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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
Hmm, what could be the news group with the most activity? Let's search for groups with the word "pictures" in them and I'll bet we find out.
... I see you are browsing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyteens
Would you like:
* tissues
* baby oil
* a life
* or me to fuck off
?
I seriously doubt that even Microsoft can make the USENET spam problem worse than it already is.
I mod down anyone who uses M$ in their posts. I like to live on the edge.
Now, as a time-saving measure, right next to the "post reply" button, there will be a "Me Too" button, and a "Send me the link username@hotmail.com" button.
Ryan Fenton
if usenet was supposed to be friendly it would have been designed that way :-)
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.
Hey Microsoft, what did you innovate today?
[*]
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..
Well, as a long time internet participant, I recall quite good what
.DOC rich text attached to an otherwise empty posting.
AOL did to usenet: Aquire a hord of "Me too" follow-up posters.
Actually, a quick google-groups research shows that of the 32,000
postings that contain "me too", a whopping 30,600 also contain the
word "AOL".
So I question - what can Microsoft do to usenet? I suspect, nothing
nice. Probably their efforts result in even more MIME/HTML postings,
with binaries attached in non-binary groups (probably something like
"My Signature.exe"). And certainly a lot of proprietarily encapsulated
text, such as
On one hand, usenet is for everyone, including Microsoft users. On
the other hand, I really hope that google-groups will filter them off
so that usenet can stay the valuable source of accurate tech information
that it is today.
Marc
Check the stats for NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email) that get regularly posted. More than half is OE.
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."
What will the effect be on groups.google.com be if Microsoft begins to take over Usenet?
Personally, I don't even use a normal newsreader program, but just peruse using google. I find the info I want (typically tech help on linux) and then that's it. You can even post to newsgroups through google.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
This is very bad news for Usenet. In the beginning, USEnet was a haven for people with the persistence and intelligence necessary to figure out how to use it, and it was good. Flamewars were minimal, people were respectful, and knowledge flowed freely. Then AOL, WebTV, and their ilk came along and lowered the barriers to entry. The quality of discussion went down, the quantity went up, and USEnet became a lot less USEful than it had been. I feel like that situation has improved slightly, at least in the text-only discussion groups. But if MS makes it possible for every dingbat melonhead with a modem to get on it, it's going to get much worse.
I'm probably being elitist, but I like it when it takes a little effort and intelligence to be able to participate in a discussion. I know that the people on a newsgroup are at least slightly more advanced (usually) than their ICQ-going friends, and that better discussions will result.
The other thing is that USEnet has (so far) been flying below the **AA's radar as far as file sharing and software IP ifringement go. If they all of a sudden turn their attention towards it, USEnet is easy prey for a takedown: the servers are centralized machines that are easily traceable to a company or individual, and most ISPs would probably just take theirs down rather than fight it out with the RIAA. Of course, the user uproar would be like nothing we've ever seen before, because USEnet's main use is not only non-infringing, it's incredibly valuable to a lot of technical types out there.
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.
true, but I'm sure the boys at Redmond are up to the challenge
What would happen is you load all the posts into a database and perform analysis on that data. From there you draw conclusions on the pretext that, if there were a lot of replies and a lot of repeats last week on newsgroup X, then that should continue this week, so that might be a good one to go for info.
Once they get the ball rolling on this though, I'd be willing to bet they try to "update" USENET as they become a major player there. Maybe that's just pessimism on my part though.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Here's a good way to get those usenet responses back and keep your real email hidden, disposable addresses:
Spam Gourmet
1) Content-related query and aggregate presentation of feeds, rather than simple 'feed'->'group' organization
2) Intelligent filtering based on my interests (e.g. the kinds of messages I have chosen to read before), not just a simple kill-file / watch mechanism
3) Better integration of links and web content (the kind of thing you're seeing in Outlook 2003 / good RSS aggregators)
4) Tools to help with the end-user integration of threaded news content into other apps (e.g. InfoPath-like tools)
No reason any of these things couldn't be done (beyond the fact that two in particular would require the kind of R&D effort that currently goes in to spam filters - the first half of this sort of equation). Forms of 1, 3 and 4 are already available in Outlook 2003, only it doesn't integrate news feeds into the experience. Hence, I guess, MS stated intention to make news a first class citizen in this world.
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.
Well isn't this just wonderful! It's not enough that usenet is plauged with spam, now we can have pop-up ads there, too!
:)
Someone let me know when the Mozilla team gets them blocked -- God bless them, every one.
Most news SERVERS are running unix. The major clients are running on windows. I would think agent and outlook express are the top clients.
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.
This week, Microsoft invents the threaded news reader......
Embrace and extend, embrace and extend....
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.
search for newsgroups containing "e":
/Static/default.asp, line 213
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0006'
Overflow: 'CInt'
Anyone using CInt for something like that is so utterly clueless that we'll have nothing to worry about.
Something tells me that Joe Averagecomputeruser will be fairly disappointed when he gets a taste of Usenet, but that's beside the point. As CmdrTaco noted in the original news post, Usenet is to a point that it can't really get much worse. Who knows? This might be one of those rare occasions when Microsoft is actually on to something.
Then again, it will probably just end up being Usenet with pretty Outlook stationery.
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
Yes, and Microsoft has already polluted that. Or probably diluted, I should say.
There ought to be either a comp.sys.microsoft or perhaps a new sub-hierarchy comp.vendor.microsoft.*. Instead, you get all this top-level microsoft.* nonsense. And then, of course, every 'me too' sheep of a vendor follows suit, so there's now borland.*, symantec.*....ugh. You're computer or computer software vendors, you belong in the comp.* hierarchy, not at the top level.
Cheers,
Ian
In August 1996, Microsoft made their internal microsoft.* hierarchy available to the world at large. Around that same time, they switched from INN v1.4 to a proprietary MS NNTP server.
For the next few weeks, every post made to microsoft.* and select other groups was duplicated by msnews.microsoft.com and spewed back to the world because the proprietary MS server changed the Message-ID for every post. Message-IDs are supposed to be unique, so an altered ID was seen as a new post by servers peering with MS and thus were not treated as duplicates and dropped.
Thousands and thousands of posts were duped and spewed by Microsoft's "innovative" server, both inside microsoft.* and out. The reaction among news admins ranged from mild chuckles at Microsoft's expense to blind rage and the use of cancelbots.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I could use a good laugh.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Considering the number of OTDs (outlook transmitted diseases) that would be prevented if Microsoft would just shut off a lot of stuff by default, I can only wonder what new spams and worms will be spread more efficiently.
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'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
If this catches on, it will be worse than the yEnc problem.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Exactly: it's great, but only if you know where to look. Sounds as though Microsoft's ideas on this one are steps in the right direction. I'm a Usenet veteran, but still find it difficult to identify a group that's relevant to me when I first want to explore a new subject.
For bonus marks, if they could just get people to understand that it's polite to read the FAQ before posting (and make the FAQ an obvious link somewhere) and that following local customs and keeping on-topic also go a long way, they'd be ahead of everyone else who currently offers Usenet access. A group with influence of Microsoft could do a lot to improve the signal/noise ratio on some newsgroups. Extending their reach into Usenet isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Ill-informed editorial comments like Taco's don't help much, BTW. Most newsgroups actually are pretty good these days, as long as there's one where your interest is on-topic and you have decent filtering in your client to cut out the noise. I've found worthwhile groups on various technical subjects, all of my major hobbies, my local area and more. We can do without putting off people who might be genuinely interested in reading and/or contributing to such groups with juvenile statements like Taco's.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> I downloaded all pictures sent to alt.binaries.pictures.eroica .
> I got nothing but pictures of bloody Beethoven.
Erocia -> Beethoven
Erotica -> Beat-Off-'n
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Microsoft's Outlook-based newsreader has a means of auto-detecting UU-encoded postings. Unfortunately it is an incredibly stupid method that simply checks for the presence of the word "begin" at the start of a line, followed by two spaces, which can cause all kinds of problems. Rather than fix such a grevious and utterly stupid error, Microsoft has offered the workaround "tell people not to have non UU-encoded postings with that line in it".
Brilliant. Also typical Microsoft. Tell the rest of the world to accomidate their stupidity.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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.
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.
Many have pointed out why Microsoft turning it's attention to the long-neglected usenet could be a bad thing. However, there are some possible benefits to it too...
First of all, Usenet apps are currently quite stagnant. There are new apps out there, but Agent is still considered one of the best and there haven't been any major changes to it in years. The interface is practically the same as it was 5 years ago! If Microsoft enters the news-reader market in a serious way then perhaps it might stimulate some creativity and development elsewhere. If nothing else, at least Usenet will get some publicity and new users. This is the big thing.
Currently, for most people, pay-for Usenet services are the only way to get good feeds at present. With more demand for Usenet from consumers and support from Microsoft perhaps ISP's will take their Usenet servers more seriously. Usenet is a valuable source for thousands of topics, but it is also a great repository for a weath of high-bandwidth materials such as porn, pirated music, videos, etc.. This is stuff that most ISP's don't really care about their users downloading except for the gawd-awful bandwidth costs they incur. A good Usenet server being used by users instead of P2P apps will actually reduce a lot of backbone traffic since the latest copy of Eminenema's album that everybody and their dog is downloading will only have to go over the backbone once to the news-server. From there it's all internal network traffic. Less bandwidth = lest cost, and cheaper internet access, not to mention more speed on less congested lines.
See. There's a silver lining in every cloud, even if it's a MS-sheitstorm.
...For E-mail and the Web? Let's have a look.
They've encouraged pollution of E-mail with HTML and rich text that's readable only on a client that can interpret the code. I mean, c'mon... If you can't get your message across using well-written sentences in plain ASCII text, then no amount of coloration, fancy fonts, or flashing widgets are going to help.
They've done a lot, both in the past and more recently, that bends or outright breaks W3C Consortium open standards. Granted, they've gotten a little better, but how many web sites still have interactive features that only work if you use IE? And how many have that stupid "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" blurb at the bottom? How are Flash animations and fancy graphics going to help a vision-impaired or outright blind user, who depends on text-to-speech software or simple high-contrast colors, find what they need on the web?
Outlook (known among myself and many of my friends as 'Lookout Distress') is still one of the best virus carriers on the planet. Only Microsoft would come up with an E-mail client insecure enough that it seems almost to have been designed expressly to aid virus and worm transmission.
And now UncaBill and Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer want to try and "Ballmerize" (my word -- like it?) Usenet? Sheesh... With their track records, they'll probably try (and, hopefully, fail miserably) to borg the whole thing into one big "Web Experience" that will be "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" all over again.
As others have so accurately pointed out, Usenet is fine the way it is. Noisy, a bit tough to navigate, and definitely a place where you would want to have your Nomex undies handy to grab at a moment's notice, but perfectly usable to those of us who CARE ENOUGH ABOUT IT to LEARN how to use it right.
Speaking for myself, I think I can say, with confidence, that Balmy should leave Usenet to those who know it best: The admins around the world who carry it, and the thousands of users who make it a most interesting place indeed.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
In all seriousness, when I read "Microsoft to do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web", my first thought was: "Microsoft is making a newsreader that automatically executes code stored inside of Usenet posts?"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
USENET isn't worthwhile only to porn addicts, pirates, and geaks. Those of us in the social sciences use it quite often. There are some very good communities on USENET for discussions of international politics, economics issues, etc. USENET is also great for some entertainment. There are a lot of active groups with a great sense of community that meet to discuss hobbies like art collection, carpentry, or even train wrecks like the Anna Nicole show.
In addition to BWJones' comments, USENET is often much more efficient than equivalent web-based forums. I don't have to deal with cookies, improperly formatted HTML, binary advertisements, etc. If the answer is there on USENET, I'll surely find it faster than if I were to navigate a website.
If they can clue the masses into Usenet in such a way that users think that they need Microsoft software in order to do Usenet, they'll control millions of people's access to Usenet, and to some degree Usenet itself.
If that were true, AOL would've controlled Usenet a long time ago.
Furthermore, MSN is the default startup homepage on 90% or 95% or whatever of browsers, and yet Google rules the web search.
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.]