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Microsoft to do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web?
tjones2 writes "Seems like Microsoft isn't content with sad state of email these days. They now want to "make engaging with communities easier and friendlier". This means extending their reach into Usenet." Fortunately most of Usenet is such a cespool that really they can only make it better. And after cornering the market on email worms, imagine the benefits they can bring to NNTP!
Is there a segment or a part in the computing industry that Microsoft doesn't want to control with half-done software?
Who the hell visits usenet for news anymore? What are they trying to do.. make downloading pirated material easier?
Here's a good way to get those usenet responses back and keep your real email hidden, disposable addresses:
Spam Gourmet
i kind of doubt irc is next, as microsoft has had irc servers in the past and shut them all down. the future of ms chatting is sure to be messenger.
does ms even develop comic chat any more?
Google already does this to a certain degree, although I don't know if their Activity ranking takes into account replies to topics or just number of messages or what. If you look at the Google Groups listings you'll see a rough measure of their activity as shown by a green bar. For example, if you look at the rec.arts.comics.* hierarchy you'll see rac.xbooks has no activity. And sure enough, if you go to that group you'll see 2 posts from 2003, 8 from 2002, and a handful of older ones. rac.european has an almost full bar and looking there shows 5-10 posts each month. The others have completely full bars showing lots of posts each day. Maybe Google should explain better how the Activity rating works; I didn't see a mention in the faq. Or perhaps show more detail than just the green bar.
Most news SERVERS are running unix. The major clients are running on windows. I would think agent and outlook express are the top clients.
Gnus (the newsreader built into Emacs) has done 1 - 3 for years now. See "kiboze" groups, automatic score files, and the ability to find URLs in posts and make them active. Maybe the caching or article copying features could satisfy 4.
Microsoft already did IRC a long time ago. The protocol used for MSN Chat was originally standard IRC protocol, but a few years back they abandonned IRC in favor of their own proprietary protocol and MSN Messenger. About the same time they switched protocols, Microsoft also abandonned its Microsoft Chat IRC client.
check here
Yeah, but if microsoft wants to play a part in usenet they need to get the bugs out of their Outlook Express. I use grabit because OE freezes all the time trying to decode files that are contained in more than 100 posts. Also, it can't even decode yEnc.
Take a look at the link off the article. There's a proof-of-concept interface out there. It seems like all they're really doing is collecting and analyzing statistics on the groups and posts. Now, before it's over I'm sure they'll put a front-end on it that uses that data to help prod idiots in the right direction, but I definitely don't see anything horrible about it yet.
It's particularly fun if you ask for more detail on microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics, where 4th down from the top is a long thread called 'FUCK MICROSOFT! FUCKING IDIOTIC CUNTS!'
For those who haven't tried Usenet, don't believe the 'cesspool' hype. My ISP provides over 30,000 Usenet groups, most of which never see posts. Some groups are cesspools of viagra, porn and evidence eliminator spam, but 30,000 unmoderated Slashdots would be no different. Check out Fuckedcompany.com's online forums if you think cesspools are a Usenet-only phenomenum.
I've been following it ever since he first did Netscan back at UCLA. In fact, I used Netscan to do the statistics for the Esther Dyson Release 1.0 issue on open source in 1998, projecting the relative size of open source communities by comparing their usenet footprint (as well as other stats, like size of conferences and mailing lists.)
We had Marc do a presentation on what he's doing at the last O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, and it was very well received. Marc's at Microsoft Research, and he's a guy slashdotters would all relate to if you actually knew him.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com
Mr. Taco, you do seem rather naive. There is nothing so bad that Microsoft cannot make it worse. What's worse than a Usenet cesspool? A really cool Usenet that is proprietary. So you can only get into it if you subscribe to it and have to pay a monthly fee.
And the MS juggernaut rolls on...
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Gnus has various mail backends, a slashdot backend, an ultimate bulletin board backend and an rss backend among others. "Virtual" and "Kiboze" groups can include groups from any combination of transports.
I've *no idea* whether this is the kind of thing MS (or anyone else) is thinking of
I doubt it. For starters, this came from MS Research, so chances are it won't turn into anything concrete. And if it does, its likely to be something like nnkiboze with dumbed down regexps and maybe a paperclip.
If you use a decently run news server, you almost never have to see a single spam message. I use the public news server at DFN-CIS in Germany (requires free registration) and all I ever see are occasional replies to spam.
While many Usenet newsgroups are junk, most websites are also junk and nobody complains about not bothering with the Web because there are so many junk sites on it. It's nonsense to generalize. There are many active and vibrant groups about specific interests and if one of them matches your interest (which is easy to find out) then Usenet is valuable to you.
Most of the tech groups (and more than any other medium) have experts in their field who donate their spare time to answer newbies and have great conversations with each other. I think that is pretty unique.
The same happens in many non-tech groups. I visit rec.music.classical.recordings frequently, looking for cds recommendations or new music to try. Some of the participants are players in big orchestras, so I know I get great advice. And spam is a non-issue, since the group is moderated.
I use google for text reading and gravity for binaries.(OE is useless for more than basic browsing)
OTOH, I fail to see why usenet would be affected at all by anything microsoft could do. All they are doing is data gathering and statistics analysis, in order to determine what are the most relevant and user-friendly newsgroups (for instance, the groups with most replies). And if this can help to bring more people, then it's welcome.
Usenet is a valuable and unique resource, because what it does isn't really covered by the alternatives. And it's also Internet history.
Cheers,
Ian
RTFA.
Microsoft's social engineers have been analyzing Usenet for a long time, and they are providing their clients with benefits from this analysis. Things like better search engines, better ordering of newsgroups, better ordering of threads (by activity, for example).
Anyway, nothing in this mentions any changing of standards by Microsoft, or changing of Usenet protocol.
Of course I cannot
begin to tell you how much fun the old begin
bug is.
Three months ago I posted a 'real" (disposable) email address in a sex group. Then I did it a few more times. Since then I have received TWO spams to that address - in contrast to what I considered a "permanent" email address that apparently got into the hands of one of those allegedly "opt in" sex site lists about six months ago and is now utterly useless due to the dozens of spams the box gets every single day (more than 500 a week, in fact).
It's easy to identify the "spam" groups - just look at a page of stats at all the binaries groups that average the same number of posts. Generally, any groups with message counts notably above or below the average are either very active groups or are "occupied" groups that are well maintained by their communities.
So far as "quality" I have found far more "quality" in usenet than I have ever found in p2p apps and most of the free web. Even when i had the prodicgious bandwidth to share via p2p I didn't bother, for usenet was far more compelling than anything napster or imesh had to offer: well informed opinions (in the right discussion groups) and a large amount of high quality and carefully catalogued content in the binaries groups.
To wit: if you want to collect complete albums of good quality you don't do the onesy-twosy crap of p2p; you hit the newsgroups. And if you want to collect the complete collection of playboy scans, suze randall, or amateur teen kingdom, you don't do the onesy twosey shit of p2p; again, you hit the newsgroups, where the people who share and post do so for the glory and, therefore, actually take some amount of pride in their service - not only in posting, but in keeping the community culled of spam. There even (at least) one group I know of where a community member with his own website (and server) makes automated hourly posts - sort of anti-spams - of on-topic material just to help keep the community S/N level high.
There are few places you find such a collection of individuals so dedicated to their communities as you find on usenet.
Indeed. In fact, in at least one online community, '<AOL>!' is the standard synonym for 'Me too!'.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Hm...
Fake or not, the association with the name "Gordon Letwin" (creator of OS/2's HPFS) suggests to me that it could be relatively authentic...
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS