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Google Expands Usenet Archive to 20 Years
Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com
Ahh, to be young and brash again... oh, wait. Noooooooo!! Glad I've changed my email address since those long-(best)forgotten days. It wasn't me, I swear!
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Awright! Just think of all the old porn that awaits my eager stare! No sleep for me tonight.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I don't think ANYBODY should be held liable for Usenet postings they made when they were 14 years old...it's like having naked baby pictures of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around...
:)
On the other hand, you can now go back and see who REALLY won all those flame wars you were involved in
So that means that this is currently THE first post!
It's nice to browse through the archives and read my various posts over the years. How I've grown. :)
It should be noted that not all groups are archived. I recently checked out one of my favorites and after the name of it, it said (This group is no longer archived). That's a shame, because I would love to read the older stories of alt.sex.stories.
I wish that one can access the Google Groups through a news reader such as Pan, because I really don't like the interface Google provides, and one reallly can't change any of their account settings for posting. I was hoping these things would be fixed in beta, but I guess it's OK as it is.
You die too easily.
That's a neat timeline, but what it's missing that I'd love to see:
First Spam
First Metoo
First Flamewar
First MLM/chain letter
You know, the really important historical stuff.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
Remember when alt.sexy.bald.captains still had Star Trek in it?? These days, it's all alt, sexy, and probably bald - but that's about it :(
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
It doesn't have binary files on there. The only pr0n (why not just spell it as porn?) they have on there is erotic literature.
You die too easily.
Younger folks probably won't find this too interesting as it will be more like history to them rather than us old farts re-living younger days...
I went to the Google link where they have a list of firsts:
First mention of Microsoft; not even the oldest post!
IBM PC.
CDs, in 1982! Shit, now I realize how old I am!
C64, Lisa and Mac, AIDS (a purely homosexual disease?!?!- really weird 'cause I just found an old copy of Discover magazine that had a first mention of AIDS; blew me away due to difference in info we know now)
I love the "WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary" link under the Google link:
A bit of the text-
"
Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing.
The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into
multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of them across the web.
This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more information in the online project documentation, including some background on hypertext and many technical notes.
Try it
"
SGML! Does anyone remember this! "Try it" indeed! Wow, when I thought Usenet was the shit... hehehe!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Anyway.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
You don't have to dig. Google has already given you links to a lot of good, historical posts.
u nc e_20.html
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_anno
Good thing Google made a Usenet archive without using a news server !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Since my article submission is doomed for rejection, let me at least post some of extra stuff I had mentioned. First, check out the monolithic kernel debate between Andy and Linus for yourself. Second, in my article submission about Google, I also mentioned that Alexa now archives the Web, too. Try their Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I found they had an archive of my old WEBsurf magazine from 1997. Hilarious.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
So, I did what any person does-
I went and searched on my name and now defunct emails to see how far back I go, how complete their records are, and what an idiot I was when I posted newbie questions on Caldera OpenLinux 2, apparently after having given up on RH 3x.
At least I learned my lesson. There also appear to be a few stray posts I made about BeOS, and trying to sell an old BMW.
If this is all I have to worry about staying on the internet forever, I think I'll be okay.
Now I can browse all of my anti-Mac rantings from the comfort of my Powerbook G4.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
The only pr0n (why not just spell it as porn?) they have on there is erotic literature.
And in alt.ascii-art.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Think about this-
back then, there was nearly zero, and I mean ZERO, apam! The term off topic wasn't even invented as far as I can remember.
/. had nothing to do with this by itself- the invention of the web as a whole religated usenet into a smaller niche. Once you could add pretty graphics and pictures, the whole text medium was on the decline.
And forget news, you could find interesting and non-stupid content as well as news. I used to love reading alt.talk.bizarre, as it was different & weird & (again) non-stupid, but I have no idea what it is like now since I haven't been there in about 5-6 years. Probably 90% spam at this point.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Don't you love Google? This item took some decent reseach, holds genuine interest for many of us, is presented in a light format with no banner ads and is actually interesting.
If only Google could take over the WWW as well as usenet we'd all be better off!
and
alt.culture.electric-midget
This is the stuff that really bears the test of time! Not to metion the great AOL flood of 1995, and the annual rites of September.
What else? 20 years of tjames and kibo.
1.1 Why pave the earth?
There are several advantages of a paved Earth over a non-paved Earth, the only really important one is the ease of driving though. Today roads are narrow, you have to turn, and most governments frown at ground travel over Mach1. With endless blacktop in every direction, there will be no restriction to your movement, and rocket powered hypercars will whiz in all directions. We will be able to amuse ourselves with endless driving at incredible speeds while drinking beer and eating wonderfully juicy burgers.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When I searched Deja a few years ago I found a lot of very, very old posts I made to FidoNet "echos" before I had Internet connectivity. These were a serious blast from the past... right back to my childhood.
Back then nobody I knew had access to "the internet", although a few people could get limited janet access (a Uk academic network), and I'd love to reread some of them.
These posts don't seem to be on google. Does anyone know if they're lost forever or hanging around somewhere?
Thanks.
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
Actually, this is the first post. It's *9* days older! =)
It appears that this is the first message mentioning slashdot.org.
This one is the first post by Rob Malda.
First mention of Jeff "Hemos" Bates.
First mention of CowboyNeal (is it the same guy?).
Awww, you guys...
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Back before I realised anybody actually archived this stuff, man did I make a bunch of stupid posts.
Do a search for "Peter Buchy" and you'll find all kinds of weird shit.
The amusing part I think was in my high-flying "I'm an amazingly spiritual Christian out to save you" phase. Now I'm a far more sedate Christian, but still (as you'll note) a D&D player.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Since Google updated their archive, a search for USENET posts I have made turns up a big fat zero even though this same search pulled up ozens of posts just last week.
Even more surprising, I looked up a certain newsgroup only to find it contained zero posts when just last week there were several posts available via Google Groups.
" I bought the latest computer;
it came fully loaded.
It was guaranteed for 90 days,
but in 30 was outmoded!
- The Wall Street Journal passed along by Big Red Computer's SCARLETT"
Back in September 1989... I didn't think my 286 was outmoded back then... of course, I was only 7 at the time, wtf did I know? All I needed was Sopwith, Centipede, and Nyet!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Now that Google has a historian's wet-dream of actual writings by actual humans as they experienced historic events, such as the falling of the Berlin wall, what are the odds that someone at some point moves to ensure that this information is preserved? I think Google may be thinking very smart here. Their product could become so important that people might actively try to preserve the company, too.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
http://saveie6.com/
it was spelled pr0n back then so that it could not be found by search engines (of all kinds). that was of course when nobody knew about it (unlike today).
keep it simple.
Linus Torvalds has new computer See for yourself here
Subject: Booya!
Date: Jan 01, 1981
Newsgroups: alt.flame,arpanet.general
First Post!
--
Ah, those were the days.
-Legion
I'm gone from the archive. Like I was never there.
... I can't find any evidence of my existence on google.
effugas@best.com, dankamin@cisco.com, Dan Kaminsky
It's actually somewhat disorienting, like looking at your fingertips and seeing a smooth clear reflection staring back at you...
--Dan
(Yes, this is the third time I've tried to post this. Damn Slashfilters :-)
Accusations of ego surfing will be ignored. It's always interesting to see where you came from...
--Dan
Hey,
I used to have a bunch of posts on groups.google.com but now none of my old correspondence are there. Wierd, anyone else see themselves as missing?
Douglas Calvert
base64 is part of MIME from the start of the 90'ties, and wasn't really used on Usenet before mid 90'ties. Before that we used uuencode, however there was very little pr0n back then, and low quality. ASCII art comapred favorable to it. You couldn't upload much with 2400 baud modem.
We loved it, though!
even some (of my own) I posted in 1985, now that's scary. And an argument (that I don't remember) from around the same time about what may have been one of the first warez postings
like almost everyone else, I typed my "real name"...and found 293 articles dating back ./, anonymity and disguise
to april 1992. Excepted for my most private
and personal life, you could guess almost
exactly who I am, what is my career, hobbies
and so on... On
seem to be more prevalent than on Usenet.
Amazing also to see that before 1994 or so,
there were only educated, polite, informative
people on the face of the earth (and I looked
like a bad-taught puppy in comparison to them).
At this point, with AOLers and non-academics
appearing, something definitely changed.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
What is it with you people? An marvellous and unique archive like this will become completely useless if people like you want to start censoring it.
Take the responsibility for your posts!
And legally, those postings are not in the public domain and Google has no right to republish them beyond the purpose that their authors originally implicitly gave permission for: temporary distribution on USENET.
In which case given that the archive appears to be in the USA it would appear to be trivial for any authors who object to have them taken down. (Or we get proof that the DMCA is only for corporates and thus is voided by the US constitution anyway.)
back then, there was nearly zero, and I mean ZERO, apam! The term off topic wasn't even invented as far as I can remember.
Also you would rarely, if ever, see upside down followups.
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned this one yet.
Still a favorite of mine:
USSR on Usenet
Of course, now nobody thinks twice when they see a Russian address, but back then it was a big deal.
(To the younger readers: They were the bad guys back then, the "Evil Empire"...)
And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on
this network. So:
NA ZDAROVJE!
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
I just thank god no one seems to have archived IRC :-)
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Hey Folks,
:)
A lot of fun and a great job. Christ it's a laugh to look up first mentions of things.
Why not send a little thanks to google and the folks listed on their page that THEY give thanks to. For the lazy:
comments@google.com
bjones@wmhosting.com
faq-admin@faqs.org
magi@csd.uwo.ca
Doesn't take but a few minutes... So go on and drop them a note. Probably matters more than you think
Those postings were made in the expectation that they were part of an informal, temporary discussion group, not a permanent archive searchable by anybody and everybody in perpetuity.
Were your expectations set by policy or wishful thinking? I've been posting to UseNet since 1990/91 and I've never had a feeling that my comments would cease to exist. Each server in the distributed UseNet has always set its own policies, time horizons, groups to propogate, etc. When you've got thousands of those servers, each with different interests and resources, it's pretty natural to think that some of them would try to keep articles around longer than others.
AFAIK, Google's Groups function is part of USENET -- and there has never been a standard for length of cache on a USENET server.
:)
I think this is great - so much more information that can be indexed, searched, and relearned without the same old Q&A.
As for "temporary" -- no data is ever permanent: it's all a matter of perspective.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Read the FAQ, or use the Automatic Removal Tool.
-dair
Another question, while we're at it: It's inevitable that historians will include sometimes extended citations from Google's usenet archives in books they sell (much like Katz did for /.). Is it right that Usenet authors will contribute their ideas without their consent and without compensation from those who profit from their work? Do historians know any precedent in cases like this? I mean, I know that personal correspondence is often quoted by historians, but always after the author is dead (or explicitly gives persmission). I know usenet is not like personal correspondence, but it's not exactly like publishing, either. I'm not a social scientist, so I don't know what protocol applies here, but I'd love to hear about this from someone who does know.
Advanced google groups search yields Osama from Feb/19/1994
Text: In The Statement Sent To Several Saudi Newspapers, The Bin
Laden Family Members Said They Want To Disassociate Themselves
From Osama Bin Laden.
Osama Bin Laden Is Believed To Be Living In Sudan And Is Said To
Have Been A Main Financial Backer Of The So-Called Afghan Arabs.
They Are Muslim Arabs Who Fought Alongside The Afghan Mujahedin
Against Soviet Forces In Afghanistan.
The Bin Laden Statement Was Signed By Bakr Mohamed Bin Laden,
Osama Bin Laden'S Brother. In Their Statement The Family Said
All Family Members -- Whose Number Exceeds 50 -- Would Like To
Express Their Regret, Denunciation, And Condemnation For All Acts
That Osama Bin Laden May Have Committed, Which, In Their Words,
We Do Not Condone And Which We Reject.
Osama Bin Laden Has Been Specially Mentioned In Connection With A
Group That Has Committed Several Acts Of Violence In Yemen. The
Bin Laden Family Comes Originally From The Southern Part Of
Yemen. Some Family Members Emigrated To Saudi Arabia Decades
Ago. (Signed)
Well, UN is looking for new World Heritage targets to sponsor... ;-)
I never expected that my comments would "cease to exist": of course, there were backup tapes. However, there is a big difference between archiving them on some tape somewhere and republishing a massive database of comments 15 years after the fact.
None of that has any bearing on the question of copyrights. For example, just because TV networks broadcast stuff and lots of people tape them doesn't mean you can freely redistribute those tapes before the copyright is up.
Their list is great to browse through, but there are some real gems off the beaten path as well...
For instance, google points you to: "October, 1991 Linus Torvalds's Linux announcement"
But you can also find a quite interesting, more preliminary announcement from him a few months earlier: "What would you like to see most in minix?"
You can also read about Rob Malda's "Weird Problem while booting...", which is also the first time he calls himself 'Commander Taco' on Usenet. (October 1995)
Post your interesting finds!
I don't see why. First, there is a difference between personal use and commercial redistribution. Second, if the RIAA and MPAA rules are the law of the land, I expect Google to play by them as well when it comes to my content.
This very question of the copyright status of public postings has been tried and precedent has been set: Your Usenet posts aren't really copyrighted.
Oh? Would you care to share the case law?
Adjust your expectations of privacy downward.
I have, as have most other people. But the on-line world is poorer for it, because if every word is "on the record", people either post anonymously or they don't engage in informal discussions. You just can't have informal on-line conversations with friends if everything is recorded.
I think this should be called the St. Peter Effect... you see, cuz when we go to heaven, St. Peter will Google us, and pull back everything we have ever thought, said or did - ranked by relevance or date... Just be glad that mere mortals are limited to 20 years of newsgroup postings!
BTW: If you search on my name and find stuff about LSD, it was another Chris McKinstry.
The card I have is a VG-2000 by DFI
with 512kB video ram, supposed to be able to do almost anything (well
1024x768 16 colours anyway). The problem is - it doesn't.
Hey, buddy, quit bitching and just use it in VGA mode, like everybody else.
If you don't like it, why don't you just go write your own drivers? While you're at it, why don't you go write your own Operating System???
(Heh heh... Sure told him a thing-or-two...)
-- My Weblog.
I remember sizing a server in 1993 to be a news server and setting aside 350 megs for the news spool and then being pissed off when I got it because news traffic was up to 20 megs a day. The stats back then showed exponential traffic growth.
How much crap is in a typical full feed today?
P.S. I deleted all that stuff I said about your wife when I was real drunk.
-Kevin
It makes me nervous to find texts about people
having been abused and writing about it. And
that's by searching for their names and what
they've done technically the last years.
The Usenet was IMHO never as public as the web,
but had much more a private character, where people
could say what they only wanted to know certain
groups.
Just imagine, your name is well known (e.g. Linus Torvalds)
and suddenly someone who searches for it finds
texts you wanted to keep more or less private.
The famous post, i have seen it quoted so many times. So here it is in the flesh, posted by Linus Benedict Torvalds himself to comp.os.minix, 08:53:28 PST 5th October 2001. Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&th=8ed1169d0 b48c9b8&rnum=2
I found some of my earliest postings migrated from FidoNet to the Usenet groups. My jaw dropped when I saw the domain:
My.Name@p0.f860.n6007.z87.FIDONET.ORG
No wonder when the Web hit, people wanted Short Domain Names.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
...if one could actually reply to those old postings. Esp. the one asking about MS-DOS, and if someone has more information about it. :-)
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Though this one is from May 1st...
M.
Given that this archive now stretches back to 1981, I'm left wondering how this will affect some of the younger politicians with aspirations of getting elected to grander seats of power. Politicians who follow in Clinton's footsteps, for instance, might have much more difficulty convincing people that they didn't inhale, if they have a long posting history to rec.drugs.cannabis.
Many, many Usenet newsgroups have kept permanent archives over the years.
There's a header field in NNTP: X-No-Archive. It's been around for a long, long time. Google obeys it when it's present.
Just because you have no clue about Usenet's actual structure doesn't mean Google's not performing a valuable - and valued - service.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Advanced groups search.
You can select order by date. Unfortunately, it gives you the most recent first. Fortunately, if there's less than 1000 posts, you can jump right to the end.
Where this breaks down is in big groups; when you've got 30,000 posts/year or so, there's no chance of reading them a 1000 at a time. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I think I started posting in October of '91. That's what I always thought and the first post I could find was October 2nd, 1991.
Counting this one, though, they seem to have 10 email addresses with posts from me. I think I tracked back all the old VAX accounts I had in my undergrad that I posted from. (I used to sign up for CS courses a lot to get accounts. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Strange. You'd think google would be able to just do a select min() from their DB, though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Man...I was just looking at some of my old posts (which I don't even remember how I made them).
I think we can have a collective opinion that when we were younger, we were a bunch of dumbasses.
When I think old Usenet, I think Serdar Argic, the prolific anti-Armenian cross-poster who was widely suspected to be a bot. Was the reality or artificiality of Argic ever definitively determined?
Makes me want to pull out my old "Howling Through The Wires World Tour" t-shirt.
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
First mention of slashdot
n &s coring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=17&as_minm=1&as_miny=19 97&as_maxd=11&as_maxm=8&as_maxy=1997&rnum=5&selm=5 cr9je%24j2i%40mirrors.cellnet.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=slashdot&hl=e
:P
Until computer networks were overrun by the multitudes, they were populated by mostly research and development sorts of folks, and the signal to noise ratio of the posts was a bit higher. But that only lasted a few minutes.
Here's one of my first posts, from 1981.
- In article <1991Apr12.185342.4699@news.iastate.edu> vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H) writes:
It's amazing what a difference a decade makes.>I recently downloaded the IBM PC demo from plains to send to a Cobol
>Wizard who wants to learn Minix and build a Cobol compiler for it.
Right. And don't forget about Ada - we need that too. And, oh let's see now, perhaps a good relational database system....
The possibilities boggle the mind, chill the blood, call for a stiff drink, and make one check the calender to see April what, now?
John Nall
So I take it I cant keep my personal record of archived posts on certain newsgroups over the past few years because you didnt mean them to be archived.
The main use for this is to demonstrate to the youngsters the greatest troll of all time
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Sonofabitch. You don't say. And when exactly was that first documented?
I was dissapointed that the time line didn't cover any of the antics on alt.religion.scientology which lead to a great deal of lawsuits. And IIRC, ended in some pretty scary pre-DCMA descisions being made.
Myddrin
Stop whining. You posted your comments to a PUBLIC forum. The fact that someone has found a way to make money off of a archive of public messages does not give you any kind of legitimate grievance. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing if you wanted to. If you really feel so strongly that your copyright has been infringed, put your money where your mouth is and file a copyright infringement suit against Google.
If you spray-painted a bunch of grafitti around your town, then someone came around and took pictures of it and published a coffee table book of your art, you would have a VERY hard time convincing a court that you were due a cent. While IANAL, I would be suprised if there was not ample precedent saying that by placing your original work in a public forum you are releasing it to the public domain.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
First post (and not even under his own account) can be found here.
Maybe other celebrities can be found in the archive..
Find the article
here
but still, I'm sure there's some doozies in there . . .
hawk
Hi . . . but I think I've got you beat by a couple of months with this link.
Wanna cup of Prior Art?
I did a search for some of my old email addresses. After reading old posts, I've come to the conclusion that I've actually gotten stupider over the years. I blame all the beer I drank during the dot-com years.
_______
2B1ASK1
I particularly liked how Linus mentioned that Hurd would be out soon after his post.
:)
And I'm so glad none of my posts have been archived for posterity. My name just turns up some Pearl Jam fan's posts.
If you want a temporary, informal discussion, set up your own SILC server, and ask your friends not to log. Otherwise, quit whining.
His first post. It was posted in 1991.
I think this is kind of scary (if it's abused like what I am doing here)
I went looking for a couple of long-lost messages, but they are clearly not in the archive. Search for "Bean-Hill-Influence Lad", a parody of a bad comic book called the Legion of Super Heroes, and you will find quite a few messages quoting and discussing the original post, but no copy of the original.
Similarly, I looked for the original discussion of the resemblance of Star Trek's Ferengi to traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes in sf-lovers, and found that it is also not extant in the archives.
It worries me that the two messages I went looking for are both not present, in that it seems to imply quite a few holes in the archive. Still, perhaps I can be content with the 8,280 posts containing my name.
Tim Maroney
the first USENET censorship case
I personally like how he said he hasn't decided on a license and that it may be gnu-style :P
At least 1996. I thought longer, but maybe I was wrong. Anyway, this is the earliest reference I could find: a post on Google which quotes all of a post that talks about this header.
I did find a couple of apparent posts from 1995 that appeared to refer to the header.
It's not in any RFCs, but there haven't been any Usenet RFCs really since the '80s.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Thanks a million, Google!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
And I seemed smarter than I remember being. Most odd.
Jessica "Eaten By A Bengal Tiger" Cohen, if you're reading this, go make some toast and stop wasting time online. GUMBY BRAIN SURGERY!!
Mr. Ska
Looking at the context, they are claiming that lots of people answered, yet Google only keeps 5 posts in the thread.
It seems that the archives are very incomplete.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.
--circa 1982
Where in the world did they dig this data up from? Were these tapes that Deja had somehow acquired, but never read in, or did Google actually root around and restore backups from way back when, and if so, from who did they get the tapes from???
I figure that Google has to be getting these posts from trusted sources, or else you could inject false data into the historical archives. Anyone know for sure?
I gotta say, it's weird seeing how much I used to post. Of course, it was back when USENET was actually useful, and not clogged with spam and idiots... The funny thing is, that AOL used to be the same way (back when that was one of the few ways outside of academia to get something like an e-mail address, remember bitnet?) but that was even farther in the past...
I'm pretty sure I get to take the credit for that one - something like it would certainly have existed eventually, but this is the earliest discussion (by ~5 months) that even mentions anything like it, even if I did suggest it as X-NoArchive instead.
I just wish I'd saved the original email as well.
fencepost
just a little off
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
You missed my attempt at sarcasm. Some people are complaining about having all their stuff back to 1981 available and the response was about the x-no-archive header. Well, as you said, it wasn't created until 1995 or so, so people posting before that date have no means or choice on whether to let them live on or not.
Except that Google has a take-down link. You can contact them to have your stuff removed.
Also, there were archives even back in 1981. This isn't new: it's just that the web makes it easier to access.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
So, with so much of our past now logged, will this be the "I didn't inhale" of the Teens and '20s?
"Why yes, I did occasionally scan alt.pictures.binaries.bestiality, but I didn't *download* anything..."
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Personally, I think this is the coolest thing ever. History will never be the same. To be able to go back and re-live events and discussions is like going back in time. It's incredible.
was the crossposting flamewars between a.p.t.e and a.d.t.e (alt.destroy.the.earth). The pavers just wanted everything turned to asphalt for their driving pleasure, while the destroyers seemed to be much more creative in finding ways to totally obliterate the planet. Every now and then they'd start arguing. Very amusing. And then alt.devilbunnies would somehow get in the middle of it and things just went wierd from there :)
Do you understand that UseNet exists entirely because articles are COPIED from server to server and kept around as long as possible? There's nothing centralized; by the time you read a posted article, it has been COPIED many many many times and exists on many servers simultaneously, for as long as each server cares to keep it around. That might be forever. In any, case UseNet relies on COPYING articles (not propogating them, like e-mail for example). Google Groups is a great place to get UseNet articles from -- it's currently the strongest node for UseNet content and I'm happy about it.
Oi! Wow! I just did an ego-search and boy was that embarrassing...
I found some posts from November 1992, three months after getting my very first UNIX account!! (I must remember to make a note about that, it's soon to be ten years since, so some celebration is in order). I believe I asked for Calvin & Hobbes graphics in rec.arts.comics.misc. And later, I asked for a scanned copy of the Einstürzende Neubauten logo, hmmm, in the wrong group.
Two years later, the WWW started forming. I wasn't very impressed. You could actually have sort of a map of the thing in your head. It was so small, only a couple of hundred places to go, and not very well connected. Mosaic was the thing to use. It didn't use a cache so it was painfully slow. Everyone put their "hotlists" on the web (things hasn't changed very much, have they?).
The World Wide Web Worm! Does anyone remember that one? That was the first search engine that I came across.
Then everything exploded, the web expanded even more and many places went commercial. Later everybody merged and went bankrupt. Now it just stinks.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Q: Who posted this question back in May 1995?
A: The same guy who posted this request a few days earlier.
And look where we are now.
WOW! I went and looked and found postings from my self starting in 1982... Some of it was really weird. Based on my postings I am not the same person I was 20 years ago. At least the things that matter have changed.
Stonewolf
Yes, in the US everything is copyrighted by default the moment it is created. However, I suspect that publishing your work in an uncontrolled public forum would be considered an explicit relinquishment of your copyright, especially if you did not include an explicit copyright notice to the contrary.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
You already know that people are going to Google you. Save them the trouble by doing what I did -- tell them about the skeletons in your closet. Remember, it can't be used to blackmail you if it's already public record...
It seems that Google Groups can become an interesting resource (or one that can haunt you from the past) for more than your own postings, see this article on John Walker's postings.
I was 10 in 1982, and working on Apple ][ hardware. No, scratch that, that must have been later. I think I was on a Timex Sinclair 1000. Programming graphics demos at the time, but I'd definitely never heard of unix.
If I had stuck with the programming I bet I'd have a great job by now. Oh well.
-Legion
-Legion
If you've suffered the consequences of this aggregation and are willing to anonymously tell your story, i am really interested in hearing it. Personally, i would like to encourage Google to change its decision, something that can only be done collectively through people's voices.
They do ... Green Card Lottery- Final One?
the hyperlink to the first mention of AOL even.
-Legion