What's The Problem With USENET?

Sir_Winston writes: "For many months now, several of the larger news servers--at least, the "premium" news servers who sell access to individuals, not just to other businesses--have been experiencing severe problems with retention and sometimes with propagation as well. I can remember subscribing to services like Altopia and Newsfeeds because my local ISP's feed had retention of only ~2 days, but now several of the commercial news servers are down from 8-14 days to around 2-4 days. (some offer retention stats on their Web pages, and others can be gleaned from talking with customers). Talking with users, some seem to blame broadband connections for allowing users to flood USENET beyond reasonable capacities. Is this the case, or are there other considerations? Given that USENET isn't a truly distributed system, is it in for increasing problems as more people keep dumping massive binaries that may be better posted somewhere else? (For example, almost every mp3 posted to USENET can be found on Napster, often at higher bitrate). So, is there a problem, and if so how can it be addressed, and which USENET providers are still doing well at retention and completeness?"

Comments

Drop binaries

[ptomblin]

My site doesn't carry binaries. Neither do my main upstream sites. We have a very complete newsfeed and retain newsgroups in the big 8 for about 15 days.

By the way, alt may be a sewer, but there are a couple of islands of very high quality groups. Most of them are high quality because they are patrolled by a cadre of old-timers who attack anybody who tries to lower the standards.

binaries on usenet.

[chuqui]

Usenet is the worst possible way to distribute binaries -- you are sending every byte of every messages to every computer everywhere, in case someone someone might want to look at it. It's the worse possible distribution model you could think of, especially since you have to encode it in 7bit ascii to boot, thus exploding filesize even further.

Want to fix usenet? do away with binaries. How? damfino. I wish you luck. As someone else said, with things like Napster, there's no reason for usenet binaries any more, anyway. Except for the "I have a hammer, so this must be a nail" problem. It's there, it's used, and nobody can say "no".

The primary use for usenet these days, IMHO, is to be a place where the kiddies go so they don't annoy the people with a clue who left and moved onto real systems to get their stuff done....

Re:binaries on usenet.

[Sir_Winston]

The encoding problems aside, there is one great advantage to USENET's kooky distribution model: data cannot be effectively blocked. It propagates like a virus, entering one server and then getting copied to nearby servers until it propagates all over the world. Now, hopefully systems like Freenet can handle that sort of problem, since they throw a technical solution at creating an uncensorable network without having to have the Rube Goldberg solution of distributing the data to every server, and provide a measure of anonymity and untraceability for both the posters and for the place(s) where the data are located. This sounds like a great solution for storing texts, but on the other hand it could never provide the the discussion qualities of USENET.

You might be surprised at how many fairly knowledgeable chums still poke around USENET. For example, if you want privacy and anonymity resources, there's no better place to go than USENET--the only things on the Web that can compare are those that rip off the FAQs and resources built up in some USENET groups.

The problem is certainly the binaries, though. Broadband connections have inspired too many twits to post hundreds of large files a day, which kills retention not just in binaries groups but in text groups as well since they're all typically stored in the same server pool. There are now binaries groups which were created specifically *for* broadband users, with no daily posting limits. Too many of these people fail to realize that what's posted in one group affects retention in all the others.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be binaries groups--I think there are some binaries groups in USENET which are great, because they're conversational and interactive, which you can't get from a Website or a Napster-type program. Some of them are very like the old BBS days, and it's nice to see "communities" not just file repositories.

For all the good stuff in some of the alt.security.* and comp.* and even occasionally in the alt.binaries.* hierarchies, I worry that a relative few people with broadband who are mostly posting stuff that would fit better elsewhere are going to drive USENET into the ground. It would be sad if USENET goes the way of BBSes--it'll go on, just like there are still a few BBSes here and there, but only as a shadow of its former self, catering mostly to nostalgics. That wouldn't be good.

The problem...

[Wakko Warner]

The problem with Usenet is that it was designed back in the '80s, when the only people on the Internet were researchers and college students and the fastest connection was a T-1. Typical lack of foresight: nobody expected this kind of bandwidth to be available back when colleges had 9600bps serial ports in every dorm room.

The easiest thing for most feeds to do is simply drop their alt.binaries.* groups (or at the very least, the binaries groups with the largest article counts); why bother having what effectively amounts to a local mirror of Napster? I fully expect to see most ISPs do something like this, if they haven't already.

The "nicer" providers might decrease the expire time on binaries groups to a day (I've seen half-day expires even) in order to raise expire times on other, more meaningful groups.

- A.P.

--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

spammers, trolls, flooders, script-kiddies

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem is that there are a lot more assholes who delight in destroying newsgroups and filling them up with garbage.

One of these characters is Gary Burnore. Some of you San Francisco Bay Area people might remember him as one who managed to piss off most of the ISPs around there and anyone heavily involved in database management. More of you might remember him as the one who harassed Jeff Burchell into shutting down the Huge Cajones anonymous remailer because someone fingered him for child molestation; a change for which he was subsequently convicted. In revenge, he had his now wife impersonate a lawyer to get the nonexistant logs of Huge Cajones shortly after Helena Kobrin harassed Jeff to get the same nonexistant logs. Jeff shut the remailer because of this.

Gary violated probation by leaving California for Raleigh, NC where he offers network services primarily to trolls, flooders, spammers, and other vandals and shields them from complaints. He and his syncophants have been known to threaten lawsuits, make physical threats, launch denial of service attacks, and make up stories to get critics kicked off their ISPs.

Usenet is attracting many more psychopaths just like Gary. They don't care how many people they piss off, nor are they concerned about possible legal consequences or retaliations.

Desert Rat