Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
> 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
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'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
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
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.
-----
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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...
"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.
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.
--
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...
--
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.
--
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.
--
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:
Searched the archives for pr0n.
Results 1 - 10 of about 23,200,000,000. Search took 0.15 seconds.
Did you mean: porn?
--------
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
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....
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.
--
--
silence is poetry.
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.
Regarding janpod66: That is a typical pissy reaction to change of any sort. There're a lot of great postings in the archives. It's a fine resource. A six-month limit just makes no sense. Rather, people should own up to what they post. Most of us would find that a natural thing to do. I do it every day. Regards.
Now is the winter of our disco tent
I'm sure there are plenty of articles and other literary works that people wish they had never written. But like it or not, they are history, and valuable information is still there for the finding. If you don't want any old records to be archived, don't ever publish anything -- electronic OR otherwise.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
alt.binaries.* groups back to '95? :-)
no that's alot of porn
--
Damn it Jim, that's my sphincter, not a jelly donut!!!
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: