Slashdot Mirror
How Google Saved USENET
Masem writes: "Salon has a well-written article article on the recent revival of much of the USENET archives from '81 to '90 by Google. It mentions that much of the recovery was thanks to years of work in transferring data off 140-some 10" magnetic tapes (~120megs of data) to a more conventional format in order to recover much of the early posts. Even a reference to the previous Slashdot story is made." Update: 01/07 23:52 GMT by T : btempleton adds: "O'Reilly Network asked me to do an article on similar themes and rememberances of USENET history." Thanks, Brad.
--Chag
--Chag
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Yes, google saved the historical record of the USENET, but it needed not to save the USENET from anything else. USENET is alive and well.
Get your Unix fortune now!
they recovered the first post ever?
------
Sig
Who made backups of Usenet. I want them fired.
I think I speak for everyone when I say "Thank you Google for arming me with the information contained in old USENet posts to bring up embarassing teenage posts to my friends!"
thelocust[dot]org
I have nothing deep or insightful to say except "Thank You, Google".
Google Groups is awesome, especially when searching for some obscure piece of hardware advice or settings.
I don't have to worry about getting and setting up a news client, and it's just one tab over from my default search engine.
Google did save USENET for me - though I never post, searching through all the linux and comp newsgroups is usually faster than looking up a HOWTO.
As a software developer, no matter what problem I run into, somebody else has already run into that problem and has asked my question and recieved an answer on groups.google.com. Whenever I get stuck on anything at all, it's the first place I run to. groups.google.com is the single most useful site you can point your browser (konqueror!!!) towards. I'm not sure how they make money over there at google, but what a great service they are providing!
Check out my podcast: DreamStation.cc Video Game Show
...how Google will make money off of this. They supposedly make money off licensing their technology (and presumable their collected data, as well.) No ads whatsoever. I applaud their dedication to that goal so far.
Groups.google.com seems like the kind of thing they're doing just becuase they can, though. I can't imagine there is much money to be made off the technology, because it's all text - the same search tech applies. So, as far as I can tell, there is no business reason to be doing this. it's a drain on resources with little to no return, except for (geek) community goodwill.
The conclusion I draw, then, is Google is in this just for the fun, challenge, or doing something for the community - maybe all three. Philantropy at its best. =)
± 29 dB
An interesting thing about these tapes: They stretch over time and can sometimes become unreadable because of that. There are times when, to extract the information on the tape, I would put a number of them in my freezer for an hour or so, then try again. Nine times out of ten that would actually work.
Another note about the article: I can still remember discussions with others who had modems about 1200 baud being just "too fast". The reasoning was that the average person couldn't read much faster than 300 baud. :)
years of work in transferring data off 140-some 10" magnetic tapes
;)
That means at least one person spent several DAYS PER TAPE???
Even punch tape 'd faster than that.
All posts below this are quite clearly, silly.
I was wondering what kind of backup googles uses now for all its info? What happens if one day a script kiddie breaks in and rm -rf / all the boxes? Do they have tape backups? How many etc. I also wonder how much they spend on it.
It's like going back to your kindergarden and seeing what you used to play on. The stuff you remember and the stuff that seems much smaller now.
I ran a search under my name...found some old posts...also found some wild stuff, like an old Slashdot quote I had that someone had pulled out, snipped, and posted along with a bunch of other quotes on an alt.atheist posting.
Kinda of like a community Napster for the brain...Hope they never go away.
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Google seems to be getting involved with a lot of things. It's nice to see that a group is not only trying to push the Internet forward, but also trying to preserve the past.
My other sig is an import.
you could read the motherfucking article? The answer to your question is on the first page.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
...is just to prove that porn-solicitations and X10 ads aren't the true purpose of "distributed communications." Remember when you could actually carry on an on-topic thread?
I recently tried to track down the milestone changes for Mozilla, and got a link to the original newsgroup posting. I thought I'd dig around through the responses and see what everyone else thought -- 550 message headers later, I realized that even the Mozilla servers were utterly spammed with "me and my friends, naked & FREE!" For some reason (probably just bad memory) it didn't seem like we had these types of problems back at Berkeley...
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
"years of work in transferring data off 140-some 10" magnetic tapes (~120megs of data)" Crap, 10" magnetic tapes. And to think all of these years I have been archiving the history of USENET on 5.25" Floppies. :/
I know this is a repeat but this is a great read. Dr. Gene Spafford's farewell posting. If you don't know who that is, look it up.
n ews.groups,soc.net-people
:-)
===
From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu
Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.misc,news.admin.misc,
Subject: That's all, folks
Followup-To: poster
Date: 29 Apr 1993 19:01:12 -0500
Message-ID:
[ I originally was going to post nothing on this topic. I'm burned
out, and I don't want my fatigue to appear like I'm posting
self-indulgent garbage. However, several people have argued with
me, and convinced me that maybe I should make a statement to "end an
era," and as a piece of net "history." At the least, even if it is
perceived as self-indulgent garbage, it will fit right in with the
rest of the net. ]
There is a Zen adage about how anything one cannot bear to give up is
not owned, but is in fact the owner. What follows relates how I am
owned by one less thing....
About a dozen years ago, when I was still a grad student at Georgia
Tech, we got our first Usenet connection (to allegra, then being run
by Peter Honeyman, I believe). I'd been using a few dial-in BBS
systems for a while, so it wasn't a huge transition for me. I quickly
got "hooked": I can claim to be someone who once read every newsgroup
on Usenet for weeks at a time!
After several months, I realized that it was difficult for a newcomer
to tell what newsgroups were available and what they covered. I made
a pass at putting together some information, combined it with a
similar list compiled by another netter, and began posting it for
others to use. Eventually, the list was joined by other documents
describing net history and information.
In April of 1982 (I believe it was -- I saved no record of the year,
but I know it was April), I began posting those lists regularly,
sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly; the longest break was for 4
months a few years ago when I was recovering from pneumonia and poor
personal time management. (Tellingly, only a few people noticed the
lack of postings, and almost all the mail was "When will they come
out?" rather than "Did something happen?") As time went on, people
began to attach far more significance to the posts than I really
intended. It was flattering for a very short time, and a burden for
most of the rest; there is no telling how much time I have devoted
over the last decade to answering questions, editing the postings, and
debating the role of newsgroup naming, to cite a few topics. I really
tired of being a "semi-definitive" voice.
Starting several years ago, at about the time people started pushing
for group names designed to offend or annoy others, or with a lack of
concern about the possible effects it might have on the net as a whole
(e.g., rec.drugs and comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac) I began to question
why I was doing the postings. I have had a growing sense of futility:
people on the net can't possibly find the postings useful, because
most of the advice in them is completely ignored. People don't seem
to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly
violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature
files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common
sense and common courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings
of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly
indicating that they aren't being read. "Sendsys" bombs and forgeries
abound. People rail about their "rights" without understanding that
every right carries responsibilities that need to be observed too, not
least of which is to respect others' rights as you would have them
respect your own. Reason, etiquette, accountability, and compromise
are strangers in far too many newsgroups these days.
I have finally concluded that my view of how things should be is too
far out-of-step with the users of the Usenet, and that my efforts are
not valued by enough people for me to invest any more of my energy in
the process. I am tired of the effort involved, and the meager --
nay, nonexistent -- return on my volunteer efforts.
This hasn't happened all at once, but it has happened. Rather than
bemoan it, I am acting on it: the set of "periodic postings" posted
earlier this week was my last. After 11 years, I'm hanging it up.
David Lawrence and Mark Moraes have generously (naively?) agreed to
take over the postings, for whatever good they may still do. David
will do the checkgroups, and lists of newsgroups and moderators
(news.lists), and Mark will handle the other informational postings
(news.announce.newusers).
I'm not predicting the death of the Usenet -- it will continue without
me, with nary a hiccup, and six months from now most users will have
forgotten that I did the postings...those few who even know now, that
is. That is as it should be, I suspect. Nor am I leaving the
Usenet entirely. There are still a half-dozen groups that I read
sometimes (a few moderated and comp.* groups), and I will continue to
read them. That's about it, though. I've gone from reading all the
groups to reading less than ten. Funny, though, the total volume of
what I read has stayed almost constant over the years.
My sincere thanks to everyone who has ever said a "thank you" or
contributed a suggestion for the postings. You few kept me going at
this longer than most sane people would consider wise. Please lend
your support to Mark and David if you believe their efforts are
valuable. Eventually they too will burn out, just as the Usenet has
consumed nearly everyone who has made significant contributions to its
history, but you can help make their burden seem worthwhile in
between.
In closing, I'd like to repost my 3 axioms of Usenet. I originally
posted these in 1987 and 1988. In my opinion as a semi-pro
curmudgeon, I think they've aged well:
Axiom #1:
"The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even
resemble the real world."
Corollary #1:
"Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure
of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic
voodoo."
Corollary #2:
"Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their
relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing
whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to
divine the future."
Axiom #2:
"Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity,
intelligence, or common sense."
Corollary #3:
"An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards
could produce something like Usenet."
Corollary #4:
"They could do a better job of it."
Axiom #3:
"Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet."
Corollary #5:
"In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes
the 10%."
Corollary #6:
"Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too."
Which of course ties in to the recent:
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea --
massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a
source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect
it." --spaf (1992)
"Don't sweat it -- it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes."
-- spaf (1988?)
--
Gene Spafford, COAST Project Director
Software Engineering Research Center & Dept. of Computer Sciences
Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-1398
Internet: spaf@cs.purdue.edu phone: (317) 494-7825
===
Ye Gods!
The modern slashdot nerd trembles in the presence of those ancient USENET nerds of old
A 300 pound slashdot weakling is easily flung aside by the 500 pound USENET god. Who at slashdot keeps taped archives of every post for the nerds of future generations? Truly those were nerds.
i'm a tad concerned about the posts i made in the early 90's when i was an asshole know it all teenager coming back to haunt me... i wish google never uncovered those... i cringe when i read them now...
When I was back in trade school, sometime around -93 I think .. They gave us a rule of thumb that mainframe users stay happy if they have about 2400bps bandwith/user.
.. As it is, you only get 48000 or 50000 connection with near-perfect digital lines.
Most BBS systems I've ever seen wasted oodles and oodles of bandwith on the UI thought. That, plus fancy color-coding drops down the efficiency even more. I don't think I ever saw a proper screen division where the UI didn't update with whatever you were doing at the time.
And every time I read from a mag there's going to be a new modem spec in 6 months, "persons in the know" told me that's flat out impossible. Granted, I don't think you'd get much beyond 9600bps on the 60-era barbed wire phone exchanges
History of USENET
Archive for the History of Usenet Mailing List
Usenet Readers and Clients
History of Usenet - Development, people involved
(Yeah sure, anyone could look these up but isn't it easier to just point and click? There is more to USENET history than Google. Also, if you think I'm a karma whore, that's fine. I've got karma to burn.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
I find this somewhat scary. When I first came on the internet in late '94, I was 14. I have made several posts USENET using my real name that I would rather that prospective employers, my friends and family did not see. When I made the posts, the prospect of someone storing every message on USENET and making them available years later did not occur to me. Maybe I was naive, but I think at the time it was a reasonable assumption.
;)
I think that storing these messages and making them searchable is wrong, similar to someone recording every phone conversation made to later make them available to be searched for keywords (imagine the uproar if, say, the FBI did that
Is anyone else in a similar position? Does anyone have any idea how to get these posts removed from searchable archives? (I didn't release the copyright on my posts, so presumably that still holds)
(Posted anonymously because said friends may read this).
a/s/l?
You get to read about all flamewars between Mustang and Camaro owners.
We must not forget to give credit to Al Gore, the USENET inventor, and the man with the initiative to restore the archives.
Thanks, Al.
In a major university, and I decided to honor his
.. alt.emacs, here I come.
soul and follow his foot steps.
And now, thanks to google, I find myself battling
the flame wars he started.
Better go back and do him and VI and honor
I am sorry they will allow requestors to delete their own postings. While we might wish it otherwise, 10, 20, 50 years later, this may be the real historical value. To purge, seems the equivalent of having a letter to the editor removed from newspaper archives.
To those who feel like "they are walking around with their baby picture stapled to their forehead", we all mature. What I thought at 20, 30, and 40 show how I grew. What other archive in human history can provide the transitional opinions, discussions, and outright imbecilic flames wars?
While we would hate to have someone pull out our post in support of the flat earth theory, to act as though we all believed the earth was round is rewriting history. Convenient for us, but misleading to the future.
The question now becomes, what happens after Google and Slashdot, when the archive is tera-bytes large? Will it take 100 years for the next conversion?
Since he's immortalized in the Net Legends FAQ, it's a shame there are few examples of his jokes, other than in our memories.
And now, the Minas'ized version of this post:
Friend says to me, "See Google because they have many funny posts." I search for my name and find out I am being a kook. Friend says "Legendary!"
They saved all those "Hot Teens 4 U" spams from oblivion.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
The first "me too" post isn't until two years into the archive. I suppose that says something about the intelligence of the usenet demographic back then.
--
that it's that hard to get or use the equiptment.
/dev/rmt device.
;)
http://www.unisys.com sells 10" SCSI readers for thier A-series system. You can buy it seperately without a A-series service contract, and it works like any other
I worked for a company that distributed bank software on them as late as... well... now. And yes, it is cobol software.
Major Kudos to google for bringing back old usenet posts. Besides the knowledgebase provided, they are fun to read! Lots of stuff tasteful geek humor. I recommend checking it out.
-EvilMonkeyNinja
Mild Mannered Host by Day
Wild Hammered Programmer by Night
Three tapes for rec.singles desperate
Seven for alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
Nine for comp.sci compiling late
One for Google's engine dark
In their Linux cluser where the shadows lie.
One engine to search them all, one engine to bind them
One engine to index them all and in the darkness find them
In Google's cluster where the shadows lie.
Carousel is a lie!
Google rocks. I hope they can keep on going like they are.. saviors of what little we have left of the internet.
How Slashdot Saved Salon
Google has a history of doing a lot of things right, but I have my doubts about their new service: catalogs.google.com. It's a search engine for graphically scanned in versions of mail order catalogs! You type in sewing machine, say, and you get 3 views for each match: a scan of the catalog cover, a scan of the page, and a close up of the page, with the search terms highlighted in yellow.
It's so retrofuture weird! Like what someone on a C=64 in the 1980s might think a future of online shopping would look like...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I'm not upset that requestors can delete their own postings.
Back in my early trufan days, I tended to put a copyright declaration on many of my posts, for this very reason.
I did not grant others the rights to my works then. Neither did Bill G.
He's rich, I'm not, but some of my early flames would be very embarassing now if brought back to the light of day. For then we fought the faanish wars, and many a tale was told round the electronic flicker of the green and amber screens about the forces of chaos and their wars with those who sought to control the power of the WorldCon for their own evil aims.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Here is what the first post said:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice.
See you later! Thanks
I find it very interesting that in the last 10 years of USENET, it's traffic (and presumably use) have grown dramatically. However, the number of servers has, I believe, dropped equally dramatically. USENET was one of the most distributed systems I remember using, with it's shared-nothing, "flood-fill" algorithm.
Yet, as it scales up to more and more messages, it actually is becoming less distributed. A good lesson for all the futurists forcasting the rise of distributed systems...
FIRST POST!!! :)
March 11th 1981 - It'll be 21 years old soon, wild!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Search for something personal. I found another TheoFish, and wierd information about people I actually know IRL. It's a little scarey really.
And with Attack of the Clowns on the way, with (rumor has it) NSync in it, and more Jarhead Bites, you certainly have to wonder if Lucas is having "Sellout" tatoo'd on his forehead....
Now, LOTR may not have been perfect, but at least it was reasonably true to the book (hence a decent story) and showed what you can do with a good story. In this instance, we have Lucas busily destroying the mystique and the depth built up in the first SW trilogy (well, first in terms of release date).
I waited outside for a few hours to get tickets to EP1. I'll wait till a while after the premier to see this next film. If it is as disappointing, I'll wait for EP3 maybe longer than that. George, this is not the way to go about prying Imperial Credits from my wallet....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I guess you read a different article than the one I saw. The article discusses the archiving that saved a bunch of old usenet posts for posterity. Google didn't do it. They didn't even exist back then. They just happened to be willing to take on the responsibility of making that data (which other people had already migrated from mag-tape to a more modern media) available to the public.
I wish they could have kept it dead. I stank there.
Always post to Usenet with a fake name an e-mail address!
And to be sure to set the X-no-archive header!
google really should put the Oh How I envy American Students usenet posts in the timeline.
Who at slashdot keeps taped archives of every post for the nerds of future generations? Truly those were nerds.
No, they weren't nerds, they were geeks.
There is a difference - nerds understand technology; geeks understand technology - and like it.
The people who archived this, and brought it back, did so because they liked it - and that clearly makes them geeks.
You can read the article I wrote on the O'Reilly site
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
This was probably an unavoidable turn of events. Nevertheless, whether it is Google or some other company, I consider it wrong for them to republish this stuff, in particular as part of a commercial venture. It's the equivalent of digging out old security surveillance tapes and broadcasting them for the amusement of the masses. It's wrong, and the fact that people find some sort of voyeuristic delight in it doesn't change that. The backup tapes that Google used should have been destroyed.
To quote the great Jim Croce:
"After all, it's what we've done, that makes us what we are."
There are a few posts that I'd rather not people see - but I won't ever ask Google to supress them.
I made mistakes, I learn from them, they are a part of me; if I forget about them, I'm liable to make them again.. I'm glad that I have somewhere to go in case I forget.
While also saving the Usenet archives (public and widely dispersed information)..!
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
If you look carefully in usenet archives you can see Rasterman and Mandrake trying to figure how to develop E....Unfornately that still being discussed
... I was a member of Team OS/2!!! Where is that URL to get postings deleted?
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
So let me get it straight. 9 years of USENET posts occupy only 16.8GB of hard disk space?
You sure those 10-inch magnetic tapes weren't 1200MB or 120GB or something? Hell, a converted VCR using VHS as a backup medium can store like 100GB (saw one somewhere, I forget the link.)
Now I know what David Wiseman's day job was. Instead of cracking funny jokes while teaching Comp Sci 020 in the evenings at UWO (Introduction to Pascal) in 1989, I always wondered what he did during the daytime. Little did I know he would on a mission to "save" the USENET...
One thing I remember about him was that way back then, his desktop wallpaper on his Sun workstation had a huge picture of his face (noteworthy only because he had what was then considered to be a giant screen monitor - maybe a 17"?) -- that was pretty funny.
The other noteworthy thing I remember about him was that 2% of our exam mark came from putting our name and student number correctly on the exam booklets.
Ah, memories...
The only issue is the media then, and I'm sure we could make a smart choice when it came to that... BTW: How do you carve Unicode into stone tablets?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
yes, it's great that google makes this stuff available, as it was great that dejanews did before. but, remember all the shenanigans at deja where they kept trying to blur the distinction between actual usenet and deja proprietary content? then, when deja went away there was a time when the future of the news was uncertain?
someday, google may stop being so generous.
then there will be a bunch of pissing and moaning here about "our" usenet...
It's "our" usenet today, too, and this data is all of our heritage. Google should make copies of it available for other folks to archive. When this goes away as it inevitably will, you'll remember that you were warned.
Allot of the good gurus are moving over to slash ran message forums. Talking to a guy who is a perl guru, he has moved most of his perl help requests from usenet to Perl Mongers. I've been seeing this trend in the last few years, as independent subjects are moving over to a website based web forums. I even spend more time reading 5 mailing lists and a dozen message forums, and dont touch usenet anymore.
With these message forums and mailing lists not linked to a usenet group, there is a lot of wasted knowledge that is not shared. I would love to see a slash-mod or some type of mailing list enhancement that posts a overview or some kind of daily message post to usenet.
The whole idea of usenet was knowledge sharing, not binaries and spam ads. Glad google has saved usenet, but some effort needs start using it again.
Humm, Maybe Slashdot should enhance a usenet forum? Thou 5-20,000 posting a day on a usenet might be a little much. Maybe only 2+ posts make a moderated usenet group.
I use Deja extensively for fun and work. I was thinking the other day that Deja (well the Usenet info it provides access to) is invaluable data and is currently in the hands of a corporate master (benign as they currently are). Since Deja is such a slice of information is there some way to guarantee it being kept around in case Google goes broke and decides to start selling it or could no longer support the upkeep cost. For instance the previous owners had started to make it a merchandise search tool (ack!). Maybe the library of Congress should maintain something like Deja or at least keep backups. If all the information Deja organized was to vanish it would be a mortal blow!
This is downright scary.
Nothing like looking through the archive to see an old post from a skilled sysadmin friend asking a basic question in the wrong group years ago.
Nothing like seeing delusional inane posts you wrote while in high school making you look like an utter twit.
Nothing like seeing old usenet posts from friends who have died years ago. This is just too creepy for words.
Aside from his good works in the terms of Usenet, David is the reason I am where I am today. 4 years ago, I was stuck in Perth, Australia and very bored. I was reading the student newspaper one day and saw an article about student exchanges. To cut a long story short, 6 months later I was at The University of Western Ontario.
:)
;)
I had looked over the courses they ran in Computer Science there, and saw one called "Unix and C". Being a bit of a geek and having used unix a *tiny* bit in my high school days, I thought it was be a cool one to take. David was the lecturer for this course. He had a lot of knowledge and passion for the subject, which is unsurprising considering his experiance with all manners of unicies. His classes for CS175a taught me a lot about Unix (and a little about C). I got 92% overall for the unit, an A+ and the highest mark I've ever got for any unit. The next semester I was at Western, I taught myself Perl, using an account on the CS Department servers and on the Reznet linux box a friend had
It was a unit for non comp-sci majors. CS Majors were expected to learn this stuff in a bunch of different classes.
Sadly, Western no longer offers CS175a - Unix and C. I feel it is a loss to the community as a whole, but at the same time, I understand that a one semester course in Unix and C probably isn't seen as too acedemic by many. Which I think is a shame. Too many universities turn out gimps fluent in one langauge, and one language only - Windows *shudder*. I think it sad that units to teach people how to click mice and use Word can get you acedemic credit, but Unix and C courses don't seem worthy enough to run.
When my time was up in Canada, I came back to Australia and while I finished my degree, I made money on the side doing CGI scripts in Perl. Then, when my degree was finished, I applied for a job as a System Admin at a department at The University of Western.. Australia. It was the first job I applied for and I got a callback the morning after I had a 70 minute panel interview. Due, in large part, to the stuff I had learnt in David's class, I passed the interview quite well.
Today, I am 22, earn over AU$40k, I get to play with lots of cool computing and network hardware, and I think it would be safe to say that if I hadn't taken that course with David, I wouldn't be where I am today. I suspect I would have been working as a security guard, making minimum wage, since my degree wasn't actually in Computer Science, but Security Studies. Thinking back, I'm pretty damn glad I did take it
David's homepage is here
You posted to a public place. You gave up your copyright when you did that.
TOTTALLY AGREE!!!
Slash and other forums should be changed to pipe into and feed usenet. This would make a much broader reach of this info.
Just add some meta tags to the headers for moderation and other stuff.
comment directly in my journal
Can you still download the archives? If so, where?
All that info would be incredibly useful!
What format do you think it would be in? Threaded text or database format or what? How would you read it or search it?
Also, what do they do with the attachments? Imagine THAT archive. Heh heh heh.
Sorry, shuold of called the message topic
Message forums (Slash) are killing off Usenet.
Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to act on requests to remove these posts.
My own experience: following Google's instructions on how to request the removal of Usenet posts (posted under my real name in the early 90s), I submitted all the requested information. It isn't the simplest procedure since I long ago lost the e-mail address that those posts originated from (due to corporate conglomeration, I've had four ISP changes over the past decade). Thus I had to comply with the more complicated procedure listed at Google's page for requesting removal of posts when such a request comes from a different e-mail address than the one that posted the message in the first place.
Three e-mails and over a month later, the posts are still up at Google's site, found using my real (and very unique) name as the search string.
Having complied with Google's procedures to the letter, I'm at a loss as to how to get these posts removed. If anyone has been successful in getting Google to remove Usenet posts when the request comes from an e-mail address that is not that of the original post itself, I'd LOVE to hear how you did it. Starting with what you used as the "electronic signature". I've submitted two electronic signatures (backed by Thawte and Verisign) and Google still won't remove my old posts. How in heck do I prove I'm me if I can't send them the request to remove the posts from the original posting e-mail address?
And for those who've said that those posts should remain available for eternity, I recommend "The Unwanted Gaze" by Jeffrey Rosen. Usenet should retain its original character as a transient conversation - not everything that is said or posted is for posterity's sake.
Agreed. I even went as far as to write a portal to do this in October of 1999(?). I was in Atlanta for the ISP-forum, and I ran into ESR. He was there for ALS, which I knew nothing about, so getting to go to that was a pleasant surprise. Anyway, slashdot had a table at the show where they were selling T-shirts. I mentioned the portal and was quickly shotdown. I wish now I had gone ahead with it.
... would the USENET archives qualify? As compared with say MS development network which is the equivalent knowledgebase? Hate, love or indifferent, you cannot deny that MS has had a major influence on the growth of the PC sector and a large part of this success is their fanatical devotion to their developers (please no jokes about if you got them by the balls, their wallets will follow). USENET is a nice snapshot but is it something purposeful?
... personally I would consider the first choice to be the Guttenburg Project which is low-key but represents the unflinching efforts of many many experts and volunteers. Given the dissipation of the social contract w.r.t. modern copyright laws, the scope and vision of the originators can only be admired.
I was just musing the other day about what would be the 7 wonders of the digital world
Sure, GNU/Linux could be nominated but I'm a little ambivient about it as the impact is mainly social (due to GPL and the contributors' belief in libre software). As a technical piece of work, is it on the same relative scale as the ancient wonders were in their heyday? We are talking global uniqueness, recognised by a wide population segment, and something difficult to duplicate here.
LL
Yes, there's a huge amount of stuff missing. Net.Singles is very sparse as well.
Anyone else think it would be a great idea to dump the whole thing to say- 10-20 DVD's and sell it on the net?
I'd buy it. There's a ton of knowlege in usenet that I would love to grep.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I found some 7-8 year old posts I made when I was a teenager. I can't believe how cocky I was, and how poorly I wrote. Very few people ever replied to my posts, and I now understand why. I even found a "me too" (well, almost) post from myself. Wow, that's scary.
I appologize to the whole slashdot community for my teen cockiness in the mid 90's. I didn't mean what I said the way I said it...at least looking back.
One good way to find your old posts is to search for your (old?) email address.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Nasa has an ongoing program to transfer all their data to new formats. Last I heard they were (still) moving it all from tape to 12" optical disks. They have lots of data.
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I really wish Google Groups let users post replies. These days I find myself just searching for some info and moving on. I want to see a REPLY link beside every single article. At least Deja got that part right.
Having an archive is nice but it wont be so nice in two years when all the search results are 2-3 years old.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
I have been using USENET for 20 years, so I am affected by this, and I have seen USENET slowly fall apart. USENET was always a bit rough and had a lot of noise, but people did get to know each other personally and professionally. Today, USENET is nearly completely useless for any kind of social functions, and the huge expansion of people posting, anonymous/pseudonymous postings, and the need to post anonymously because of searchable archives is largely responsible. There is no forum like USENET was 20 years ago anymore.
On every single story, somebody posts a parody of that poem. This is the new Beawolf cluster.
If they came out with a CD ROM with the 120 MB of data, plus a small search engine, I'd buy it. It'd be nice to have, plus it would be that much more secure for history if it were well distributed.
Also, with the data sitting in one place (is it really?) it would give a '1337-h4x0r' the chance to literally re-write some history.
I guess that 120 MB doesn't include the alt.binaries groups, but it probably includes alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
OK: how long before a presidential candidate's Usenet postings will be dragged out for the whole world (US) to see ?
How come there's NO mention that UT gave their blessing? The only reference I see is where one of the guys "relieved" UT of the tapes.
Seems like stealing to me.
And exactly how much did google pay for those stolen tapes? Nothing, perhaps? Sounds like google is cheating UT out of some money here.
I'd be very curious to see Henry Spencer defend himself on this one.
I'm not real certain the tapes should be *destroyed*. However...
I have a fairly uncommon name, but there are just enough other usenet posters with that name I'm nervous. I ego surfed, and uh-oh, one of my doppelgangers is a usenet-posting militia freak. Even worse, I know of him, since he's a distant cousin from the same area I am, went to the same state school, but I'm thankfully 4 years older so our academic careers didn't overlap. I'm an officer in the Navy. Nobody's asked me yet, but I worry that my name gets flagged when my clearance comes up for review, and I get to go see the polygraph (wo)man. Or, somebody (who doesn't like me, such as somebody I've just disciplined) reports this information to their (or my) superiors. If they know me personally, they know it's not me, but first impressions can be important. Also, doubt like that can be quite a career impediment. Proving the negative is hard.
I do find it funny that somebody that fears the government that much used his REAL NAME and PERSONALLY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION when he talks about how best to shoot FBI agents, and distributed it to the whole damn universe seven years ago. His name even appears in posts he didn't write. Not paranoid enough, perhaps.
Unfortunately, Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world. They have 4 tabs off the main page. One of them is groups. I'm doing the math. Groups is an excellent research tool, but they should follow the Lexis/Nexis Model--that is, subscription service, but for some trivial amount a year (say, US$5). At least put it off on its own domain name, where people who know what they are looking for can go look.
And, I too was a loudmouthed asshole when I was younger. I didn't post to usenet, though, and it seems a bit unfair to all the folks whose Star Trek flame wars will come back to haunt them, while my drunken collegiate dorm room arguments ("Debbie Gibson is *way* hotter than Tiffany, you c*cks*cker!") remain safely anonymous, since they were conducted face-to-face.
The information is readily available on Google's site. Why bother accessing it any other way?
From a Phil Karn comment in November, 1988...
5. Making the source code generally available is perhaps *the* best way to prod the vendors into fixing *lots* of holes in their systems, not just the ones exploited by the worm.
Face it, we all know how vendors behave -- everyone does the least work possible, subject to the vocalness of their customers' demands. Several people have already stated that they knew of the hole in sendmail for many years and they just chalked it up to the net being composed of benign people. Since it wasn't generally known (I didn't know about it, for example) there was no general cry to fix it, and it lay open long enough for Morris to come along and exploit it.
6. I found it ironic to read that the elder Morris recently submitted a paper on UNIX security for publication, but his employer squelched it. Who knows what was in that paper? Perhaps, just perhaps, maybe it contained a description of the hole in sendmail, among other things. Perhaps, just perhaps, Robert Jr., learned of this hole from his dad. Perhaps if that paper had been published, people would have taken steps to protect themselves before the younger Morris had unleashed his worm.
In sum: SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY JUST DOESN'T WORK!
Ever since I discovered slashdot I've been wishing for a USENET version. And with such a large userbase, we could probably bring a lot of users back to USENET.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Looking at the history, the first big Usenet spams came at exactly the wrong time- and it badly twisted the subsequent development of the Web.
Spam hurt Usenet by ruining it as a tourist destination right as mass tourism to the Web began. Long-time Usenet users couldn't recommend it to new Internet users ( "Really its a great place, just ignore the trash and the noise and don't give your name because you'll get a zillion ugly mails afterward" doesn't work as tourist advice). And for existing users, reading Usenet meant wading through muck, and then with address harvesting starting, a muck filled mailbox. Between this and the constant interruption of irrelevant ads, people were driven out, the extra traffic made Usenet a burden to ISPs, old users went elsewhere, new users never came. While the rest of the web exploded, Usenet started its long fade.
Arguing alternate history here, but if mass Spam had hit much earlier or later, the damage wouldn't have been as bad, both to Usenet or to the Web overall. Had it been much earlier, perhaps the cancelbots and other technology responses to spam would've been well developed by the time the mass tourism started. "let's ignore the problem and go somewhere else" isn't a solution when there is no 'else' to go to. Had it been much later, higher adoption rates for Usenet (as a % of all Web demand) would mean companies would need to take the Usenet model into account: people might've expected/demanded better spam solutions, more cross-website communications, and less walled-gardens. People would've been less likely to accept 'the only protection you'll get is to stop posting and come to our walled-garden web discussion group' as a solution. Ditto with the loss of shell accounts and open relays.
Hmm, I seem to remember when Google first aquired the old Deja archives there were tons of posts on slashdot lambasting Google and it's new Google Groups.
Now that everybody seems to singing praises for Google that makes me laugh.
Some people having been complaining about how this shouldn't have been done, or how useless it is. Well where else could you read about some guy complaining about compatibility of ms-dos 2.0?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Too bad its not like the old west, people could still be shot for being stupid.
Couple of people on my list, some spam and some isps. (-;
When Google was fixing the kinks in groups.google.com, I remember everyone complaining.
Heh... I'll second that. I'm not ashamed at anything I said, just amused. And I had no idea how many posts I put out there. :)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Is this really needed? Sure, there is a bit of historical significance, but do we really need all of it? 99.999999% of it is crap that will never be needed or used and will only serve the purpose of returning hits that are no longer relevant. How many times have you gone to deja (it'll always be called that by me), done a search, think you've found the answer to a current problem only to find a work around from 1999 which may or may not still be relevant.
.com wave and is just waiting for the inevitable.
If the info was really important it would be elsewhere on the net by now. Most things of relevance have been transfered from usenet to the web and can be found with a regular Google search.
Even the largest of pack rats eventually have to clean house. I use deja pretty frequently and I can't think of hte last time that I've found anything pre 1998 or so that I've found really usefull. And as time goes on things will become even less so.
Spending time and money on this sort of thing really makes me wonder if Google really has a future or if they are still riding the
Actually, I've done this. Back on my Amiga 500, I had no way to back up my *massive* (chuckle) 120 MB hard drive, so I used a VCR backup kit. It was a bugger to use, but it was the poor man's ass saver for sure!
Ah the memories today...
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Ok look, I'm suggesting anybody use this method to go stalking anybody or anything - but, has anyone ever searched google for those "send a dollar to the people of this list" spams where the message contains an address local to your area?
Because I have. The search I did was something like:
"this is totally legal" dollar [my home town]
I found 20 or so people's names and addresses and looked up their names in the phone book. Of those 20, I only found 2 people who's names and street addresses matched what was in the spam.
So... I called them. I asked if anybody had sent them money and if there had been any consequences. Neither one of them had any idea what I was talking about. They denied ever posting the spam. I even got the impression that they didn't know what usenet was.
So, what do you make of that?
Oh please, the "dollars follow eyeballs" fantasy hasn't been mouthed by anyone worth their weight in salt in over two years. 99% of the posts Google is archiving have absoluately zilch, nada value, to anyone, including the original posters.
My guess is that Google will realize that 95% of the searches pertain to posts from the last twelve months and will send the rest back to the tape locker.
I've got points but I can't mod a +5 post. You youngsters just can't appreciate how +5. Insightful this comment is.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Thank goodness you can Remove those embarrassing old posts
From http://groups.google.com/groups?q=bryon.sutherland &start=400&scoring=d&selm=bryon.800579322%40jove&r num=402
I read several more chain mail for profit letters today and then I realized something..... These chain mail letters might actually be providing a valuable service on the net. The idiots who believe that they can actually make $50,000 in 2 weeks by sitting on the couch in their underwear will send their money in and eventually they will be so broke that they can't afford their internet connection.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I does seem that a search for things that I'm sure I recall that a friend told me that a friend was sure they saw... well, I just can't find it.
If anyone has any knowledge of any omissions (in attachments, especially) - Please reply to this thread. I have nothing but (how do you say - ) *historical* interest, of course...
db
Cig:
ôô
So, you are saying that USENET has changed from an informal discussion group to a searchable perpetual repository of technical support Q&As, plus a repository of background information on people who were foolish enough in the 1980s to post under their own names. I agree. The part I don't understand how you think that constitutes "saving" USENET. USENET didn't use to be much of an on-line community compared to some of the others, but it was a community. Once it became archival, anonymous, and searchable, that went away. Who, after all, wants their every word recorded and replayed into perpetuity?
It's already been lost. Oh, sure, you can cling to a bunch of articles from the 1980s. But what motivation is there to contribute anymore? USENET has become too big to be a community in the old sense, too much spam gets posted, and if you do participate in a discussion where you are willing to change your mind, you risk that people will find you half a century later and confront you with your every word.
I used to post messages on USENET under my own name. Some of them got picked up and republished in computer magazines. Now, I put all my technical advice on my web site, and I do all my "flaming" on Slashdot (pseudonymously). A venue where most people interact informally using their real names, where they get to know each other personally and establish reputations, doesn't exist anymore.
The original SAIL users were contacted, one by one, and offered CD-ROM copies of their files. Where the original users permit, their files will be made publicly available. The permission process is still going on, but the result will be an archive of the early days of AI.
Spetsakis, not Spetzakis, you non-cretin.
NNTP access has been in the FAQ forever. Unfortunately, no money can be made with the NNTP version, and I understand that this is an important issue.
i'm a tad concerned about the posts i made in the early 90's when i was an asshole know it all teenager coming back to haunt me... i wish google never uncovered those... i cringe when i read them now...
Me too, my first usenet post after months and months of lurking was a troll-posing-as-an-expert in rec.arts.startrek.current when I was 13. Either that or in the usenet oracle newsgroup (alt.oracle ?).
What happens to the archive when they're bought by someone else, or end up in bankruptcy court? Will it go the away of the online digital photo storing sites, vanishing one day without a trace, taking irreplaceable data -- data of immense academic historical interest -- with it?
Google should promise to donate the archive to the Library of Congress, do the transfer now, and make a social contract with the net community to turn over the reigns on this project if they're acquired or go out of business.
Save the babbles of the past? Ok, but what's with all the damn goorgling popup ads now. Google was the sane search engine until now.. I protest!
You should too!
funny, it seems intermittent..
From the picture at the beginning of the article, it looks like the type of tape my old uni sysadmin archived my mail onto when I burst my quota...
Postmaster: "You were warned. It'll take at *least* 7 days for me to get your mail back"
Me: "Oh. Sorry. Bye"
Me: *close door, walk down corridor*
Postmaster(distant, muffled): "muahahaha"
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
When I read the article at Salon, the ad on the same page was so funny (in context with the foto of David Wiseman). It made my day.
I captured the page for all to see.
Me
As a regular USENET poster, I'm gratified that you've found our posts useful, but please, please do consider participating yourself!
"But I don't know anything worth posting!" , I hear you cry. Well, for a start, since when has that stopped anyone on USENET, myself included! Besides, I'm sure everyone knows something about something, even if it's "only" mexican cooking (alt.food.mexican-cooking) and Italian manga (alt.italian.anime-manga).
Take the trouble to subscribe to a few groups and get involved. Keep them as lively discussion fora, not dusty historical archives and a spam collection!
I discovered USENET in 1992, and I've rarely gone away. It's definitely the most consistently interesting and useful part of the Internet, IMHO.
--
it's great for finding my old resumes i put online, i forgot some of the places i used to work for.
The court was tired of recounts, and demonstrated how to take care of it.
I could only find a fraction of the posts I made in those early years.
It would depend upon the lead time. Given ten years, and a similar budget, I think it could be done. Actually, I think we could get to Mars, given those conditions. It cost, IIRC, $10 billion in the 1960's. These days we wouldn't use a Saturn V. We'd haul the pieces up in space shuttles, assemble them at the space station, and launch from there.
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It bothers me that a lot of dumb, stupid things I've said are there for public viewing. When I began using Usenet, I had no idea that a) the posts would be archived forever and b) they'd be easy to look up by using my name. Had I known this I would've thought twice about some of my more obnoxious posts.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Let's hope they don't archive /.'s message forums. Imagine having to read all of your old "-1" modded postings for the rest of your life.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
- E-mail?
I've never received spam from Google. I've never even received a single e-mail from them.
- Irrelevant search results?
Blame the page authors who try to get more hits by including irrelevant information in META tags.
Google don't hide ads in-between search results either (unlike certain other search engines) - the ads are clearly marked with a different background colour and the text "Sponsored Link".
So, what do you mean by "spam"?
Clever signature text goes here.
Where can I find a free newserver to feed news to and suck news from? I'm not just looking for a misconfigured newserver that allows people to post and read, I want to stream news from and to it. I've looked at some commercial news providers and they're quite expensive.
My first few years of UseNet posts had a copyright declaration in them. I own that copyright, and I did NOT grant google that copyright usage.
You licensed it for use in Usenet and Usenet-like media as soon as you clicked Send. You can terminate that license by going to google.com and submitting a remove request.
Will I retire or break 10K?
On every single story, somebody posts a parody of [the ring] poem [from LotR]. This is the new Beawolf cluster.
Not exactly. It'd be the new Beowulf if they started parodying The Adventures of Beowulf .
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hell, a converted VCR using VHS as a backup medium can store like 100GB (saw one somewhere, I forget the link.)
Assuming 9 Mbps of raw data (half the data rate of HDTV, because garden-variety VHS is nowhere near broadcast-quality), and assuming some heavy-duty error correction reducing effective data rate to 6 Mbps, VHS's SP mode records for 7200 seconds, giving 5 gigabytes on a tape at a bare minimum. (For comparison, a single-layer DVD holds about 4 1/2 GB.) If we go to EP mode, increase the bandwidth to S-VHS levels, and apply 3:1 text compression (common with deflation of large Latin-alphabet texts, especially containing quoted material), we may be able to store even more data per tape.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The information is readily available on Google's site. Why bother accessing it any other way?
Two use cases, both resulting in failure:
I try to access Google's site directly from a certain computer, and I get an error message: "No network connection is available." In other words, I'm not online 24/7.
I try to access Google Groups from any computer, and I get an error message: "groups.google.com does not exist." How do we know Google will be around for the next decade?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If anyone is interested, I'll be conducting an audio interview with David Wiseman Friday morning. The interview is for UWO's campus radio station CHRW, to air on our 12:30 newsmagazine. It'll probably air sometime next week. I'll be asking him some questions about his contribution to the project, as well as about being interviewed by Salon. He's a pretty interesting guy (as evidenced by his website), so there should be some colourful dialog.
Since I posted a lot of crap back in the mid-90s, I have always (I still do this) used a fake name and email address, and changed it on a weekly or monthly basis. To even further push the anonymity envelope, I ALTERNATED MY
:-)