'd material.

The cost isn't for the MATERIAL per se, but for access to the medium that can GET you the material.

Slight difference, but a difference none-the-less.



We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.

Re:What about GPL'ed code sent on newsgroups?

[Error27]

If you put GPL code on Usenet then you are distributing it and it's your duty to have the source code. Except you didn't do it for profit so it's probably ok to just have a link to the source code.

But since you said you put "code" on there and not "binary" on there then you would think that the source "code" would already be there where you put it.

It's just like back in the day when people payed for the letters on the recieving end and not on the sending end. You could buy a bunch of mail and then deliver it yourself and keep the profits. But your still delivering someone elses mail not selling it yourself.

If you know what I mean.

Re:What about GPL'ed code sent on newsgroups?

[kfg]

The GPL does NOT require that source code be available either for download, OR free.

It requires that if BINARIES are distributed source code must be made *available* for *no more than a nominal fee* and that said source code can be freely distributed, * which includes selling,* by anyone.

I can distribute GPLed source code in whatever medium I want, including carved on granite, and charge whatever I can get someone to pay for it all without in any way violating the GPL.

I suggest you go read it again, ( it is again, isn't it?), * very carefully.*

Hopefully . . .

[karma_policeman]

Hopefully, whoever buys the Usenet archive will 1)Keep the service free, and 2)Hire some programmers.

Deja is the buggiest major site I've ever come across. If you've tried to use deja.com to read anything other than the most recent day or two worth of traffic, you probably know what I mean. Follow a link to a specific post, and there's a good chance you'll be directed to a totally different post. This state of affairs has held for at least the last year, maybe longer.

Knowing that deja is up for sale, it now makes sense that they haven't put a lot of effort into fixing bugs. But whoever buys the usenet archive is going to have some serious work to do.

Re:Profit

[wrinkledshirt]

On the other hand.. maintaining such a behemoth for no profit would suck, and would take someone far more idealistic than me.

I don't know just how hard a thing deja is to maintain. The code in itself seems like it hasn't undergone many changes in the last little while, including this #$@! bug that comes around every now and then asking it to search only for messages that contain the '*' character...

one dolla

[bdigit]

A dolla a post and 50 cents extra for attachments that contain nudity and 50 dollars extra for fake britney spear attachments

You don't do coding, do you? We need this!

[devphil]

I highly doubt that anyone will want to pay for an archive of usenet postings. Frankly, they are of limited use - most post threads offer very little useful information.

Most of the books in the public library are crap, too, IMO, but I wouldn't once suggest that libraries are of limited use.

Almost every single coding problem I've come up against, or configuration problem, or hardware problem, or VCR-clock-setting problem, has been asked already. All I need to do is a Deja Power Search, some thoughtful keywords, and I have my answer, courtesy of someone the previous year.

Deja's archives may be of interest to an educational institution looking at the historical value of the posts, but the useful market value of the posts is zilch.

Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And we need to preserve that information, so that those of us trying to write code and support the rest of you aren't forever asking the same questions.

As for Deja as a product review site - what can you say?

How about "It blew goats!"? Deja should have stuck to what it did best -- archiving Usenet -- and left that "portal" crap to places that believe in such things.

Re:WTF is MMF?

[Mr. Sketch]

I'm assuming Make Money Fast, but I could be wrong.

Library of Congress

[etherwalker]

Shouldn't the Library of Congress (USA) maintain a Usenet archive? Anybody know if Congress has ever asked the LoC to do so? If not, why not? I would consider it a gross negligence of their duty if they're not.

Re:Library of Congress

[robson]

It's the right idea, but the Library of Congress has taken a decidedly anti-Internet stance. I recall reading something recently wherein the LoC's head guy said he won't be placing any of the Library's contents on the Net.

Thus, they seem like they'd be the last institution interested in hosting Deja...

Re:Library of Congress

[mugoi]

this is not what he meant. he meant the LoC
should archive Usenet. nothing to do with
Deja except maybe buying their archives to
add to the LoC's.

Re:Library of Congress

[__aahyzr9271]

I vaugly recall hearing about an outfit that was archiving the internet, the whole internet. I believe this was 5 years ago, and that they had acrhived 2 TB of data at the time. Does anyone remember anything more about this? This was a long time ago, and I'm not sure if the're still doing this.

This is something that needs to be done, and not just with Usenet, but with all of the Internet. Our historic records, scientific and artistic works, in fact, all of our information is shifting from being stored on phyicall meada (ex. paper) to being stored on electronic meada (ex. bits and bytes on a hard drive somewhere), and it's become so importaint that there is an archive of this infomation that we'd be fools not to have one, least a mistake or equiptment failure causes vital works, records, and infomation to be lost forever.

Re:Library of Congress

[sjvn]

Besides some people at LoC not being that crazy about Usenet & Internet discussion forums (e.g. Slashdot) in the first place, the real bottom line is that LoC doesn't have the money.

There's a lot of federal waste, but, to my mind, the really useful agencies like NASA and the LoC are always being short-changed.

Steven

False Memory Syndrome?

[fatphil]

Shoot me if I'm wrong, but I remember www.dejanews.com being _web accessible_ back in 1993 (which was the first time I used it, it may go back much further). The article claims that the company Deja was set up in 1995 in order to do the above. I think that is revisionist history. My version is that in 1995 they decided that they wanted to _make a profit_ from their web site, that's all.

FatPhil

Re:Article states that Usenet unit IS profitable

[Tackhead]

>The company believes the profitable Usenet business unit [...]

Then we were right all along, and deja.com is truly fuckedcompany.com material.

The reason their USENET archive was profitable (fuck, just think how many banner impressions get generated for a typical query - and I'm talking Deja Classic, not the "new" mode) was because it was useful, and people used it.

I'm actually very relieved to see that they'll be selling the USENET archive to someone who gives a damn about USENET. Deja sure as hell didn't.

And that the money-losing "product review" site will go to someone dumb enough to think that when I'm searching for "Frobozznitz 1996 specs", I want some FrobCo marketer's spiel about the latest and greatest, when the reality is merely that I found the circuit board for a Frobozznitz in a surplus store, the dates on the chips indicate it was made in 1996, and I wanna find out what it was!

I just hope that the buyer of the USENET archive gets the full source tree for their code, so they can go back and dump the ass-sucking "frames" look, the nonproportional text fonts, the goofy colors (ugly shit-beige on white!?!) the tracking URLs (www.deja.com/wewatch/whatlinksyouclick/thenweredi rectyouto/http://www.eatatjoes.com/oldfr obs), the spammish URLs (http://www.frobcoscompetitor.com) inserted into USENET posters' posts, and all the marketing shite they added to Deja's code over the past 3 years.

A USENET archive. Profitable. Kick ass.

Re:Profit

[tregoweth]

In conclusion, I don't want Deja, and anyone who does want it will either be A) A zealot we admire but secretly resent; or B) A big businessman with a stupid business plan and no soul.

Paul Allen!

-jon

Re:Selling USENET Archive?

[fatphil]

You did ask for them to archive your post by omitting the X- header which turns off archiving...

FatPhil

Re:Profit

[fatphil]

The small glimmer of truth in what you say is that maybe some large non-commercial center should manage the archives. Where? MIT perhaps? Whatever. That would be great. However, every American tax payer would then be paying for it. So Europeans and South Africans and Australians and Japanese and Brasilians and ... would be getting the service for free.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

FatPhil
(A European who thinkgs that we Eurpoeans should pay our part to keep the archives up and running)

Copyright, GPL, and selling (out)

[zelyan]

I don't get it. I keep reading posts by /.'ers saying "they can't sell the database, it has my copyrighted work/code/pictures/whatever on it." or "They can't sell the databas, it has my code on it, which is GPL'd, so they can't make money off it." I won't even discuss whether or not that's legal under the GPL--others have done a better job than I coud do.

What I will discuss is the hypocrisy. Never mind that they're not actually selling your content, they're selling their business. (Technicality, but absolutely true, they're not really making money off the value of your content, which is what copyright is designed to protect, they're making money off its existence. Yeah, I ain't a lawyer, so I might be totally clueless there. It doesn't matter. I've got a real point here.)

How about the hypocrisy (boy, the tangents...)? Here we are arguing that Napster should be legal cause it's not violating copyright, it's "sharing," and then when a company, that has merely archived posts that we knew were going out into the public domain, we start screaming about our copyright. For shame!

Jeff

Re:Copyright, GPL, and selling (out)

[legoboy]

Simply because a minority of this site's readership is zealously in support of the saying "information wants to be free" doesn't mean we all are.

If you'll recall when Slashdot wanted to try to publish a book involving our comments on Katz' Hellmouth series? Around fifty people, including myself, were extremely vocal in our protests against it. You'll generally not see these same people supporting Napster. I can chose to use the GPL on a throwaway program. The program is *not* under the GPL by default, until I say otherwise. Likewise with my writings and public domain. The post you are reading is copyrighted. However unlikely I am to enforce it, I certainly could - and probably would, were someone else using it in a way that I found objectionable, without permission. (ie, publishing it on a different website, in print, etc)

I'm not sure how long you've been reading this site, but the editorial opinion is not written into stone - perhaps the editors are fairly hypocritical, but the majority of the readership is not.

--

Re:Copyright, GPL, and selling (out)

[zelyan]

You probably won't see this, but I thought I'd respond.

I do indeed recognize that the editorial opinion, while vocal, is not the entirety of the site. It is, however, a significant percentage. Supporting Napster usage is karma whoring because it will get you mod'd up, while if you're arguing against Napster, you'd better be damn persuasive if you want to be listened to. It seemed to me when I read this article that the people arguing that Deja had their copyrighted material had also posted pro-Napster stuff (I followed the user links and looked at their other posts, and since we had the Fanning Napster post yesterday...)

In any event, the majority of the readership may not be hypocritical, but there's are quite a few hypocrites out there.

Jeff

Being a woman ...

[Nicolas MONNET]

... does'nt give you the right to whine. Bouh bouh you're a victim of the nasty anon. cowards. Hell, guess what, I browse at +1 and I don't see those. So stop whining, or fuck off.

--

Re:Being a woman ...

[Cantor]

Easy for you to say, as a male. According to your own logic, why didn't you just ignore her writing? I think you were whining without reason, Anne-Marie wasn't.

Re:Being a woman ...

[Nicolas MONNET]

"Women are victims" ... yeah right.

--

Re:So you would rather...

[Edgewood]

Hell yes I would rather. There are a lot of things I would rather have disappear than persist in another form. 1. Your mother dies and leaves instructions that her body go to a local teaching hospital. But the hospital is sold to an HMO chain. Your mother's corpse is put on display in the lobby, floating in a vat of formaldehyde under a banner that warns about the dangers of autoerotic asphyxiation. 2. 299 of your most intelligent, penetrating posts on slashdot are printed in a little bound volume and distributed by MicroSoft as "Thoughts of Chairman Bill". 3. You find yourself having to make micropayments to look up your own usenet posts. You spent hundreds of hours helping out newbies for the love of the community; now someone is selling your words. It's all about context. Just because you do something for free does not mean you don't value it. And if the law does not recognize that, who's wrong: you, or the law?

Re:So you would rather...

[Moofie]

If you were so worried about your words, why didn't you archive them yourself? I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is a finite cost involved with maintaining and providing access to the data in question. Why shouldn't somebody be allowed to charge for that service?

Re:Copyright? D@mnright!

[VAXman]

Not a problem. Deja could just re-locate their servers to Russia (or any other country which doesn't have copyright), and there's no problem. Your copyright would be unenforceable. Then the sale could occur overseas, and they could move the servers back to the US. It would be legal, and there's absolutely nothing whatsoever you could do to impose your overbearing intellectual property laws.

Re:Spam database

[87C751]

I bet the trawlers sell off munged email addresses in the list regardless, anyway.

I have a pretty large collection of spam sent to my personal domains. One recurring destination address is a Message-ID from a USENET post somewhen in 1991.

A curious point, for me, is the number of spam pieces sent to usernames that not only don't exist, but never existed. And not just easy guesses like "sales@...", but plausible-looking usernames. These addresses could not have been trawled. I haven't seen any of them repeat, so they're probably not on lists. But I still wonder what the utility of sending spam to an address guaranteed to bounce might be. Are they spamming the postmaster through the bounce log?

Somebody notify...

[dagoalieman]

Sounds like time to notify f*ed company!!!

Re:and they just transferred their email service,

[GordoSlasher]

Yep, I originally signed up for my-dejanews email because of the spam filtering. It worked well.

Today I got spam from the new mail provider advertising some books, and claiming that I opted-in for these "marketing" messages. I guess everyone who was automatically transferred to the new mail service automatically "agreed" to this. I'm now opting out of using their service. This was my main "secondary" email account so it's going to be a painful move.

Deja has been falling apart for quite some time. Get your private info out of there before it gets sold to somebody like Sanford Wallace!

Re:Profit

[Xafloc]

What if you are not buying the archives, but are buying the many hours that it took to program around the archives. What I see as a more important aspect of the deal, is the programming that is used to store/retrieve/search the archives. I am sure there are ways to "get" archives that one does not have. The system that that information is entered into is the more beneficial...I would assume.

But as a programmer, I tend to look at the value of the machine, as opposed to the value of the occupant.


-= Xafloc =- Xafloc.com
Nod.toM

Roll your own archive...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a DSL or Cable modem, you can roll your own archive. Since Sept 99, I have archived about 500 newsgroups, including most of comp.*, microsoft.*, linux.*, and a few rec.*, etc. Since then, I have archived 8.2 million messages. Each article is individually saved in a separate file and compressed with gzip. This still consumes 13 gigs of space over 3 partitions. I do not archive any "binaries" groups, either. When I get new articles, I store the subject of the article in a MySQL database. I wrote an Apache/PHP front end for the system. Once nice thing is that I can do a SQL select/like statement which gives me great flexibility when searching. Searching the entire database can be slow (50 secs). However searching in an individual group (or a small subset) only takes a second or two on a celeron 450. Since, my connection has a slow uplink, I send the requested file over the wire compressed with a gzip mime-type, and netscape and/or IE will decompress it on the client side.

I like my implementation much better the deja. The interface to deja was horrible, IMHO, and was one of the main reasons I decided to roll my own. I'd suggest archiving stuff you'll never think you will need. Back then, I didn't know that I would be running Sybase on Linux, but since I archived most of the comp.* groups, including comp.databases.sybase, I was able to use the information with relative ease.

Re:Roll your own archive...

[TheGratefulNet]

so, post the source, man. let us all enjoy your code.

today, its cheap to build an fast system (athlon 1Ghz), add 10rpm discs and hardware raid (for speed/reliability), sprinkle with lotsa mem., and you have a local deja of your own.

'cache the info out towards the edges' is what I always say. power to the edges! praise be to he who caches reliably and frequently.

--

Re:Roll your own archive...

[pouwelse]

What is the URL of your interface?
Could you Open Source your scripts...

It would be a loss if resources are wasted, I've spend several months coding a superiour Web interface also (UsenetWeb at sourceforge).

Johan.

Re:Roll your own archive...

[TheGratefulNet]

[sheesh, bad typing day]

obviously a 10rpm drive wouldn't help much.

sed /rpm/Krpm/

--

Re:Roll your own archive...

[chrischow]

i like the idea of that, was there ever a HD that big?

Re:Roll your own archive...

[Anonymous Coward]

a 10 rpm drive would be OK if it was REEAALLLYY big! if it was 20 feet or so in diameter, then you'd get a fair linear velocity under the head at the edges!

..ok i'll go back to my hacking, now...

Re:Roll your own archive...

[bracher]

actually, since 3.23.23, mysql supports fulltext indexing of varchar and text columns in myisam tables. the results are naturally much faster than a like query against a column or columns.

indexing your archive might be a good test of their text index scalability...

Re:Usenet C-SPAN?

[blahblahblah_blah]

If you were to archive the entire usenet archive you would run into the needle in the haystack problem. I mean *please* compare the amount of *useful* messages that flow through usenet servers each day to the amount of (spam|p0rn|trolls). Such an effort to archive would result in a huge unmanegable database of worthless history of money making schemes and XXX sites.

And what about all the illegal content posted to usenet daily? It is bad enough to have the MPAA and FBI surfing for illegal http:// material. Think of the lawsuits and corporate uproar that a public protected database of usenet posts containing copyrighted software and other ilicit materials.

On the technical size, does anyone know how big Usenet grows daily? The terabytes of data in a proposed archive would be very unwieldy to maintain. Even archving selected groups could combat this problem, but then you run back into the censorship issue of who decides which groups are useful and which are not.

The incentive of years of net culture would not be worth the effort put forth by all the spammers and trollers each day

Re:Templars

[Abwehr]

And that's a bad thing?

oh dear

[uncleFester]

if they invalidate the search results so dejafilter no longer parses away the junk, whatever shall I do?[0]

So, are they selling the entire archive? Or just submissions after May 15, 1999? :)

[0] okay, rhetorical.. I'll hack the fscking perl source just like I did when they started putting those fscking little arrows all over the place, but still... *sigh*

Too un-PC for the VC?

[3prong]

Imagine Kleiner-Perkins or (insert random venture capitalist here) investigating this potential purchase. They come across the talk.bizarre archive. Chaos ensues. Wallets close. Dogs and cats begin living together.

3prong

Re:Re-De-centralized Usenet

[Chas]

Currently, I'm the moderator of a Big Eight newsgroup. I'd most certainly be interested in at least hosting the archives for that particular newsgroup. For historical purposes if nothing else.


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

Ha.

[h3x0r]

Good. I was sick of accidentally searching product reviews or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be when I meant to search usenet archives. Now hopefully it will revert to a usable form.
---

Re:Ha.

[British]

It became wayyy to e-commercy and less of a nice, free usenet reader. I mean, any search you do gives you a dumb link on shopping for it.

Example:

"Find great deals on KILLING YOUR PARENTS on deja.com!" Endless fun.

Re:Copyright? D@mnright!

[redelm]

Sure they can play gamers with non-Berne Convention countries. It won't save them from copyright violations.

I could demand royalties whenever they retrieve my posts for a paying customer. They're copying an publishing my work for their profit. If they or that customer are in the US or other BerneC country, I can probably "attach" that payment.

Re:Copyright? D@mnright!

[redelm]

It's not the archive transfer that would necessarily violate copyright. The deal could include the hardware, and there would be no copyright violation.

But I'm presuming the buyer might want to make some money :) By maybe charging for archive retrieval. _Then_ the copyright violations commence.

Re:You don't do coding, do you? We need this!

[Chagrin]

• wasn't saying usenet had no worth, I was saying that Deja's archives had little monetary worth

So what you're saying is that you like hearing all the same questions asked over, and over, and over again?

My bid is...

[PFactor]

(pinky in mouth) one mill-yun dollars!

Re:WTF is MMF?

[ocelotbob]

No, it means Make a Mate Fast. Most of the schemes in there are of the highly illegal pyramid types, and will get you thrown in the clink where you get to be Bubba's new mate.

Re:Does it include binaries?

[ibpooks]

I download more than that in a day!

Re:Copyright? D@mnright!

[jaroca]

Yeah, but can't they just say they are selling there name, and giving the information away for free to whomever purchases the name?


Round the firewall,
Out the NIC,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
NOTHING BUT NET!

Deja: "Before You Buy" is their trademark!

[oxytocin]

Do you check out Deja on deja before you buy?

too recursively surreal for me!

Out of curiousity

[Fervent]

Does anyone here actually think Deja went down in usability when they included the product review section? I don't.

Granted, I'm not really interested in the older archives (which I'm sure they have on file).

Still, I use it every day (particularly when I'm having driver issues or want fan reviews of my favorite games.

Re:Usenet C-SPAN?

[NMerriam]

deja only keeps text posts (not binaries) so the data volume and the copyright issues aren't that big of a deal. You're still talking about many megabytes a day, but it's far short of the gigabytes flowing in binary groups...

I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.

The Spam database, and the anti-spam textisms

[d.valued]

Old-school email addresses rock.

Nothling like a bang-path to throw off modern spammers.

I Dream of Google Usenet

[Zach Baker]

Usenet would be a very natural fit for Google's search-focused, keyword-focused ad placement site. While Google buying out part of Deja as a company is sketchy, I can see them buying out their Usenet archive separately and integrating Usenet with some of their expertise. Man, with Usenet on Google I'd never leave my chair^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htheir site.

Re:I Dream of Google Usenet

[bnitsua]

I remember for a short while, when AltaVista was a great search engine, not a portal, they had such a feature. If I remember correctly, it was nicely integrated as a part of the standard search engine, like the language feature now is. It did not archive binaries, but it was still immensely useful.

Such a feature does not seem too far for a search engine, as AltaVista showed.

Re:I Dream of Google Usenet

[adubey]

Hmmm.... this might be difficuly - Google depends upon hyperlinks for its technology to work. There are no hyperlinks in Usenet. You could use the number of replies as a proxy, but then searches would give successful trolls high scores. Also, you lose a lot of info because a post that gets many replies can itself only be a reply to one post - whereas on the web, a page that is heavily linked to can link to many other sites.

Those old archives are the best part of deja...

[isaac]

One can mark the decline of Dejanews by the decline in their USENET archives. First the formerly clean (and quick-loading) search interface became cluttered with other "portal" crap (altavista, anyone?), then the old posts went away ("temporarily"), then USENET searches were relegated to other pages, then the cutoff for old posts was 12 months, and finally they started parsing their usenet posts to add links to their product review databases (does anyone use those? apparently not...) in the bodies of the messages. Now they're on the block... boo hoo hoo.

I hope the archives get bought by someone who wants to make a usefully complete, freely-searchable USENET archive (my wet dream: Google buys the archives), but I fear that they'll just be snapped up by a company like Lexis-Nexis, who'll happily take the publically contributed works of thousands and resell access at kilobucks-a-year.

-Isaac

Re:Spam database

[andyh1978]

People change email addresses, so it's just cheaper and more efficent to setup some regexs and skim usenet today.

True.

If you can't write a program that takes out NOSPAM, you aren't a real programmer.

It's pretty irrelevant anyway. Anyone who's taken the minimal bother to munge their email address is also likely to be annoyed with spam already, and so is 100% certain not to buy anything from a spam email; so what's the point in bothering to get the address and send one out anyway.

Besides, probably upwards of 95% of people don't bother mungeing their address, either because they can't be bothered or more likely they never thought of it/don't know how. That's plenty of addresses to sell.

I bet the trawlers sell off munged email addresses in the list regardless, anyway.

Not the same incentives

[Anne Marie]

Cable companies contribute to C-SPAN because they fear congressional legislation and they want to appear like nice citizens to Congress. Where's the incentive with Usenet? In fact, ISPs would be grateful if Usenet died for all sorts of reasons:

there'd be one fewer source of headaches for them. Usenet contributes to the perpetuation of spam, and it's the ISPs' majordomos that have to clean up when their users get led astray.

Many ISPs are trying their best to set up their own proprietary bulletin boards accessible through their own channels. Usenet is an unnecessary source of competition

Usenet is a big gaping sucking legal wound waiting to happen, what with all the copyright infringements, obscenity, and violations of the DMCA being tossed around. Any prudent ISP wary of tort suits should be wary of affiliating itself with such an anarchic beast.

Usenet still, above all, requires enormous resources to maintain. Especially binary groups.

In general, there has been a move away from Usenet and towards other fertile discussion forums within the last four years. I expect this trend to continue well into the next five years. Today, Usenet is nothing like what it was ten years ago. It'll be even less so, tomorrow.

Re:Not the same incentives

[fish]

I have to stronly disagree here!

If a ISP can't handle usenet they should change business.

Usenet is not the unnecessary compitition - the new proprietary BBSes are.

The copyright "wound" applies to everything, not just usenet.

Apart from the huge binary postings, usenet is nice and small! I have been reading it for longer than I can remember (10 years?) - it takes about 20 minutes a day to download the news from a dozen or so newsgroups and read them at home. Much better than having to look things up on webpages full with flashing banners and other crap (I only have a 56k modem).

And like someone else mentioned - you can find the answer to almost any question with a few decent queries in the power search. There is also Dejasearch, which is a front-end to dejanews if you don't like their interface (I don't).

It will be a sad day when usenet disappears...

-fish

Libraries? (was Re:Usenet C-SPAN?)

[Simon Brooke]

It seems to me reasonable that one of the major public libraries (British Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, Library of Congress, whatever) should take on the archiving of Usenet.

Wait a minute...

[fuerstma]

I thought for a minute, 'well how cool is that. this would be a great opportunity for the internet community to band together and buy this great resource for everyone to use' and then i realized, those are my freaking words!! I have posted far more than the average person on the newsgroups, and would end up paying for the rights to my own words back. what the hell is the deal with that? i wonder how much my percentage of the take should be....

Google should buy it up.

[cybrthng]

Googly should by them up. Sell off the product side or not even pick them up, but offer the usenet archives along with there advanced web querying.

Surely they can spare some of them 6,000 computers :).

Re:Open Content Usenet initiative

[Arrogant-Bastard]

I joined Usenet in 1981, when the principal method of propagation was via modem at 300 baud (1200 if we were lucky). It was an amazing thing to be able to hold conversations with people like Dennis Ritchie -- the community was small enough, quiet enough, and well-behaved enough that this was not only possible, but commonplace.

Obviously, those days are long gone -- but if I took time to enumerate the causes and symptoms of Usenet's simultaneous massive expansion and massive decline in civility/utility/economy, this would be a much longer note. However, in spite of all that, large pockets of useful content remain and I would be supportive of attempts to preserve them. It is probably too much to expect Deja.com to donate the content back to the community -- their actions over the past few years, including spamming and insertion of ads into articles, indicate to me that they have little if any regard for the people who actually make Usenet a useful medium. However, I'm sure that there are folks (such as the person who responded to this article in another thread, and such as myself) who have partial archives stashed away and would happily contribute them to an open-source based effort to provide a community service.

kibo

[the_tsi]

I'm sure there's someone out there who can answer your question, assuming he can find it. You just need to find something to put in your subject so that he knows its there......

-Chris

whoa, a million MMF posts...

[Lx]

I could certainly do with those. But how about some of those MMFFFFF/nc/bd/rom ones, eh?

-lx

The Usenet archive is PROFITABLE

[ragnarok]

Did anyone actually read the article? This is about the 50th post I've seen claiming that a usenet archive is not commercially feasible. To save you the trouble of clicking the pretty green link in the story, I'll cut and paste:

The company believes the profitable Usenet business unit, which has long had an Internet-savvy audience, will appeal to many buyers...

Split it!

[fatphil]

We've seen the power of the masses before (distributed.net type stuff - DESCrack, RC5, GIMPS etc...). We don't use one supercomputer to attack these problems, why should we want a super-server to solve the usenet archiving problem?

Let it be chopped into manageable sized chunks, run by people who have a genuine interest and relevance to the field under discussion. If noone wants to archive alt.fan.right.said.fred then it fades away, but if the official fan club wants to, let them. So this has the benefit of maybe thinning down the archives.

Also remember about compresion. The amjoity of a usenet post is redundant, or at least highly predictable, and will compress down immensely.
It's write-once read-many, so the compression scheme can be chosen to be decoder-light.

FatPhil

I don't want the archives

[mami]

I am against archiving all of usenet indiscriminately. One could archive just selectively technical usenet groups for historical reasons. But I guess nobody will be brave enough to decide what to keep.

Just wondering why you think the digitized mumblings of mankind's thoughts are worth to be archived for eternity.

I for once think it's against humanity and probably against basic human rights. Our thoughts should be allowed to be forgotten. I would protest against archiving my posts to usenet for a longer time period (let's say five years).

I protest also against any archiving by default, I am for a clearly visible opt-in feature, whereby the poster allows consciously for the post to be archived longer than a couple of days or weeks. I don't want an opt-out feature from a default archiving procedure.

I am very much against the "sort-by-author" feature for usenet posters by default. If a person wants to allow the production a profile of himself (let's say in technical groups to make his expertise available and known to a worldwide audience), then it should be the decision of that person alone. It should not be done by default without the consent of the author.

Re:I don't want the archives

[Grit]

I don't agree that there's any fundamental human right to have your posts forgotten. :) One might argue that your posts belong to you (via copyright law), but the public nature of their distribution would seem to argue against unlimited control by you.

What sort of regulation are you suggesting? If I, personally, keep an archive of every Usenet post you send, would you come sue me? Or would the Internet Police beat down my door?

Like sending an email, posting on Usenet is implicitly giving others the right to view your copyrighted material. While there are (admittedly fuzzy) limits to what I can do with a post, I'd strongly oppose any prior restrction on my rights to archive communication sent to me--- whether individually or as part of a group. So while I can see an argument that my posts can't be republished, the act of archiving itself shouldn't be prohibited. Doing so leads to a view of copyright I (and much of the Slashdot "community") don't particularly like--- the abolition of fair use, tilting the balance too far toward content owners.

On a more practical note, it's essential to preserve electronic communications because we increasingly don't have a paper history. Future historians need to have something to work with--- although they probably won't be interested in any of my e-mails or Usenet posts, they definitely care about President Clinton's. Where in between would the need for privacy require the erasure of history?

Re:The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[mzito]

Yes, yes, yes.....the cost is that low when you look at the simple cost of the drives. Then you need to add up all the other costs:

-Salaries of people to run it: 1 million/year (20 people at an average of 50,000/year each, which is low)
-Database software: Assuming you want to run oracle, that'll cost you a variable amount depending on the number of cpus you want to run it on - say a 16-cpu box...... 400,000
-Storage system - I know the cost of drives are 50,000, but you need the software, the support infrastructure - 10 terabytes of storage doesn't just show up in a box. You need something like an EMC. Let's say it is an EMC, and you get a good deal - That'll be about 8 million dollars (you may think I'm kidding or exaggerating, but I'm not)
-Database server- this database won't run on a linux box - you're talking something like Sun. I don't know IBM or HP boxes, so I'll price out a Sun - a 16-cpu, 16gb of ram sun e6500 will run you about 600,000 and you need two of them (at LEAST) - 1.2 million
-HA software - Stuff like Veritas, your backup software, software raid, cluster server, etc. - 400,000

Now we're up to 11,000,000 dollars, and that's initial costs, not counting co-lo space, front-end application servers, backup servers, bandwidth, office space, benefits, management, etc. etc. etc. Of course, if you're a pre-existing company, you may be able to leverage some of your existing infrastructure to support this, but no matter what, there's no way this will cost 50k.

Thanks,
Matt
Matthew J Zito, CCNA

Re:You don't do coding, do you? We need this!

[Ars-Fartsica]

So what you're saying is that you like hearing all the same questions asked over, and over, and over again?

No, what I'm saying is that I don't use usenet anymore and I wouldn't pay a nickel for Deja's service...neither would nayone else, evidently.

and they just transferred their email service, too

[TheGratefulNet]

just as I was getting used to the old deja email (which was NICELY spam-free), they dumped it and went with some totally clueless SPAM-BY-THE-BOATLOADS web-based email service.

and it 'only' took them 3 weeks to restore the saved mail from the previous provider to the current one...

its to the point where, since its no longer spam-free, that the web-based email service is totally USELESS. sheesh - didn't they know that's what the draw was?

I loved the fact that dejanews.com (I prefer the old name to the shortened deja.com) archived usenet. and the fact that you could opt-out of it (x-no-archive: yes). who knows what level of service the new owner will exhibit. probably less than what is currently offered, I fear.

--

Lottery is actually an insurance policy...

[goetze]

It's an insurance policy against good luck.

Imagine you selected 6 lottery numbers, but didn't buy the ticket. Disaster strikes: your numbers come out. Too bad you're uninsured.

Let the community have/buy it.

[kato]

I'd hate to see the same thing happen to Deja.com that happened to the International Lyrics Server (lyrics.ch). The ILS provided content created by the community that, according to some laws, belonged to the artists. Deja.com provides content created by the community that is owned by the community. Deja.com is commercial now... I can handle that. But the ILS sucks now that it's "songfile.com". I couldn't stand to see that happen. Of course, the "right" thing to do would be to donate the archive to the people who created it, the community. I'm quite certain that there could be legal issues with selling other people's content. I'm in Deja.com and I never signed over the rights to my content. If they are selling it, I want a piece of it. Or, perhaps the community could "buy" it from them. While I don't think that many people would be eager to donate some cash to pay for the company, I think that a series of donations could give a small infusion to get it going and banner ads would be enough to run the server/database on a daily basis. Or, most likely, you could find a company willing to donate the resources to run the site.

Re:ebay

[po_boy]

at least their blatent plug made it to the front page. I had to resort to a comment.

Re:Deja [vu] for sale...

[11223]

Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Say a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.

Now, now, you know deep in your heart they're all just holes in the skydome to let light in...

Forgive me for being cynical.

Why not archive webboards and email lists too?

[gad_zuki!]

USENET doesn't get much use from non-tech savvy users and though it has merits its mostly crap. If you're serious about keeping it you should be the one collecting megabytes worth of threads and discussions and burning them on CDs. Put up FTP sites, do whatever, but if USENET goes I won't shed a tear.

I've seen webboards with better content and email lists that makes USENET look exactly like the infatile playing ground it usually degenerates into yet where's the call to save these and put them on a search engine?

Re:Why not archive webboards and email lists too?

[Sabalon]

Perchance it's just me, but it seems almost every web board I come across in the result of a search BITES.

People there are just morons. You'll find a question, and 5 out of 6 replies will be the original post indented and no new information, as if they hit reply and forgot to type anything else in.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I want Deja's archive to DIE!

Want to know why?

A few years ago I was an embarassingly shrill Linux zealot. I posted embarassing amounts of total zealotry on the .advocacy newsgroup.

I still use the email address I posted all of it as (the concept of anonymnity still disturbs me on sites where I care about what I say- obviously Slashdot no longer rates). I want to continue to use the email address I posted all of it as (I mean, it's a good freenet address that has email forwarding from a clean ordinary Pine/Lynx interface that I can dial up to directly those months when I get so sick of the Net that I won't PPP at all).

Anyway, I am sure there are lots of people like me, who really don't need the shit they typed when they were dumb and naive hanging over their heads forever. Hell, I liked Linux back then. Now all I keep a Slackware box around for is that it's an NFS slut (easy to throw up shares from without the security hassles) on my home network of BSD boxes.

Spam database

[i22y]

I sure hope Deja doesn't fall into the wrong hands - it could easily be mined privately for millions of e-mail addresses, as it sort of is already.
----

Re:Spam database

[Arcanix]

I don't know why people even bother to put NOSPAM in their e-mail address. Whenever spam comes my way it's either filtered automatically or it takes me one second to add it to my ignore list and I never get an e-mail from that address again...

Re:Spam database

[bugg]

People change email addresses, so it's just cheaper and more efficent to setup some regexs and skim usenet today.

If you can't write a program that takes out NOSPAM, you aren't a real programmer.

Re:Spam database

[MustardMan]

If you can't write a program that takes out NOSPAM, you aren't a real programmer.

And I suppose being able to do that makes you a real programmer? Wow and all this time here I thought I was just an average college level programmer who slapped together a few numerical computations and simulations for computational physics courses. Now, I see, 3ye 4m 4n 31337 h4x0r... excuse me while i r3w7 j00r b0x0rz!

heh :)

Re:Spam database

[Tackhead]

> A curious point, for me, is the number of spam pieces sent to usernames that not only don't exist, but never existed [ ... ] plausible-looking usernames.

Consult (deja.com :-) in news.admin.net-abuse.email for "dictionary attack".

Both chickenboner ("guy in a trailer park) and mainsleaze (i.e. "legitimate" - at least, companies that *pretend* to be legit) marketroids are spamming any plausible username at any SMTP server they can get their hands on.

The goal is, as your logs show, to cram spam down the throats of users who've never even used email. After all, the spammer just ignores the bounce, and your box has to consume bandwidth dealing with it. It's no skin off the spammer's nose if your box dies from the load.

If you're seeing this, report it as a DOS attack. Because frankly, that's what it is.

Re:Spam database

[87C751]

I could understand a dictionary attack, if I were seeing loads of bogus names with the same content. But I've only seen single items... never two from the same source. That's what makes me wonder if there isn't some other attack mechanism at work here. The really strange part is that I'd expected some followup, but never saw any. One might think the bounces were being used to confirm a working mailserver at the domain, but as I say, no further traffic from the originators (at least, none I could recognize).

Shrug...

Re:Spam database

[bugg]

I shouldn't feed the trolls, but..

And I suppose being able to do that makes you a real programmer?

I never said that. I merely said that it was a trivial task to write a program to filter it out, and that anyone who considered themself a programmer would have no trouble doing it.

Stop making mountains out of molehills and relax.

Re:Older Archives?

[CACondor]

For a while, Gene Spafford of the Clouds project at Georgia Tech was archiving netnews to 9 track tape. I think he stopped in the mid-80's, when he went to Purdue.

Does it include binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, what's the going rate for 1000MB of VCDs warez and kid porn?

Re:Does it include binaries?

[bugg]

_Much_ more than that gets postedin a day.

Until advanced holostore technology, it's not feasible to archive usenet and binaries for any real length of time.

Deja [vu] for sale...

[MustardMan]

I have the weirdest feeling I've seen this article somewhere before...

Re:Deja [vu] for sale...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the weirdest feeling I've seen this post somewhere before... (-1, Redundant)

Too bad all the internet million$ evaporated...

[otis wildflower]

... I'm sure one of the enlightened option$ millionaires in the *x/OSS community would buy out the archives and opensource them..

Any takers?

Your Working Boy,

1,000,000 MMF Posts?

[jgotts]

The only news groups that seem to be overrun by spam are the alt.binaries.pictures.* groups. Apparently, CmdrTaco doesn't read comp.*. ;-)

No need to defend yourself

[FreeUser]

Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created.

As a guy whose name (Jean-Michel) often causes USENET readers to mistakenly believe they are corresponding with a woman, I can relate in some small fashion. The behavior of some of the cretins on the internet (be it USENET, irc, or slashdot) is enough to make one ill.

Nevertheless, I would implore you to consider the source. These are Anonymous Cowards, the keyword being Coward. Were they confronted with an actual woman showing any interest in their sorry existence whatsoever, they would almost certainly soil their pants with fear before stuttering something inane and descending hopelessly into a seizure of insecurity and general social cluelessness.

You have no need to defend yourself or your gender. The offensive posts to which you refer speak for themselves and identify their posters as the penultimate losers of society, whose only chance at either a sexual or interpersonal relationship is limited to their right hand.

I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better to read this, being the target of such purile harassment, but it is nevertheless true: your value as a contibuter is in no way diminished or tarnished by these idiots.

And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot.

I know you're angry, but this comment is very unfair to the vast, vast majority of men on slashdot.

Throughout history women have seduced, betrayed, and murdered men for cheap material gain, to grasp power, to avenge a wrong (real or imagined), or even out of simple spite and jealousy.

The sexes have a long history of using and abusing one another, just as they have an equally long history of nurturing and sustaining one another.

It would be as wrong for me to paint the women who post to slashdot as "gold digging cunts" (or some other equally offensive characterization) as it is for you to paint the men here as would-be rapists, batterers, etc.

Put simply, some human beings are scum, irrespective of sex. Most are not. And while I don't blame you for being angry, please try to resist the very natural, human tendency to overgeneralize about an entire population of people based upon the behavior of a few mysogenist losers who will almost certainly remain sexually frustrated for the duration of their small, pitiful lives.

Re:What about warez sent on newsgroups?

[drben]

It's not just GPL code they have to be concerned with; there are tons of warez and pr0n and other copyright violations all over usenet.

In defense of pr0n

[FreeUser]

My girlfreind and I both enjoy watching porn immensly. It hasn't harmed our relationship at all. Indeed, it has at times added some rather interesting spice to our lives.

And yes, we're both quite addicted to sex. :-)

For all we know, it may have been your friend's wife's intolerance of porn that ruined their relationship, not the husbands "addiciton." Even if it wasn't, the notion that a few losers can't control themselves or are so narcissistic that they can only get off to pornography does not even remotely imply that sych would be true for the rest of us, who enjoy healthy lives and relationships while enjoying a little hardcore from time to time.

Selling USENET Archive?

[ackthpt]

Is anyone actually sure they can do this? I don't recall ever signing a waiver for my posts. As it is they arrive on Deja, but also on other news servers. I believe Deja could sell their software, but the database of posts should go without cost.


--
Chief Frog Inspector

LetsBuyDeja.com

[Eimernase]

LetsBuyDeja.com has enticing offers on miniature zebras and Mars colonization. This is a hoax.

Re:Open Content Usenet initiative

[krokodil]

> To make this possible we cut the
> cost of news reading by eliminating
> the special news software at the
> access provider. We cover our expences
> with small sponsor messages on
> some locations of this site.

What?! There a tons on excellent free
USENET news software, like INN.

I dunno about others, but I am not quite
ready yet to replace my convinient news
reading software with crappy HTML forms
interface with "sponson messages" on it.

They Had Better Pay Me

[PingXao]

I never gave them permission to sell any of my posts. I want my check, as I retain all rights to anything I've ever posted on Usenet. Time to file a lien or million or two.

Re:You don't do coding, do you? We need this!

[Ars-Fartsica]

Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And we need to preserve that information

I wasn't saying usenet had no worth, I was saying that Deja's archives had little monetary worth. I'm glad you have found tidbits in there from time to time, but you aren't going to pony up $100 million for it either, are you??

Older Archives?

[CoughDropAddict]

I always wished I could read usenet postings that were really old, say 8+ years. The old-timers always talk about the glory days of usenet, and we always see references to the famous postings of "Larry Wall" on April Fool's day, when the concept of Perl Poetry was first seen, or of course, the famous Linus posting when Linux first met the world. Anyone know of a place where you can read really old messages like these?

--

dejaNEWS.com

[tkrotchko]

Hey...its not our fault that someone tried to make money off that which is inherently not profitable.

No, seriously, as much as I like DejaNEWS, I believe it has as much to do with the downfall of usenet as the entire alt.binaries.sex hierarchy.

Re:WTF is MMF?

[stimpy]

heh, that was the first thing I thought, too...

Article states that Usenet unit IS profitable

[John Harrison]

from the article:

The company believes the profitable Usenet business unit, which has long had an Internet-savvy audience, will appeal to many buyers, including information technology companies and others.

So it seems that the big businessman in option B wouldn't be so stupid after all.

Wouldn't it be cool if

[Error27]

the archive was bought by google.com?

They have an archive of pretty much everything else...

Let's burn our own archives!

[KidSock]

I hope this isn't deja's way of saying "we folded" and are never to be seen again. The world will be a dumber place without them(or at least I sure will be).

With the cost of storage as it is I think it's time to start thinking about setting up a news server on Linux to pull my favortite groups and archive them. I wonder how much frequently I would have to burn a cd if I had say 50 groups.

KidSock

The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[Baldrson]

So let's assume there are a billion Usenet posts at an average of 10Kbytes each (being conservative) in Deja's archives. That's 10 terabytes. A lot of storage, eh? Not really. Not anymore. Spinning magnetic store runs around $5/gigabyte. The Deja archive would require 10K gigabytes. That's $50,000 in spinning magnetic storage. The monthly payments (at 12% interest) on that capital would be around 1% of the $50,000 principle which works out to be $500/month.

Get it all into a fault-tolerant RAID system with hot swap and quadruple the cost. You still have only $2000/month debt service.

That's less than a fast food worker makes in Silicon Valley these days.

If your objection to these figures are that the traffic is so high that the costs are dominated by bandwidth, then the problem is you've got too much business -- a terrible problem with which you must learn to cope.

As the Buddha says: Life is suffering.

Re:The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[Baldrson]

You are forgetting an important part. You don't just have to archive the posts. You also have to provide efficient search capabilities.

Grasshopper, when I made my little comment about "bandwidth" and the Buddha, I did neglect to mention that bandwidth includes everything that scales with usage: internal CPU to memory bandwidth and disk bandwidth as well as wide area network bandwidth. The point is that the incremental costs of maintaining the pre-1999 archive for online access are miniscule compared to the rest of Deja's other expenses, yet Deja has used the costs of providing the earlier archives as the reason they are offline. The CEO even admitted they get hardly any incremental increase in bandwidth utilization (see definition above) from the older archives. So, since the incremental costs of simply having them online is so low, how can the CEO use this reason? Where are the real incremental costs of keeping the older archives coming from?

Oh, also, I did quadruple the $50,000 to $200,000 for interfaces, etc.

Re:The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[vheissu]

Get it all into a fault-tolerant RAID system with hot swap and quadruple the cost. You still have only $2000/month debt service. That's less than a fast food worker makes in Silicon Valley these days.

Yeah, but not less than a outhouse in Silicon Valley, these days.

Re:The Cost of Maintaining an Archive

[Baldrson]

Yes, yes, yes... there are companies like EMC out there who have customers that will pay enormous amounts of money for "storage systems". I'm sure they'll take even more than $8 million from them if they'd give it to them. For that kind of money they might even be willing to stroke the customer ego by convincing them it really has to cost that much and that they are nobody's fool. Lots of technically illiterate suits have that kind of ego need as a consequence of posing as technical studs with their capital sources, which is a big market segment for companies like EMC, if not its biggest one.

You ignored my comment about bandwidth which includes everything that scales with usage -- not storage. Furthermore, you say "no way this will cost 50k" when I quadrupled "the simple cost of the drives" to $200,000 to get the drives into a interface with some redundancy for hot-swap.

As you, yourself, admit, inclusion of organizational costs is the cost of a from-scratch startup, not "the cost of maintaining an archive".

When you want to go high availability (presumably when you want to go high performance), you may as well just duplicate the system in geographically remote locations -- this gets back to the scalability/bandwidth point I already made. The "transaction journal" for such a system is simply the Usenet feed. You don't need Oracle or even want it since it doesn't do the right kind of indexing anyway. The only backup you need is another server added to provide bandwidth. Recovery takes time, of course, even with a T3 retransmitting the archive from the redundant system(s), but it isn't too bad. At only 1Mbyte/sec you can recover a fully redundant nuked site in 4 months. You don't need or want a system like Veritas for high availability. When one system goes down, the other(s) keep(s) serving and feeds the log to the one being brought back online. This isn't up-front capital.

At the limit, this gets to the real solution to the Usenet archiving problem:

Peer-to-peer redundant archiving.

The main problem to be solved with peer-to-peer redundant archiving is query optimization, decomposition and routing within a distributed redundant index. Know of any good work in this area?

Open Content Usenet initiative

[pouwelse]

Creating a open network of Deja.com like servers is my dream and I already have stable running code for it...

At SourceForge.net the project UsenetWeb is located that is the Open Source implementation of Deja.com

Currently the software is stand-alone, but is could be expanded to form a network of OpenContent deja.com like servers. With the sharing of news groups across several servers, it could become a volenteers only job... The software only supports text-only newsgroups for now.

Are there people here that would like to run this software and build a Open Usenet Network? ? ?

See a demonstration of Open Source deja.com at Usenet4free.com

Johan.

Re:Open Content Usenet initiative

[pouwelse]

If you are happy with current software, please keep it.

But if you want access to Usenet messages with a simple browser for anywhere, a deja.com like solution can be better.

Do you know an Usenet provider that is free? All usenet providers on my list ask a few $/month. ISPs charge indrectly for it, or just have a crappy flooded server. With a advertisement based business model you do not pay, it's your choise.

Re:Usenet C-SPAN?

[mengerin]

450-500,000 non spam articles daily. There are over a million messages that are processed then spam filtered. The size of each message is inconsequential really, it's more the number of entries that is the hard problem.

Profit

[Chiasmus_]

I was just wondering to myself, "If I had $500,000,000 in my wallet, how much would I spend on the Deja archives?"

I came to the conclusion that I would spend nothing at all. Why? Because I feel that ideally, these archives should be free to all and any attempt to charge for access would be somehow wrong. These are ideas in their purest form, when they were just first beginning to be transferred into digital format en masse. This stuff belongs in a museum, not a pay site.

On the other hand.. maintaining such a behemoth for no profit would suck, and would take someone far more idealistic than me.

In conclusion, I don't want Deja, and anyone who does want it will either be A) A zealot we admire but secretly resent; or B) A big businessman with a stupid business plan and no soul.

They are selling what?

[logiceight]

The company plans to sell the Usenet

Which will become the biggest pile of crap ever sold in the history of mankind.

Feh

[Chris Johnson]

They can sell my words for all I care if they find someone dumb enough to buy usenet posts :) they just can't claim they wrote 'em- or change them and claim I wrote them.

If I remember correctly they've flirted with doing the latter already- in that they are putting hotlinks in stuff as if I, in writing 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes', had added a link like 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes'.

So you would rather...

[DAldredge]

So you would rather it go away than someone make some money off of it?

Please explain how in the hell that makes any sense.

Profit? Information is not free (as in beer)

[Sunir]

It is very wrongheaded to conclude that the archive should just be provided without cost. The information itself is free (as in liberty), but the collection and archiving is not free (as in costless).

Also, there is value in the archive, technically speaking, provided you are interested in reading it. Consider that without archives, there would be demand and no supply. I'd bet you'd want to pay for them then. But, if you don't want the archives, don't pay for them.

On the other hand, if you do want them, the only free (as in liberty) and fair method would be to distribute the cost amongst the users proportionate to their use (as opposed to having some volunteer "sugar daddy" front the cost for you). If there aren't enough people willing to do this, then the only way to maintain the archive would be for some non-public, non-volunteer body to buy it. Then that body should be able to recoup their costs + interest, ethically speaking.

Actually, I think the whole idea that information wants to be free (as in costless) is just wrong.

Don't try this at home

[jrobertray]

http://www.home.net/aup/

The Usenet news service included with an @Home residential service account is provided for
interactive use by the subscriber, using a commonly-available NNTP client such as Netscape
Communicator. Non-interactive clients which download Usenet articles in bulk are prohibited.

...

Users must ensure that their activity does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other
user's use of the Services, nor represent (in the sole judgment of @Home) an unusually large
burden on the network itself.
--
Why Ah Must Scribble GNU

Flambait my ass

[gad_zuki!]

How is the parent of this flamebait? "Oh my, he has a dissenting opinion!" Get a clue moderators. I've got tons of karma do your worst, or read the moderator guidelines.

Civil Action

[PingXao]

I strongly urge anyone who has ever posted anything to Usenet to inform Deja that you retain complete copyright control over anything you have ever posted to Usenet. They can't sell my words or your words. Time to sue.

User Information sold

[simpleguy]

Ok, when I signed up to deja, I agreed to its privacy policy presented to me at that time.

Now that deja will be owned by someone else and that includes its 'customer' databse, what happens to my personal information and yours?

Anyone feel like playing a lawyer on /. today?

My perfect Deja...

[Robotech_Master]

The kind of archive site I would like to see would be in the form of read-only nntp servers. Then people could access them with whatever newsreader interface they liked. To keep there from being too many articles at once for a newsreader to keep up with, call the servers news1991.deja.com, news1992.deja.com, or whatever, and stick just content from the one year on them. Or maybe use one server and rename each group 1991.news.group.name, or news.group.name.1991, etc.

It'd be a damn sight easier to use than what Deja has now.
--

Interesting comic (OT)

[Dwonis]

Check this out.
--------
Life is a race condition: your success or failure depends on whether you get the work done on time.

Going rate for 1 million MMF posts

[TBHiX]

I'm not sure. I'd probably give them a bulk rate -- they'd only have to pay me $15 or so per message to take them.

-TBHiX-

WTF is MMF?

[b0z]

I have no idea what MMF is. My first guesses would be "Mad Mother Fucker", "My Mango's Friend" or some other crap like that. Someone please explain to me what MMF is.

Thanks.

Me Too

[lkchild]

For sale to the unlucky bidders.

Limited edition CD containing "Me Too" umpteen million times. Full USENET simulation can be gained using a CD multichanger to simulate cross posting.

Dont delay, buy today.
--
Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net

Usenet C-SPAN?

[jimhill]

For a couple of years now I've been arguing that ISPs ought to kick in for the maintenance of a Usenet archive in much the same manner that cable companies kick in to cover C-SPAN's costs. While some newsgroups are higher content than others, there's no denying that there is an absolute treasure-trove of information that passes through news servers every day. Since the entire online community benefits, the entire online community ought to pay to maintain an archive.

Just today I saw an online article that over half the households in the US are online in some capacity. According to the Census Bureau, that means around 50 million households are online. A buck a month per customer routed through ISPs and you're looking at six hundred million dollars a year -- enough to cover an archive without even asking the rest of the world to kick in. We could pay for it ourselves as a token gesture of reconciliation for "Americanizing" the rest of the net through brute force.

You run into the issue of censorship almost before the proposal hits paper. For every newsgroup there will almost certainly be someone or many someones who wants the content sifted or outright not in the archive. Beating these people into submission so that they will be silent forever will be difficult.

Just a notion, make of it what you will. I'm sure there's a vast array of technical issues that would have to be worked out up front, but I'm absolutely convinced that this could work. Further, I think this is the only way a Usenet archive _can_ work (barring some well-funded philanthropic gesture from a dead billionaire).

Comments?

The net does not want its own history

[Ars-Fartsica]

The value of a web article, news story, or usenet post is inversely proportional to the square of its age in days.

Or something like that.

I highly doubt that anyone will want to pay for an archive of usenet postings. Frankly, they are of limited use - most post threads offer very little useful information.

Deja's archives may be of interest to an educational institution looking at the historical value of the posts, but the useful market value of the posts is zilch.

As for Deja as a product review site - what can you say? It lost the race.

Epinions, Yahoo, and Amazon's product reviews are far out ahead, and Deja never really made a meaningful transition from being a usenet archive.

The bigger question is whether NNTP is kaput altogether at this stage.

Re-De-centralized Usenet

[sahai]

Personally, I think that the Usenet archive could be very attractive to an ambitious "P2P" company that wants to show that they can re-de-centralize USENET archives while maintaining searchability. Volunteers might be brought in to help host the millions of posts themselves.

Distributed full-text searching, possibly with some sort of centralized assistance, but truly distributed access would make for a pretty mighty technology demo. I wonder if they're up to the task.