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Gooja's Got Old Stuff Online Now
Chrismo was one of several readers to contribute this news: "Google Groups now has the Deja content back to 1995 online." While that still leaves plenty of Usenet not yet accounted for, it's a huge step (backward) forward.
Depends. Does your university have a feed to or from one of the commercial/ providers? Ex: TAMU had a feed to supernews which then propagated the tamu.* to the world. I can see the tamu.* stuff on supernews and usenetserver... BUT it does not include clarinet since that is a subscription service and those that subscribe are under contract to make sure that their system does not "leak" clarinet posts.
PS... usenetserver only has the uva.general and uva.want-ads groups... but the fact that they can get those means that they can probably get the rest as well..
fire up gopher and go to gopher.browser.org
in the site there are usenet archives from _1981_
i wasn't even born yet!!
I think the new-new economy you speak of is anything but. It's back to business as usual for the internet, just like every other mass-marketed medium i.e. television, radio etc. They all started out free...
groups.google.com has been on websense's block list for 4 months already.
I found this on the end of what turned out
to be the last page of postings even though
the search results indicated there would have
been more than 1000 (this was the 100th page
with 10 per page - note the fencepost problem).
Now what is the criteria for deciding which
1000 were relevant and which of the others
were not? It was a single keyword search only.
From the last page:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 999 already
displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included..
Hmmm, wouldn't this be a new form of censorship? Effectively, if someone voices an opinion which you dislike, you could link him/her to an obscure/past post that will remove him/her of any credibility (say, a post in alt.sex.hampsters or somesuch) and blackmail him/her. I'm sure that'll shut him/her up.
This is great! While browsing newsgroups back in 95, I came across a great piece of crossposting spam. I'm going to go look for it now.
I would have lied to you silly.
" Nah, just used it to fix my C when windoze
gave me grief."
Then you wouldn't have seen all the posts I made
about how I more often than not end up doing the
Boss's wife.
I hope google does a deal so I can buy old stuff before it goes offline again, electronics repair and web stuff. Information to invalidate questionable patents will be in there. How about they cut some popular groups, and advertise special releases on DVD - real cheap for pre-orders. I'll buy, probably loose the cd some months down , then re-order. PS have 10 free onetime use seaches with the CD.
Anyone else having the problem that stuff they nuked from Deja YEARS ago has returned with Google Groups? Not all of it has returned; just about 200 posts from a account I don't have any longer--articles that I nuked in 1998.
Now my boss can check all my previous screw-ups and flames since 1995. Thanks, Google!
"I ofter wonder how anyone can find any specifically useful information in the newsgroups. "
?
You really mean that? I find very usefull info in the newsgroups every day. How? I use a search engine, like google. Try it, it won't hurt.
If you check these groups, they are being archived. This looks like a labelling error.
eeeewwww!!!
oh wait..you said *grainy* pics not granny pics.
my bad
Google allows you to nuke your old posts. You only have to send them a message with your address and the URL of the article you want to delete.
The details are at http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/help.html
Exactly. Nearly all of my LaTeX questions are answered by searching Deja. Click Advance search, enter a few keywords, and put *.tex into the Group field, then I get the answers after a few seconds. Deja is the most useful if you know which newsgroups your questions are asked, which can raise the S/N ratio a lot.
I just checked out my dopey, USENET posting past, and I must say that it's a very weird feeling once again seeing messages and discussions that I thought were long dead.
Also remember that people are also archiving large chunks of the web purely to capture a piece of "history".
--
Simon
Thanks.
--
Usenet is different to mail or web. It has different advantages and disadvantages. The search engine is a massive advantage for finding useful information.
Some groups have spammer accounts pulled within minutes of the spam being posted. They don't get spammed often.
Trolls and flame wars are easily filtered. SLRN scoring on Linux or nfilter filtering on Windows.
Deleted
X-No-Archive: Yes
That's all you have to do.
Deleted
I got that too. Did you ask for that message? I certainly didn't. Please don't support businesses that spam, and don't use this site.
> The amount of useful content there is vanishingly small, and it takes far less time to just do a google search for the relevent information than it would to find the appropriate newsgroup and hope that there's someone else there with half a clue.
t hat_never_ended.html
And now USENET content from 1995, when it didn't suck half as badly, even if it was always September by then[1], is part of that googleable content. This is a _good_ thing. I've certainly found useful stuff on Deja in the past.
(And there are still some usable bits).
[1] http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/s/September_
--
rant
Does anyone know if this is also tackling newsgroups on University systems?
Most university systems made a concerted effort to avoid their groups "leaking" to the outside world. You mention UVa -- the news admin there when I had an account on darwin.clas got the occasional question of "why do some 'internal' groups keep showing up on other servers?"
The answer was cross-posting. If an article is cross-posted to an internal group and another group, it can "leak" the group as other servers will sometimes automatically add groups in Newsgroups: headers that they don't already have, pending review by the news admin. (This used to be much more common than it is today.) Then of course you would have people following up to both groups, which would lead to non-internal users' posts "leaking" back in, and people complaining "why does my ISP carry uva.general, but not others? Fix it, UVa-news-admin-person!"
These days many sites (such as MindSpring) simply reject articles cross-posted between internal and external groups.
-- Old Man Kensey
Wrong. Its the same 4GB of bad grainy pics over and over again. Trust me. My palm is sore and my mouse is sticky.
Yuck!
ACK
I know Deja has long offered posts going back to 95, but how I long for the pre-spam golden era of the late 80s...
Is it archived anywhere or is it gone forever?
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you choose to use a newsreader that requires you to wait for message headers to sync before posting, you have only yourself to blame.
-
Yeah? I first started using Slackware when it was at 3.2. That wasn't *so* long ago, was it?
Well, okay, four years.
My former ISP had this webpage about how they would help you promote your website by creating targeted mailing lists from usenet addresses.
They deserve what they get. Somehow, I think it's sorta fitting.
Ah, my days of porn as a teenager came back beautifully.
Viewing or starring in?
Mostly because the web is hard to archive, but Usenet is easy. You don't see someone providing a compilation of all the helpful web sites from '95 to the present, do you? But you can now search Usenet for helpful information on a topic all the way back to then.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I've solved more technical problems with google (and deja before it) by taking the error I was getting and pasting it into the search criteria. Or paraphrasing the problem and searching in the appropriate group.
...)
I've rarely found something so esoteric that *someone* hasn't asked the question. (Occasionally -- very occasionally -- I find something no one *responds* to
I've solved problems co-workers have spent days on, just by going to google/deja and searching. At one job, I taught people how to do the searches themselves as a research tool...
Very cool, and glad more of it is on-line now!
GenericJoe
Get a cheap shell account with an ISP and telnet/ssh in to a news reader for use during the day. Or, get an account with a beefier subscription-based news service with a web interface like newsfeeds.com.
(Or you can go total geek like some people out there and colocate a unix box for all your non-work related activities which you connect to in the morning and logout from before you leave work...)
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Someone didn't read the USENET Primer before they started! :-P
(See "Be Careful What You Say About Others")
Well, what do you know? I just searched for "pr0n", and what category links do I get?
I don't even want to start thinking about how _THAT_ did happen... *g*
np: Reinhard Voigt - Track 3 (Premiere World)
As always under permanent deconstruction.
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Of course, I've probably said something like that before, and now I could find it again...
As others have pointed out here, google isn't the only usenet archive around. Is one to go to every single one individually and ask them all? Should you have to keep track of every time a new usenet archive service appears? If a company buys an existing usenet archive, can they be trusted to continue to honour the "deleted" messages? What about usenet archives which don't allow you to do request that your posts be deleted?
I don't see a way around it, quite frankly .. the proverbial cats out of the bag .. if you have some nasty stuff from your past that you want gone, its too late.
-----
From the announcement:
With the completion of the archive project, we expect to offer posting by no later than mid-May.
Altavista has changed their submit URL process. A picture of randomly created numbers and letters are shown, you have to type them in and only then you can submit your URL. They had to do this because most of the submissions were from auto-submission services, which sent 95% crap.
A similar thing could be done with the email address display within Google Groups search results.
I had a person ask my be e-mail about a month ago on a problem I had with MS-SQL (I know, but if I have to deal with the biatch it WILL behave) The article I posted on USENET was over 3 years ago.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
As if we all did not use it when those hand me down pc's were dumped in our laps. I don't think Linux would be where it is today without Deja.
If only we could go back to Deja's content and moderate the hell out of it and remove the "Me too's", ads etc. But then some peoples treasure is anothers bit-bucket.
I've seen several people complain about loosing their anoniminity by the USENET being archived. It was'nt until the spammers came around that we all started hiding our e-mail address and names. Google could fix this thou by removing the e-mail addresses/posters names. Then you you would have rants without any credibility. Would it matter anymore?*sigh*. A no win situation.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I think that's because of Google's reliance on links for importance weight. Tons of pr0n sites have enter/exit buttons, and most of those exit buttons link to Disney. Thus, if thousands of pr0n sites are linking to Disney, people searching for pr0n must find it relevant!
Something similar happened with George W and the search term "dumb motherfucker."
Look, friend, Google Groups's interface is still in beta . If you have a suggestion or complaint, then for heaven's sake stop whingeing and tell them , not us.
It didn't take long to discover Netnews. Because I was basically a sorceror's apprentice playing around without a wizard at my side, I made some incredible newbie mistakes, like trying to figure out what inews did, sending out a newgroup control message by mistake, and getting personally flamed by Mark Horton, if I recall. I was part of a minor flame war that erupted on net.jokes over the appropriateness of posting ethnic humor, a fuss that resulted in the creation of net.jokes.d to segregate the discussion from the humor.
I didn't have the slightest clue that I was in on the beginning of something that would change the world, and so I saved almost nothing of what I contributed or enjoyed on Usenet in the early '80s. I'd love to recover it--embarrassing as some of it might be.
>What's the point of USENET? The few times I've ever bothered with it, it's been nothing more than random flamewars...
/google, is the single largest repository for technical information in the world. I have often found better info on usenet, than on the web.
There are still many great Usenet groups, you may not have found them, but they are there.
That there also is a lot of crap groups, flooded with trolls, kooks and spam, is because it is free and anarchic (the alt.*).
In many respects it is similar to the web; Huge, disorganized, full of crap, with some real gold nuggets here and there.
How would you react to somebody who said "I have tried this web-thing a couple of times, but it was full of crappy, rotting homepages, pr0n, pop-up sites, and whizzbang rotating banners."
About the kernel list. It too, like many other maling lists, had its of share spam (discussed many a times on the list, recently; Maps DUL)
The Usenet groups I follow are either totally spam free, or almost (a spam twice a year), thanks to moderation, or vigilant spamfighting.
And the kernel list do have a Usenet gateway, since Usenet readers, are an excellent way to read high volume lists.
>But then again, it always suprises me how much "foward-thinking" tech types seem to want to cling on to the past.
Usenet, as archived by deja
If you need such info, then it would be a rather backward thing, to disregard Usenet.
And yes, thanks to google, you too can access Usenet by the web, with all the hyperlinks and html, that you crave.
Interesting point. I knew I'd been spammed but this is literally the FIRST time a spammer actually had something to say that I actually wanted to hear. I get an average amount of spam that I don't ask for (well, I guess technically all my spam is spam I didn't ask for...that's what spam is) and I see your point- supporting spammers just encourages them.
But OTOH until Google brought the archives back on line it was a no-horse town if you were looking for free web-based access to USENET. And I'm glad to see another free provider trying to provide USENET access via the web, if only to keep Google on their toes.
I guess I'm getting mellow in my old age but I don't plan to not use the site on principle, just because they spammed me. I may not use it because it sucks, but not because they used a business practice I vehemently disagree with. Once upon a time I would do that (I refused to buy from eToys and told all my friends to do the same) but now I just don't care enough. Sad but true. Keep fighting the good fight, though.
I haven't had the time to check it out in depth but I got this mail the other day:
---
USENET archives are now available on http://www.etin.com
Chronologically relevant searching of messages.
Browsing of text and binary newsgroups. Posting.
Free. Public. Complete. Anonymous.
Text messages are archived and retained permanently.
Binaries are retained 10 to 20 days.
---
I don't know how good it is though. I tried a quick search for some of my old postings and got nothing.
If I were such a person, I'd worry more about governments, corporations, and other potentially nefarious entities that are trawling for and archiving only those posts with X-No-Archive headers, in which all the potentially incriminating stuff is conveniently marked.
Usenet was great in the early 90's - it was like Fidonet or somesuch, except on crack. The quality of converstation was quite high, as the only people with meaningful net access were probably in university or involved in research activities. Once the boom started, there was a period of 1-2 years (or maybe a year or two more) where Usenet degraded into a spam-filled hell.
Now, it seems most of the kiddies have gone to troll slashdot and it's kin, and left usenet alone - or at least the groups that I frequent. This has caused a slightly higher SnR... imagine getting useful information from Usenet again! Usenet is the ultimate for loading onto a palmpilot or handheld computer and wasting time-o-plenty, and at the same time, maybe learning something. The Usenet group FAQ's are an incredible repositiory of otherwise hard or impossible to locate information - I cite the rec.food.coffee FAQ as an example :).
A slashcode to NNTP gateway would be da shit though. :)
..don't panic
Hackers really do have more phrases to describe software and hardware lossage than Yiddish has to describe obnoxious people.
Gotta remember this one for when the next time the corporate Exchange swerver hoses itself...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I would *love* to be using tin (substitute your newsreader of choice) to read usenet instead of a heavily lagged web interface (ie it takes a couple of days for messages to show up). However, I don't have access to a Real NNTP Server(TM). My school isn't enlightened enough to provide one (which shocked me when I got here...I had always had NNTP access with my Internet access until that point), and I can't afford to pay for one of the commercial services. So I'm stuck with web-based interfaces.
Tell me about it. Now that they've got archives back to 1995, they've got everything I said when I was a clueless AOLer. *hangs head in shame*
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
But where is the old testement stuff? Does uunet
have any of these? Afterall, Usenet has been
around a lot longer than 6 years!
Without the ability to follow threads of conversation, it has very limited value to me. The old deja was much better. :(
Well, considering that Huey, Dewey (sp?) and Louie don't even wear pants, is it really that surprising?
;-)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Try the little box with the button beside it saying 'search'.
Rocks
--
May we live long and die out
This is wrong. My Usenet postings are certainly not public domain, even if I wished they were: according to German copyright law, a work cannot enter the public domain unless the author has been dead for 70 years.
Posting something on on Usenet probably shows your consent to some ways of distributing it. But people get rather upset if, for example, their work is used in a book without their permission. Some authors (e.g. of FAQs) even limit redistribution explicitely.
BTW: Does anybody know why about one third of the articles has a score of 4 and above? Is anybody an expert in Usenet matters nowadays?
In their latest incarnation, the top half of the browser window was entirely ads except for deja's logo and a few navigational controls. The bottom half had ads on the left and right sides, leaving only about 1/4 of the total screen to actually display the article. And they'd even started selling links attached to specific words in articles. They had so many ads that even the ordinary Joes would have to learn to ignore them or wouldn't be able to use the site.
Google seems to be doing OK surviving on Yahoo's rental of search services (yes, Yahoo offers a search through the Usenet archive) and the few targeted ads that show up at the top of searches if you search on the right word(s). And they don't overwhelm you with so many ads that you can't find the articles.
As for myself, I routinely archive every post in every newsgroup I frequent, indefinitely. Even when I'm not reading it. On a number of occasions, this policy has been extraordinarily useful. Not so much to smear others or even to win arguments, but for when someone (including myself) wants an answer to an InFrequently Asked Question. It typically takes me about 30 seconds to find all previous relevant responses.
Deja's crippling of older achives was quite a blow to me -- I hadn't realised how much I had relied on external archives of groups that I don't normally follow. Troubleshooting in particular is much easier if you can locate someone else's discussion of an obscure problem. I was not surprised when Deja finally died -- they had already gutted it and mangled the interface too badly for anyone to get any benefit from it.
That loss of old posts won't happen again -- I wrote a script to automatically extract newsgroup articles from the archive, and have so far retrieved around 180 MB of history in relevant groups. Even if Google goes under, I'll still have quite a useful archive of my own, albeit limited.
-- Tim Little
Dang, I've read my own posts, and they are really really lame. Almost as lame as those I post nowadays, but with my real name attached to it!
However, there are those who says that what Google is doing is nothing short of copyright infringement and killing the discussions on news. I beg to differ, and I believe this is just another area where we have to adjust ourselves to new technology and possibilities. If you can't live with the new times, that is your problem. If you can't live with what you've said and done, that is still your own problem. And if you can't tolerate what others say and do, that problem lurks within you until you change. We're just reaching one more step closer to a completely different type of society and life than we're used to. If you stop and notice, you can feel the movement of society. It's not just RIAA, MPAA, AOL, Microsoft and whoever else we got on our pick-list that has to change. Somehow, this is all common sense prevailing! When something becomes stupid enough, it's recognized as such and dealt with on all levels.
This is a time to be humble, because the proud will surely stumble. Try to cover all your tracks, and you will never discover your lacks.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Compare that to the 20 seconds that Deja.com achieved and draw your own conclusions ...
Even if they implement posting, can you imagine participating in discussions only every 36 hours?
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Until they have threading by message ID (ANY threading at all, please) it is kind of pointless to try to follow a discussion.
Until the basic search sorts by date instead of relevance, you'll get a jumble of messages from 1995, 2000, 1998, 1997, conveniently mixed up for your perusal.
Until they find out that a Web search engine cannot be simply "tweaked" to also cover newsgroup messages, their interface will stay inferior to Deja's.
I would have paid for a Deja subscription. Trouble is, Deja.com never asked me to until they went bankrupt.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
And, Google should not only honour X-No-Archive lines in the header but also in the first line of the body -- people had the clear intention of not having certain posts archived but Google displays them anyway.
And about that IRC archive thing, ain't that a business idea ...
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
The USA has got some good material with Bush though.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
How can you verify that "X-No-Archive: yes" posts have all been excluded? AFAIKT you would have to be able to search all articles' header for that line. The Google Groups Advanced Search currently does not allow limiting a search to headers. In fact, I can't figure out how to view the full headers of individual messages.
I am not a lawyer.
I think that it depends on what groups you look at to be honest.
I've got lots of useful information from sci.electronics.* for instance.
My completely non-technical mum found usenet of her own accord recently ahd has found it very useful with regards to genealogy.
Cheers,
oojah
--
Do you have any better hostages?
Yeah, like they have alt.solaris.x86 but not alt.solaris. ??? (I know, comp.unix.solaris or whatever, but still...)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
it is kind of wierd to read my old posts to the newsgroups that i frequented in college. i would never agree with some of the things that i said back then, or now do not feel as strongly about them as i do now. i guess i'm just getting older and less passionate about the things that i believe in. andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
650 million messages (over a terabyte of pr0n, spam, and inane self obsessed rantings).
Assume the archive is 1.3 TB. Divide by 650 million messages and you get 2 KB/message. This seems to indicate that Deja removed newsgroup postings when archiving them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was trying to find my old postings here on Slashdot, but the search engine is -- to put it politely -- poor. I go to the box at the bottom of the page, type in "ChaoticCoyote", and it can't find more than a few of my postings here.
Discussions older than two weeks are archived and reformatted into mostly static .shtml files that take less CPU time to serve. (Then they're removed from the database, freeing table space for more discussions.) Google and other search engines are free to follow the links through the doubly-linked list of static archives.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I receive on three results
Google ranks by link popularity, putting pages that are too similar to popular pages in the "There are x hundred pages that are very similar to this page" section.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The comp.databases.oracle.* groups are very helpful to Oracle folk. Too bad most of my best stuff was 92-94.
It'll be nice to be able to bring up my old unix advocacy posts and say "SEE!! I TOLD YOU SO!"
Or not.
But the various posts about how embarrasing it is... one can but hope that our society will grow up and realize judgement of onomatopoeia is ridiculous.
joelga lives! Now all I need is an archive of my older personas.
Oracle and unix guy.
how much data is there? how many cds would it take? we could just all have a personal copy of the data! Instead of distributed computing, we could use distributed storage - every looks after a few megs of UseNet!
Usenet is full of junk? Try reading slashdot at -1 for a while.
Bill, uses a newsreader.
Try using a regular newsreader. They work far better than the miriad of web-based services.
A .newsrc is very useful. It keeps a record of which articles you have read, so then when you come back a day (or an hour) later, only new articles are presented.
Why oh why can't slashdot do this?
Bill, slashdot: 1-59,61-97
Repeat after me, "There is more to usenet than the alt.* hierarchy."
Bill, "Slashdot is just a load of links to some goatsex website."
During an interview with several prospective employees I have asked if they knew of, ever posted on the UseNet. If the answer was "yes". I would go further and ask if they used it for work related purposes. If that answer was yes I have asked for the email address of their posts. Then I would search deja: a~ emplyee@oldjob.com To see their comments. Amazing what you can find out about a person this way. I would hate for a potential employer to see *all* of my postings!
--- Every day I am forced to add another to the list of people who can kiss my ass...
A long time ago I wrote:
I had trouble getting XFree86 3.3.1 to run on my new IBM Thinkpad 560E with the Trident Cyber 9382 running the latest version of Slackware (3.4)
Hmm, X really hasn't come that far has it? That new 560E is a 150 and cost me more than $3000! And Slackware was at 3.4? Great. I feel old now.
It is Google's policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an appropriate manner under such Act and other applicable intellectual property laws, including the removal or disabling of access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity. For more information, see our Terms of Service.
"By posting on usenet you do implicitly agree that your post will be copied to many servers and stored for some time, ... Googles archive (like Deja's before) is essentially just a newsserver ..."
Yes, you agree your post will be copied and stored. And if I publish a book and sell copies and even mail many copies to public, non-profit libraries, I expect and agree my book will be stored and made available to the public for a long time and even copied to the extent permitted by fair use. But if a for-profit corporation started making copies and and profiting from them, either by selling copies or by generating advertising revenue from their distribution, they would be violating copyright law.
I and many other people expected that our Usenet articles would be shared and distributed in Usenet as a reciprocal peer-to-peer cooperative effort. We did not expect or agree that our writings would be used commercially.
"So in what way is Google Groups more "commercial" than the newsserver an ISP provides as a service for its customers (for which they pay as part of their ISPs fees)?
When a cab driver charges money to transport me to the library, where I make a copy for myself, that's fine. When an ISP charges money to provide me access to Usenet, that's fine. When somebody goes to the library, copies everything they can find in it, and sells the copies, that's illegal. When somebody goes to Usenet, copies everything they can find in it, and sells the copies, that's illegal. (For these purposes, "distributing copies to make money through advertising" equals "selling".)
Another difference is that simple ISP access does not archive Usenet. The implicit permission an author grants in posting an article is permission to distribute in Usenet, which is designed to expire articles. Along with this permission may go permission for individuals to make their own copies permanently for personal use, since this is fair use. But it does not include the right to make copies for non-personal use.
"If you post on usenet you put things in the public domain, ..."
"Public domain" is a legal term that means not just that copies were given to the public but that rights were given to the public. Posting an article to Usenet is not putting it in the public domain.
"If you wrote a letter to the NY times 20 years ago that was subsequently published it is still available in the archives today and there is nothing to be done about it!"
Your letter to the Times is available to anybody who wants to look it up and make a copy for personal or other fair use. But if somebody started publishing copies, they would be violating the law.
No post since April 25th is available on Google right not (April 27)
You can't tell me that comp.lang.perl.misc has had zero activity
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Doing a search on "sweet sucking schoolgirl" came up with a result. :) Ah, my days of porn as a teenager came back beautifully. lol
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If only they brought back threading then I'd be really happy :-)
I loved the format that Deja presented its newsgroups in. I'd been using Deja since they day they started as it instantly proved useful in getting to the Usenet info that mattered to me at that moment.
Now, the layout of Google pages is too spread out. Deja had a really compact format that let you scan the pages. Their ad links were extremely annoying, but on a couple of occasions they proved useful. The search word highlighting they started to use at the end was useful and Google seems to have done it one better with the colors, but their overall format still just seems wrong.
Deja also let you post which was useful to me from anywhere I might be logged in. The current format means I have to go back to Outlook Express and friends to get on my local ISP's servers and wait as thousands of message headers are synced up.
Now that the Google engine is in Yahoo and Deja, it's effectively covering a wide swath of Internet searching. The only good innovation is the Google Cache. I wonder how many Network Appliance boxes they have to support that.
I wonder if there is an old old version of Deja pages in the Google Cache. =)
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
People criticising the fact that newsgroup discussions are archived, don't think about the importance of the data it contains. Nearly everytime i have a fall-out, problem, ... in my job I can find the answer onto dejanews. maybe I have the luck my job is computer related, but I think you can find solutions for many other domains too.
I can understand this - binaries are high-bandwidth. Though since Google strips out the encoded binary, like Deja did, not archiving the remaining text has got to yield some seriously diminishing returns.
More interesting (and baffling/troubling, IMO) is the rather... selective approach Google appears to have taken with regard to other alt groups, particularly in certain hierarchies. Want to read about bondage? Okay, they archive alt.sex.bondage... but not alt.sex.stories.bondage. Into animals? alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape is yours for the browsing, but not alt.sex.hedgehog.ouch.ouch.ouch. alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk is okay, but alt.alien.visitors is no longer archived. alt.rock-n-roll.symphonic is mysteriously no longer archived, while other groups in that sub-hierarchy are.
I wasn't able to find anything in the Google Groups help explaining what their criteria are for deciding that a group should no longer be archived.
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now if only I could read my /. comments from two months ago... I'd be happy.
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You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Google seems to be doing OK with providing a free search engine... Also once they get beyond beta stage, they might find an ad-based revenue model similar to their web search, e.g. inoffensive text-based ads that are relevant to the newsgroup / searchterms entered.
> the articles has a score of 4 and above? Is
> anybody an expert in Usenet matters nowadays?
I get the impression the moderation system is broken! After there were no mod points for anyone for a while, now everybody seems to have them, I certainly had way over my share for the last couple of days!
Replace public domain in my comment with a non-legal term meaning you have given the public access to it.
"Your letter to the Times is available to anybody who wants to look it up and make a copy for personal or other fair use. But if somebody started publishing copies, they would be violating the law."
That situation is not analagous to the Google case. By posting on usenet you do implicitly agree that your post will be copied to many servers and stored for some time, as this is what usenet is meant to do. I am not aware there is even a convention for what an acceptable time to keep posts on the server is.
Googles archive (like Deja's before) is essentially just a newsserver where articles have a long lifetime and it incorporates a search feature. Many groups get archived somewhere by some individual and quite a lot of these are out on the web. Posters should either post under a pseudonym or just have the cool to say: "yes, I posted that, that was 7 years ago, so what!"
So in what way is Google Groups more "commercial" than the newsserver an ISP provides as a service for its customers (for which they pay as part of their ISPs fees)?
Besides in the FAQ google say they honor the 'X-No-archive: yes' header and it also gives you the chance to request deletion of individual old postings, so if you are really concerned about what you once wrote you can make the effort to get it out of the public domain again! So in fact you have more chances to exercise your copyright here than in other traditional media once you have released your post into to open :)
ponxx
History, my friends, history. I was trying to find my old postings here on Slashdot, but the search engine is -- to put it politely -- poor. I go to the box at the bottom of the page, type in "ChaoticCoyote", and it can't find more than a few of my postings here.
However, now that Google has the old Usenet stuff back online, I can search back and review what I've said over many years.
Are old Usenet postings relevant? Well, consider the creation of a historical record -- as more communications travel the electronic road, fewer are preserved to provide a historical context of our times. Beyond the momentous issue of history, I often like to see what I was thinking 2, 5 or even ten years ago, to see how (or if) I've grown or changed.
Let's see what Google digs up from my long career on Usenet... hmmm... sort it by date...
1,620 hits since 1995. It sure does accumulate... let's see what I was talking about way back when...
Okay, there's some leftist stuff (Native American and environmental)... a lot of messages about Age of Empires and naval gaming... a random dinosaur article or two... lots of dicussion of my books, mostly positive (yeah!)... and, of course, all my C++ and Java postings.
Nothing embarrassing, to my relief. That is perhaps the only problem with history -- we have to live with what we've done. That's why I'm against Anonymous postings -- people don;t have to live with or learn from the immaturity or past stupidity.
A suggestion to Slahsdot: If Google had an "obligation" to maintain the old Usenet archive, isn't it equally incumbent on Slashdot to make its old messages readily searchable? Just a thought...
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Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
I saw some old postings that I commited 6 years ago.
I believe that now they're available to anybody, spammers will collect my obsolete email addresses and flood the corresponding ISP.
It is not that I care that much but maybe they should proceed with an user email protection so that automated collection of email addresses becomes tricky enough for most spammers.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
>I ofter wonder how anyone can find any : :-).
> specifically useful information in the
> newsgroups.
> There is SO much info there that finding
> something specific is literally looking for
> a needle in a haystack, or 16k in a terabyte
> of data.
From my own experience
Yesterday I needed to modify Stronghold (aka RedHat Apache) source code (thanks, Open source
I don't know if you ever studied it but I have to admit it has been really painful to understand its internal logics until I found out about one function which name i submitted to Google Groups.
3 minutes later I knew all that I needed to sort out my Proxy problem.
Thanks Google Groups, also thanks to the newsgroups community.
I strongly believe that a newsgroups search engine is mandatory to find the answer to your problem as soon as you realize that there are few chances that somebody has not had the same problem as you before and that he has not managed to solve it online.
So, if you have a problem, just ask Google groups and you'll be astonished by how quickly you'll refer tothe solution of a similar problem, be it technical/troubleshooting related or a buying decision.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Because, used properly, it can't get slashdotted? (a moderated slashdot newsgroup, gatewayed to the Real Thing would an interesting thing).
Because it's more resilient than the web? (One newsserver down doesn't take an entire group with it).
Because you could check up Linux's history without linking to a page that pops up windows like I just did? (Can't find a more decent archive of Linus's Linux first annoucement. We need the 1991 archives on deja/gooja).
Because of the scary devil monastery?
Too many other reasons that if you've to ask, then it's probably not for you.
Am I the only one who sees Usenet archives like this as a bad thing? I've always been of the opinion that Usenet is a discussion medium, *not* a publication medium. If I wanted my text to linger forever, I'd be publishing it to a web page, not posting it to an informal Usenet discussion.
Surely I can't be the only person who's received email about posts, months or even years after I made them! This in particular drives me crazy and I put these messages on the same level as spam. The fact that I happened to post to alt.hackintosh two years ago doesn't mean my mailbox is a 24/7 Mac Hack Helpdesk.
Yet thanks to Deja (and now Google), if you forget that X-No-Archive header, your text - and perhaps your email address or an inane signature - will be there for the rest of the world to see forever. From my experience, a large portion of these people also like to revive year-old discussions, via email, and at their whim.
With this news, those of us who thought our long-ago blunders were in buried the bitbucket now see that they've been revived.
Archiving Usenet is, IMO, as insane as archiving IRC^H^H^HNevermind, I don't want to give Google any ideas...
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
...postings on the web, containing more than 650 million messages (over a terabyte of human conversation).
...postings on the web, containing more than 650 million messages (over a terabyte of pr0n, spam, and inane self obsessed rantings).
SHOULD read:
My favorite USENET group, and only group that I read regularly, rec.music.gdead, was often crapflooded by a boring, uninventive troll. I was glad when deja went under.
Now, like Taco, I have nothing against imaginative trolls, but when it's always the same old shit about Bill Kreutzman I get annoyed.
Please, if you're going to troll, be imaginative.
Good luck Google, you're going to need it.
Lest you join the web corpses of Remarq, Deja, etc.
Depends what you're doing. As a computer engineering student I find the comp.arch.embedded and the sci.electronics.* groups to be really helpful and almost spam-free.
On the other hand, I'm sure most of use former mac users know what happened to comp.sys.mac.games (gee, a big file named photoshop_full.hqx? What could that be? Better download it...)
Searched the archives for pr0n.
Results 1 - 10 of about 23,200,000,000. Search took 0.15 seconds.
Did you mean: porn?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
My favorite quotes from Linux ROX Windows SUX
Linux is impossible to crash
I have never had a program crash on me in Linux
If a program does crash in Linux it is possible to jump to another virtual terminal and fix the program.
Wait a tic...I thought you just said..
This is the best troll I've ever read. I've certainly had linux lock up on me like a crackwhore with tmj (a rare ocassion and usually my fault) and as for applications crashing they sure do although not all that often. This is someone who needs serious professional help to save him from his delusions linux is far from perfect but it's getting there. (note that the post is in alt.news.microsoft and is dated 1999/11/10)
Now when you search or browse Google Groups, you access the largest collection of postings on the web, containing more than 650 million messages (over a terabyte of human conversation).
Now all I need is tons of Mountain Dew, 24/7 Pizza, and several hundred years. Thanks Google.
I ofter wonder how anyone can find any specifically useful information in the newsgroups. There is SO much info there that finding something specific is literally looking for a needle in a haystack, or 16k in a terabyte of data.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
I found some of my old UUCP map entries from around 1994 in comp.mail.maps. It was fun to browse through some of the other users in those files and remember people that I haven't talked to in 6 or 7 years...
... remember when? :-)
Oh my! I can browse alt.sex.stories and the like with google, in my office!
It'd not be too long before my company discovers this and banned surfing google altogether.....
I think Group Google is biased, when I search windows rox linux sux it returns Linux ROX Windows SUX
hmm...kinda fishy....
Right up until the day Google took over, there was a sort of back-door way to be able to get a result set which still used the "Deja Classic" look.
My suggestion for Google: try to bring back this "Deja classic" look or at least use smaller fonts and less spacing between lines to be able to get more stuff onto the page.
Is there anything else Google can do to avoid the same fate?
I'm concerned that the sad realities of the new-new economy may be difficult even for Google to avoid in the long-term. :-(
I read in the latest version of wired that Google looking to recover archived posts back to the initial tests in the late 70's.
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silence is poetry.
From the legal point of view, the posters of the original messages hold the copyrights. While USENET always ended up on some backup tapes somewhere, arguably, the original posters didn't give consent to having their comments archived and made accessible forever by some big search engine company.
Legal issues aside, I think it is also a bad idea to make content from an informal discussion forum easily available for eternity. For participants in such forums to have to worry about whether something they say today may be used against them decades from now kills participation by thoughtful people. Of course, these days, many people try to protect themselves against that in part by using pseudonyms, but in 1995, that wasn't so common yet.
So, I don't applaud Google at all for putting this content back on-line. Google should not change the rules for content created years ago. And even today, I think it would be better to return USENET to an ephemeral, informal medium as much as possible.
I hope Google will go back to making only the last six months (or so) of content available. I believe that is what DejaNews ended up doing, and it's the right thing to do.
So, why is your response anonymous? Where are your real name and your E-mail address?
Once it became clear that USENET was increasingly becoming permanently fixed and searchable, I stopped participating under my real name. I never flamed on it or participated in particularly controversial subjects, but I still didn't want to have to deal with the possibility of being quoted out of context years later.
While anonymity has many undesirable features, it is the second-best choice if you can't have informal, short-lived discussions (this is, incidentally, why I'm not using my real name on Slashdot). For me, what killed USENET was not anonymity but its permanent archiving.
I think something similar has happened in politics: since everything is getting recorded and republished and analyzed word-for-word, politicians can't engage in thoughtful debate anymore in public for fear of offending someone or getting attacked on out-of-context quotes. Instead, every political message has to be carefully crafted and rehearsed; no extraneous utterance or debate is possible.
For a really interesting debate, check out the 1993 Usenet anon.penet.fi vs. flame war here and and the other privacy goodies in the EFF anonymity directory.
Just a few things:
1) Modified newsgroups
2) newsgroups that have more than two parts in their names
(like: ibm.software.websphere.application-server.as400 , not alt.flame, alt.computers)
I think if you really need information on something, you really can't ignore any channel.
please proff read !
alt.binaries.* groups back to '95? :-)
no that's alot of porn
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Damn it Jim, that's my sphincter, not a jelly donut!!!
If I could, I would. I do most of my news reading/searching from work, ie behind a corporate firewall. Most corporations do not see fit to open a hole for NNTP access. From home, I'm cruising, and I love a real newsreader vs the crap html based ones, but I've got no choice at work.....
Gollo.
I'll be much more excited when we can all finally post to newsgroups through (Deja) Google again. AND my preferred newsgroups come up immediately when I log on. AND it keeps track of my read and unread postings. It's hard to get excited about 6 year old postings when the above (lack of) functionality has a far greater influence on my day-to-day usage of the service....anyone got any inside info on when (if) this functionality might arrive?
Gollo.
Does anybody know how far back it would be possible to take an archive of usenet?
This one goes back to 1995 but are there any offline archives that go back further?
Went off in search after asking the question...
This one has articles from 1981 - 1982:
I think that is awesome that someone actually spent the time and harddrive space to support something like this. I know that for myself I will enjoy perusing the sports section of the Clari.net Orioles Baseball section. Plus, it will be interesting to be able to look back in the science sections, specifically the accoustics.physics newsgroup and read about the advances over the years. It will also serve as a great reference for papers that I intend to be writing in the next few years about accoustical systems.
Does anyone know if this is also tackling newsgroups on University systems?
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.