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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!
If you know where to look, and what you are looking for, usenet is ok. It kind of has that wild west, last frontier kind of charm.
btw, if you hate having to decode stuff by hand with the various newsreaders, www.easynews.com is great for various binaries
I don't see this as having a major effect, most USENET users tend to run unix these days.
[*]
Score: -10000
X-Newsreader: Microsoft
Usenet is an open system that has been that way for years. We don't need microsoft going and adding their proprietary crap into usenet.
Usenet is one thing that hasn't changed much in recent times. You can find anything on usenet. It was the first place you could find massive amounts of mp3s. The first place for full movies and cd images. There's more free porn on usenet then someone could even dream of sorting through.
Usenet is many things to many people. Outside the binary areas there are some great discussions taking place and some excellent ideas constantly evolving.
We don't need microsoft changing standards around and screwing things up.. Luckily most usenet servers are old unix boxes and so they won't be able to do much harm to nntp. This still scares me though that they may try..
They want to "discover" who uses newsgroups and how often they come back. Hmm...
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
usenet is supposed to be distributed and resiliant to poor communications and have no choke points
:-(
Then it's failed, because the indescribably poor communication commonly called "spam" has all but choked it.
I haven't bothered with Usenet for several years simply because of the quantity of junk. Not to mention the quality
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Seriously, usenet is supposed to be distributed and resiliant to poor communications and have no choke points that would slow operation. All of the MS ideas would seem to introduce complication, choke points and remove much of the resiliance.
If you look at the interface at you'll see an implementation of the idea of classifying newsgroups by their active "membership" (there is no membership, of course, since everyone is free to post whenever they like and disappear into the wind as they please) and the number of replies per new topic.
The article also lists other ideas like sorting threads by their popularity, which might or might not be a good idea since generally the biggest threads are the off-topic flamewars between a few trolls that keep running forever.
What I don't see is any proposed changes to the UUCP protocol that is used to distribute Usenet news in a way that would somehow break the underlying structure of Usenet as we know it.
correlation != causation. Maybe there are a lot of people saying that AOL users say "me too" a lot. Had this discussion taken place on usenet, we would have incremented the count by two, yet neither one of us are aol users.
Every time someone predicted the death of usenet, the responses were "ha, again the imminent death of usenet is predicted". I think we can safely say that those complaining of the imminent death of usenet were proven right several years ago at the latest.
It's a shame that there is no decent, centralized place on the net for intelligent discussion. It's one of the biggest losses to humanity in recent years.
Everything they're talking about there can be done locally at an NNTP server, at least as I read it, and won't affect the wider usenet. So it's more user-interface work and work on a server with a different set of design goals to the current NNTP servers.
I'm all for it. You'll need a proxy server to protect the Exchange box running the MS-NNTP server from direct access by scary things like non-Lookout news readers of course. It sounds like an interesting idea though, and perhaps some of the better / more useful ideas might propagate to other NNTP software.
OK, well I'm one of those old fogeys who actually care about Usenet. I've been using it for twenty years and I still think it's a great thing. Admittedly a lot of groups are losing their vibrancy and vitality, and spam is an increasing problem. But Usenet is still a great way for communities of people with common interests to foregather and hang out with one another, bounce ideas around, solve technical problems and exchange ideas, irrespective of geographical distance.
Usenet, also, because of its primitiveness, is one of the parts of the network revolution which is most resistant to interference. It doesn't need the Internet; it can propagate happily over ad-hoc UUCP links on dialup lines. So even if the corporates come to control the Internet and dictate what we can do with it, even if governments put carnivore boxes on every router, Usenet is still ours and can still route around it.
It has it's problems. It was conceived in a more innocent age. We do need a successor.
But please, not Microsoft, the inventors of default top posting. This is one of the things which is making Usenet increasingly difficult to use. Microsoft do not have our interests at heart - only their own. If you want to see a new and better Usenet, look at projects like Usenet2.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It pretty much is these days.
I'm sure there are pockets of something of value, but years ago it pretty much became a total mess..
It was sad to see it happen.. Most people cant manage themselves. Its why anarchy isn't a viable option in society at this stage of the game.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe microsoft thinks Usenet is to generic and should be more microsoft-centric by allowing know-no's? :-)
Wouldn't that bias the discussions towards technically oriented people? I know a lot of rather smart people that become total idiots when at a computer. There are many people who are quite knowledgeable in many areas like history, music and so forth that would have a lot to contribute - do we really want to weed these people out as well? I'm not saying it's right or wrong but it's certainly something to consider.
I think probably the only real way to clean crap out of a truly open system is to do something similar to slashdot - with a sort of moderation system. While many (myself included) wonder if the moderators are on crack at times, it actually seems to work quite well, and is even better policed with meta-moderation
Do I detect ^M in you text? ;)
Yes, Microsoft provide few other alternatives for this rude kind of behavior. I see it in the "easy" groups like Yahooo groups I'm a member of. Microsoft users consitantly post crap in .DOC format instead of splitting out text and images, the same way they do email. It would be forgivable, but they make no effort even when told that others, including other Microsoft users with almost the same software, can not read the files they are trying to share. All of the Micrsoft defaults are to RUDE, word as an "editor" of email, email in "html" format or "rich text", it's really a challenge for the user to not be rude and once things are set they are very dificult to undo. Typical M$.
Microsoft, by encouraging their users to venture into the "difficult" world of usenet, will force all of these things along.
The answer it fix the user. Provide detailed instructions on how to undo M$'s rude defaults in a place where they can be pointed to. The M$ abusers will find themselves shunned and locked in a little M$ ghetto devoid of cluefull and polite people.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who the hell visits usenet for news anymore?
Actually I've found that as the signal/noise ratio on sites such as Slashdot have decreased with all of the AC posting and such, usenet groups such as comp.lang. have become much more useful because the signal to noise ratio has increased significantly. On usenet, questions are answered by folks who typically know the answer rather than the pure drivel and conjecture that we are seeing more on Slashdot.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I get about 50 spam messages a day in my email. I read several usenet groups, and see total of 5 a week on the busy weeks. Even then they are easy to weed out from the subject line, and rarely cross all groups.
I'll agree that the quality varies, but then it does everywhere else too. Those opinioniated people are everywhere in real life. Once I see a thread dropping into something that doesn't interest me it is very easy to skip the rest of the thread. This isn't Spam, because it is individual people (often 10 or 20) with strong opinions in one thread. Ignore the thread and you ignore the entire conversation. Much easier than email.
So you're advocating a sort of (community) security through obscurity, eh?
The implicatons I can think of are a 95% drop in NNTP traffic without doing any damage at all to the discussion traffic.
I subscribe to an international binary-free NewsServer (CIS.DFN.DE) and I like it that way. The 'binary attachment' folks are really implementing an entirely different service, and I see no reason why they should piggyback on what Usenet was originally about.
A Good Intro to NetBS
As far as I know, the Usenet message reader in Outlook Express uses exactly the same dangerous HTML/scripting concept and libraries the e-mail reader uses. Therefore, and because of OE's lack of distinction between e-mail messages and Usenet messages, Usenet worms are already in place, as long as someone posts them to a news group, and noone cares to delete them or at least remove the payload.
JeR
Microsoft--for better or for worse--wants to open Usenet to a more mainstream audience.
AOL did this several years ago. Back then it was called "The September that Never Ended".
(for those who don't get the reference, September was a famous month for all of the new college students who saw USENET for the first time, jumped in, and made idiots of themselves. College students, however, typically learned to wise up or go away. AOLers, unfortunately, did not -- seeing USENET as a service for AOL rather than an Internet resource that they were being granted the privledge of using).
Note that once the stigma of aol began to fade, webtv dumped their users onto it with even less concern for nettiquete.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Yenc is so horrible it became widely adopted overnight. yEnc and parity files have changed the way binaries are transmitted on USENET for the better. The link you provided has some valid points, but they seem more problems for yEnc implementers than users. In any case, if you got something better, put it out and let it compete with yEnc. Usenet will eagerly adopt a new standard the addresses some the problems mentioned the article. Think you can do better then yEnc, put up or shut up!
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
They don't want to control usenet.
They will produce their own usenet like service running on windows servers that will not be compatible with any of the news readers on the market.
They want to steal usenet like they stole kerberos. Take other peoples ideas, break them so that they are not standards compliant, sell servers, lock more users to outlook and windows desktop.
The world is the R&D dept for MS. Any useful thing anybody comes up with will be assimilated into the MS environment.
War is necrophilia.
I read lots of long threads, but I still can't keep track of exactly who said what -- especially when most of these threads end up nitpicking. I think both top and bottom posting suck -- interleaved posting, with judicious snipping of all but the most relevant quoted text, is the way to go.
That creates a newsgroup activity bidding system. The most active newsgroups get more participants, and more active participants. If only numbers are counted, quality is not rated. Trolls and Silliness also cause more activity. Members of newsgroups who want more activity are encouraged to post more, no matter how trivial. If you can't contribute to misc.education.medical.postmortem.organs.gallblad
Yes, those messages in a Microsoft Windows XP newsgroup where people point out that a Samba print server can handle all the desired types of output are obviously not relevant. The person was asking a question about XP, not about all solutions. And that message about a worm which infects an XP print server is obviously spam which is trying to promote something.
What a novel idea. It obviously is unrelated to the summary pages of the existing Usenet clients. Of course, this being a home page it obviously requires the protection of Passport.
Death of Usenet predicted.
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(I'm a Usenet veteran too. Google doesn't have my oldest postings.)
Yes. When learning a new subject you might not even know enough about its vocabulary to know whether you want to read about "GUI", "Desktop", or "Operating System", so you don't know which newsgroup with those terms are relevant. Then when you peek at a newsgroup you might not find any beginners nor teachers which are at your level.
So if a user's first post is "Hey everybody, I share your interest in foo. My stationary has unicorns on it. Hooray!". And the response is "Don't %$#'ing ever post binary attachments here again you %#$%'er!", then the user could easily decide Usenet is scary and rude and go back to the safety of their favorite web forum or mailing list.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]