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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?
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.
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.
-- Anne Marie
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.
http://www.deja.nsa.gov
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here is my offer for Deja
3 Cans of Spam
1 used Napkin (paper)
My Slashdot and ICQ accounts
The Head of Rob Malda
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
What Next? eBay.com For Sale? They could auction themselves off on... um... somewhere.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?
Spam: $0.01 a.b.p.erotica posts: $0.10 The perfect troll: Priceless
I've got some posts in that archive, I'm sure... Maybe I should sue for part of the asking price? ^_^
---
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.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
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.
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.
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.
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
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.
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
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.
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*
-'fester
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.
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.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
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
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
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.
-- Anne Marie
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Surely they can spare some of them 6,000 computers :).
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 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.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
I have the weirdest feeling I've seen this article somewhere before...
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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??
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?
--
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.
Seastead this.
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.
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.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
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'.
Ok, when I signed up to deja, I agreed to its privacy policy presented to me at that time.
/. today?
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
It'd be a damn sight easier to use than what Deja has now.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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
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.
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?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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.
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.