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AOL Kills Usenet Access
Numair writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL is about to terminate Usenet access for its users. Now, before everyone starts rejoicing ... where is the Usenet community going to find another large media company to protect it from frivolous copyright lawsuits?"
It looks like September did end, after all.
Sorry folks, couldn't help it.
Somehow I can't be excited about this. The damage has already been done, and they're just moving on to poison something else.
http://www.google.com/
What no more me to posts that we have all come to love :-)
AOL users got their bad name by posting too many ME TOO!, what is a.b.misc, and reply:01/99 - can you repost 2-99.
Giganews and other big name vendors will gladly sell you Usenet service and best yet you can change the port in which you connect with; say port 80 and AOL cant block as they cant figure out if your using HTTP or NTP; they could block the IP address but then again you could use an anonymous proxy and the battle continues. That being said, I hope people know that there are other ISPs that are willing to have you as a customer. If the law suites go after say Giganews then I bet there is some Swiss news account (ok ok when I say Swiss accounts I mean services that wont divulge any information to anyone no matter who's asking).
Hm, for the most part, they're still just exactly like that. Nothing's changed in 11 years. Unfortunately, this isn't going to kill AOL, as one other person suggested. Somehow, as badly as AOL sucks, they manage to continue to survive. Maybe it's all those CDs they keep distributing everywhere. Want an AOL CD? Go to Burger King! They make half-decent frisbees...
But I'll take anything that reduces AOL's Internet presence as a good thing for the Internet.
Oh, and the frivolous lawsuit was against AOL, not Usenet. You can't sue Usenet. It's too decentralized.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
The september that never ended is... ending?!
Comcast effectively "killed" Usenet access when it told you that you can get it through a third party (which charges after what 2GB?)
They gave a viable alternative by pointing people to Google Groups. At least they didn't shut off free access then start charging their users for it.
AOL has a large userbase of morons. How many of those morons read Usenet anyway? It's likely that it is a tiny group of their overall base. Why support something that no one uses and that you can get through other sources anyway?
I was there when AOL enabled usenet access. The flood of users with no netiquette or, as it seemed to me at the time, common sense, drove me out of almost every newsgroup I followed.
And now they are leaving.
Irony.
So what's Usenet?
Is it good because it cleans up Usenet? Or does it just mean there will be an influx of idiocy to everywhere else? I'm scared!
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
...the final nail in the coffin for me. The only reason I've stuck with them is because I've had an account dating back over a dozen years, and didn't want to give up that e-mail address. Between this, and the 33% price increase I saw when they did away with their 2 yr. plan, I see little reason to stay with them anymore...rat bastards.
Just another day in Paradise
"I felt a great disturbance in the Usenet, as if millions of alt.binary.xxxporn images suddenly
cried out in terror and silenced at once"
Now, if they'd just disconnect them from the Internet completely...
Wasn't there an old usenet quote, something like "There, now all of our subscribers can accesss the Internet!"??
Usenet died not long after Canter and Siegel. The amount of spam and crossposting just made the signal-to-noise ratio too much.
*sigh* I remember the days where I could catch up on 50 newsgroups in under an hour, reading most of the threads too.
If I need information now, I hit google. If I want to ask a question, I find the appropriate mailing list and send it.
What's with the frivolous link to an ad-riddled page with about two sentences' worth of actual content? Come now /. editors!
What about bit-torrent like access to usenet?
A torrent for each newsgroup, and sub torrents for the articles.
Then I can pull down what I like and not what I dont.
And it will come blazingly through my asymetric broadband internet connection.
no. I dont do AOL.
I did once use the "free 9000 hours" when I was between jobs back in 96 but that was it. - and it took 6 months to get them to frigin close the account and stop billing me!!
comment directly in my journal
This doesnt really matter as you can still use google groups or any of the other web based usenet sites. at the end of the day the majority of good information can still be seen on usenet as its much easier to search through than web sites when trying to find cr*p. The primary reason i see for that is people that put up bs web pages that contaminate the search results with garbage or the term your using is very broad on the web but in the particular usenet group its automatically specific.
Not trolling here, but...
I remember the old days of dialing into my shell account and using my little news reader ('tin' was it?) to read through my favorite groups. I even remember downloading multiple posts, linking them together, and using some archaic app (binhex, maybe) to turn them into little binary apps like hangman. I was a big fan of USENET back then - good discussions, helpful people, uncensored pr0n...
I tried to visit some groups recently and was sad to see more spam than a hotmail account, one-sentence off-topic posts, etc. Does anyone actually know of any more useful groups?
My alma mater shut off their news server a year or so ago. I have the strangest feeling the Usenet is finally dying its rather long-deserved death.
Like everyone else, though, I can't but view the removal of AOL from Usenet except with joy. I don't see how it could really hurt the old newsgroups.
Canthros
... screw it. The Market will deal with it. If users want usenet access, they'll leave and find a better ISP.
But I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is not the case, because most consumers just don't think that way. So by extension the whole self-regulating market thing is immediately dead in the water.
Phew. Good job I'm not from the right wing, or else my entire worldview may have been shattered right there
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
I love when they reply to a post, and don't write a response! Oh No! I'm stereotyping AOL users!
I'm happy to see the AOL Morons leave Usenet once and for all. I've had my news reader delete all posts involving @aol.com addresses for years.
Me Too!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
While it does not provide access to binary groups (for understandable reasons) it works really well for normal text groups. And it's free, all you have to do is registering: news.individual.net
Haven't web based discussion boards replaced usenet?
Didn't usenet die a long time ago?
I know it was a big deal once and always suffered from high noise to signal.
No, but if 1% of your hard drive was viruses, you wouldn't be so happy, eh.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
I've found one website that has a lot of usenet groups including rss feed.. they seem to update much quicker than google
http://www.talkaboutnetwork.com/ http://www.talkaboutprogramming.com/
Was it ever a decent "service" for anyone that could spell "computer"? I doubt it. I felt sadness when they gobbled up CompuServe, which had a decent "forums" alternative with a downloader that featured an offline scheduler and synch tool. Ahead of its time in some respects, but alas, not dumb enough for mass-consumption by the AOL-ers that out-multiplied us in the years after.
/. subscriptions suddenly spike by 5000%. Could this be related to AOL shutting down it's Usenet groups?
Post submitted by: CmdrTaco0195004294012
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
As if there were any reason to use AOL - which there wasn't - how does offering less services make them any more useful to their subscribers?
In other news:
SPAM and general stupidity on newsgroups declined by 99.5% after this announcement.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
me too
I remember seeing the infamous "green card" spamvertisement on EVERY usenet group.I was slighly in awe that they went through the effort to put it on EVERY freakin' newsgroup.
Now within the last 6 months, I see the same 1 or two spam posts on every single usenet group I'm subbed to. Sad, really.
I would say spam has claimed a victory here. i do find some good usage out of local groups like mn.general(which is generally spam free, but not political cook free), and the grand-theft-auto newsgroup.
But with the playstation2 group, it's 99% cross-posted-to-other-groups flamewars between ps2 and xbox users. *sigh*. Never bothered with the binary groups since I just could not figure out the obfuscated mess that is FreeAgent.
Comcast supposedly moved everyone over to giganews, which is a paid service with either 1 or 2 gigs a month. Wow, 2 gigs of spam per month! Sign me up! Thankfuly their old server still works, but they keep it quiet.
But with the poor s/n ratios of newsgroups, I can see why ISPs are jumping ship.
Can't AOL customers simply use a news client like Outlook Distress (heaven forbid) or Free Agent, and then just subscribe to a newsgroup hosting service? If it's text-based groups that you're interested in, there is News.Individual.NET which is free.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Believe it or not...:-) I've personally been a reader of alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror for something like 12 years now. During that time the WWW was created, many mailing lists have come and gone, various message boards/Yahoo groups/etc. came and went, but the Usenet group alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror has stuck around like the plague. I actually created my own web-based portal for it to make it easier for new people to join:
RockyNewsgroup.org
Most Usenet groups aren't lucky enough to have dedicated web portals for that group, but I do know there are others:
RecPoker.com
Usenet groups stick around because people can access them in so many different ways and because it's a common ground that can be "packaged" by people but will not die whenever those fancy portals happen to go away.
Gotta pull down 5,000 new headers from Alt.Binaries.AOL.Users.Me.Too
Time to go watch a movie. Should be done by then.
Alt.Binaries.Cracks.Phrozen-Crew has that crack for Dreamweaver MX. Too bad I can't download it off my slow-as-shit 56k line.
Ooops. My kid thought Alt.Binaries.Erotica.Cartoons was about TV Shows. AOL, why do you even have that group?
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
We'll survive. Thanks. Buh-bye AOL.
--- Ban humanity.
...with thousands of mouth-breathing morons lacking any sense of netiquette, usenet wouldn't need "protection" from frivolous copyright lawsuits.
"Me too! Me too!"
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I hate the smooth, hi-tech feel to Google's new format for Usenet.
Perhaps, I'm just old, but that's how I feel.
So remember, AOL caters to the simple/stupid crowd.
Who is also the crowd that generally has massive amounts of spyware/trojaned/infected PCs used for sending out Viri and Spam. And also the same who respond to spam, buy spam products and think "Gee, I'm really glad my bank is verifying my account information" when they get a phishing e-mail.
Then there are the things the semi "anonymous" accounts are used for and a few other illegal things that people use AOL accounts for. Eliminating the AOL crowd would probably make the internet a safer/saner place to be for the rest of us. Especially when you consider it's also the AOL customers that want the governemnt to "protect tehir children" from online content.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"Do 99% of AOL users even know what usenet is?"
;)
Maybe not, but 99% of them know what the internet is - the blue e on their desktop.
"In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the country adding 'aol.com' to people's Usenet kill files everywhere. The programmer of the virus still remains anonymous, but has been nominated several times for a Nobel peace prize."
Policing==editors
cadre of regulars ==intelligent and caring regulars.
Usenet==Slashdot.
Oh what we could have been.
Anyone who uses it should just shoot themselves and be done with it.
I've been an avid usenet reader for many years. asides from mail lists this has been my primary means of finding technical info. however in the last year it has been inpossible for me to download groups and not get infected. now since I have to use MS at work and the only MS reader that i use is express. it's next to impossible to not get infected. any one know of a good reader example text only that does not get infected ?
they still have access to Usenet....just use Google....DUH. Also, they likely dropped it because only people who surf Slashdot even know what Usenet is. Besides, as of late, Usenet is just a place for spam.
Gorkman
ME TOO!
This isn't a good thing, guys.
IMO: usenet, and groups.google to mine usenet, is probably the single greatest resource on the planet. This is as much a tragedy as the month (or so) Deja disappeared.
Wow. My killfile will shrink!
Has been predicted before. It's still going. Loosing AOL will hurt... a little. I'm willing to bet any Usenet users on AOL will change ISPs to maintain access to their groups. It will take a long time for usenet to die - especially groups getting 10's of thousands of text posts per day.
-- $G
Are they port blocking? Or just not making it available through AOL itself.
I could understand AOL wanting to cut support (so it's not so easy for amatures to visit and say "hey, why is there pornography here?").
Though I wonder if AOL will block ports for it's dialup users.
Either way, google groups will be around.
So I don't think it will be such a big deal.
As for a "large media organization to protect it". Don't think that's necessary. The groups stand for what they contain. As long as users use them legitimately, no question. Many linux groups, mozilla, even microsoft have run them with no problem.
It's the ones infested with kiddy porn and copyrighted material that end up in trouble... and they just need to figure things out.
IMHO it would be great if someone would weed out the garbage and restore them *all* to a useful state.
Ohhh!
Me TOOOOOO!
This is done by registering your domain and hosting it, or getting your email through someone who does this for you. Forcing every domain to forward for you in perpetuity would be cumbersom e at best . . .
hawk
Just like BSD, Usenet is *DEAD*
This is a Bad Thing. It is simply another indicator of USENET's decline. And that's a Bad Thing, because the alternatives (the web-based forums, many of them excellent--let me plug bikeforums.net as a superb example) are all under corporate, rather than community control. They are simply not committed to the same degree of openness and free-as-in-freedom that USENET is.
It is one more sign that the Wild West days of the Internet are coming to an end and the Internet is coming more and more thoroughly under the control of business interests.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
But since nobody owns Usenet--and people post from servers around the world--it's difficult to enforce copyright laws, says Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement at the Business Software Alliance. The industry group is an outspoken foe of piracy. "It's very difficult to take action against newsgroups," he says. http://tinyurl.com/5uu7t/ PCWorld.com
Now this quote is from 2002, and it is still relevant and applicable.
With the RIAA spoofing files,and sueing anything that moves, http://tinyurl.com/4af7y/ The Daily Texan I wonder how long before they start trying to propogate corrupt files into Usenet, as well. With AOL making it harder to access Usenet (by removing native support) this is removing alot of trash from Usenet and possibly a boon to the Network. All AOL has done is remove the clueless N00b (uninformed user) from the equation, and the more informed AOL user will still have access, yet from a pay Server. http://tinyurl.com/39dtp/a Slycks Guide to Usenet Newsgroups
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
In response to comments about AOL Members. Yes, AOL, like other big ISPs, has its fair share of morons. Probably more so as it targetted those who were likely to struggle with internet access.
/. posters annoy me when they abandon their principles and suggest that becuase AOL members irrate them they should effectively be denied internet access.
Yes, they can by annoying. Heck, they annoy me in the same way that
Very inclusive. Disenfranchise millions from the internet. Let's go the whole hog and stop them reading newspapers, watching TV and speaking in public.
How democratic.
Lamer.
u Suxor
I M D 133t haxor
m3 2
AOL Rocks.
al d haxor r0ck 0n AOL.
Heh. That was my first thought when I saw the article.
(editor note - let's do this right. This is the authentic way that these 'mee too' threads were perpetuated. A favorite hottie of the world of 1994 was the underage star Alicia Silverstone.)
>>If you want your pictures of Alicia
>>Silverstone naked,
>>just post "me too" on this thread and
>>I will e-mail them to you.
>Me too!!!!!!!!
me too.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
We're going through a plague of Google Groups posting in one of my regular groups at the moment. It seems that Google make it relatively difficult to quote context, so most people just don't. Consequently you end up with a swathe of posts replying to someone's point, but unless you've been carefully following every post in the thread you'll never know what that point actually was.
It's caused an outbreak of killfiling on a normally quite relaxed group, and Google really need to make quoting, and bottom-posting, the default. Apparently it is possible, you have to go into Options and reply from there, instead of just hitting reply. Don't know for sure as I don't use the service other than once in a blue moon.
Cheers,
Ian
"One more reasons to use encryption everywhere (https in this case)"
Oh gee. Like no one outside of Slashdot would think of that being used.* Encryption is not a panacea for every problem. Also in case you've forgotten. We're talking about AOL users here.
*Slashdot elitism strikes again. Slashdotters are the only smart ones. The rest of the planet is too stupid to even concive of the slashdotters brilliance.
which includes free access to por^H^H^Hnewsgroups.
These days, I just use my $5/mo AOL account for keeping my screen name (works with AIM/iChat) and image hosting for Fark photoshops. I was also having my mom use it for e-mail, but I got her to switch to using my own mail server with a real RFC protocol.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
honestly i learned much later that people once communicated and had discussions on the usenet. i thought it was all just for binaries and to request post. actually many there are companies that provide unlimited binary downloads for about 15 dollars a month. alot of them also just give free usenet access for text. haven't those discussions moved to forums,irc and such now.
And I just built that 1TB RAID array to store my killfile.
I do wonder if this is a sign.
Now that the largest member of both the RIAA and MPAA no longer has a stake in usenet, AOL can participate in a campaign to break it up, or at least to more heavily police it.
A great feature of usenet for copyright violating is that you can leech all you want and noone will ever know except you and your usenet server.
But that won't matter if they convince Congress to place burdensome requirements on companies that maintain usenet servers.
Of course, there are plenty of good Constitutional and practical arguments against doing that. But who is going to make them. More importantly, who is going to have the kind of clout that's necessary to fight a lobbying effort by these people?
1. Their frisbees don't hurt when they hit you.
2. Their frisbees don't travel as far, so you don't have to run as much.
3. If you don't catch their frisbee, not only do you not want to pick it up, you don't have to, it is generally biodegradeable.
2. Dogs have more fun when they catch one, and are generally inclined to take a break, thus giving you a break too. Much more relaxing.
Infuriate left and right
I used to access Usenet via netnews.comcast.net. About a week ago I noticed that I could no longer log in via that address. I jumped on Comcast's support site and found that they had outsourced their usenet access to Giganews. I had to change my reader to point to newsgroups.comcast.com, and was now required to use my username and password.
The biggest policy change was that they only allow 2GB of data transfer per month. That sounds like a lot, but to a data addict like me, I can go through that amount of data in a day. Actually, I did, and now have to wait a month before my quota is reset.
Right now I have a couple options if I want to continue to support my usenet addiction. I can subscribe to a monthly service like giganews for $25 a month (in addition to my $40/month Comcast bill), or I can switch to Verizon DSL for cheaper. I'm most likely going to jump on Verizon, but part of me wants to sign up with giganews and use Comcast's network to download ungodly amounts of data, just to say fuck you to them for shutting me off.
-b.
For those who don't get it:
<AOL>For me, too</AOL>
So remember, AOL caters to the simple/stupid crowd.
Thanks for bringing this up. Remember, half of the population has an IQ under 100, by definition.
There are a bunch of self-righteous egotists who hang out here and contend that they just shouldn't have access to technology. That is, of course, bullshit. Including antivirus software with their service is the second best thing AOL has done in a decade (supporting Mozilla being #1).
There needs to be an onramp for the Internet and I don't see anyone else stepping up. Remember - you too were once an annoying helpless newbie!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
-b.
How will this affect Usenet propogation for the rest of us? Let's face it, AOL is big, and what kind of a chunk is it going to take out if they shut all their News Servers down? Corrections welcome if they don't host their own for some reason.
The current Eastern Standard Datetime will be: 12:34 PM, October 1, 1993 BEEP
(GP poster here.)
Well, eighty percent of success is showing up. I think the beauty of BT is that you can be completely lame and still contribute a bit.
I can see AOL coming up with AOL-Torrent, though, which disconnects you as soon as you finish the download.
The first me too post was posted back on March 20, 1994 http://groups.google.ca/groups?selm=2mj22t%243da%4 0search01.news.aol.com
the simple fact is 90% of internet users today don't even know what usenet is (and I like it that way) my ISP is great as they provide a 5G/month giganews account for each of my 5 email addresses (I doubt they really understand this but once again their ignorance is my bliss) although for a new user to even realize my ISP has news access would take a week of diving through there site. For me the more USENET is off the radar the better it is.
I am in a similar situation, here in South Carolina. I have great access through a local Telco, but they outsource to the local conglomorate ISP, out of Charlotte NC. They have almost no binaries on thier News Server. Luckily I maintained my old ISP account, and pay $29 a month. http//www.vnet.net and they have damn near all of the binary groups, I can think of, and best of all NO DATA LIMITS I split this access to myself and my father, and split the cost. Compared to Giganews or Supernews, this is as cost effective as anything.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
I thought the only excuse people gave for using AOL in a tech-related area was "I only use it 'cuz it is what my parents use."
Posted from the wireless couch.
I'm not sure they care about whether or not you're engaging in NTP. I suspect that they just got tired of carrying the vast quantities of traffic and disk space required to participate fully in Usenet, especially if it's not an important feature for their users, and so much of the traffic is spam. I doubt many AOLers are going to dump the service just because they no longer carry alt.bitterness or comp.lang.java.announce.
If they care at all it's because of the many porn binaries newsgroups. I'm a bit surprised AOL doesn't just decide to drop them instead of all of them; there is at least some reasonable conversation remaining in the text-only newsgroups and the traffic is considerably reduced. Perhaps if they were to then block the obvious spam as well it would be much less storage (though still plenty of traffic).
Crap! I meant to post that without any mods.
Also to be fair, http://http//www.giganews.com/ and http://www.supernews.com/ should have been added as well. Not to mention there are many list to open News Servers.http://http//www.newzbot.com/ and url:http://http://tinyurl.com/5uc4z/> Google Search
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Or option three: You can quit beating off so much. Turn off your PC and go outside and play.
*shrieks like a hyena, soils himself, and then hands his baby off to a complete stranger while standing on a table and making a list of unreasonable demands*
-- AOL User
Damn It! Frelling coffee, is got me all fux0red today.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Umm.. this is a good point, and an entirely do-able one, if you accept redirecting mails to a new address as a form of portability. What's it modded funny for?
So I guess this means they won't be advertising their service as Unlimited Internet Access? Why is it that ISPs no longer actually provide a connection to the Internet but just a connection to port 80? Sorry this is slightly off topic.
But AOL didn't kill it. Spammers did. Large swaths of formerly noble USENET newsgroups are 90% spam. Moderation doesn't buy you much as spammers can easily forge moderation messages. And USENET 2 never really came to fruition.
Let us mourn our friend. She was great in her time.
From the article:
But the Usenet will nonetheless become a smaller, less interesting place once AOL turns off its newsgroup servers.
What kind of crack is this guy smoking? That's like saying that a nice neighborhood will be smaller and less interesting without all the trailer parks on its fringes. Posts from AOL users tended to be interesting in the same way that "mystery meat" is mysterious.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Now I can remember the day they left as well.
W00t!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What Is "IQ"?
It was also observed that the gaps between children's mental ages and their chronological ages widened as the children got older. The 6-year-old with the mental age of 8 had a mental age of 12 by the time he was 9 and a mental age of 16 by the time he was12. Similarly, the 6-year-old with a mental age of 4 had a mental age of 6 when he was 9 and a mental age of 8 when he was 12. In 1912, the German psychologist, William Stern, noticed that even though the gap between mental age and chronological age widens as a child matures, the ratio of mental age to chronological age remains constant (and, as we will see, remains essentially constant throughout life). This constant ratio of mental age divided by chronological age was given the name "Intelligence Quotient". Actually, the intelligence quotient is defined as 100 times the Mental Age (MA) divided by the Chronological Age (CA).
"IQ" is a very flawed standard, only in part for how it deals with non-children. However, an IQ of 100 on a 10 year old means they have the normal mental capacity of a 10 year old. The bell curve rests there. A 10 year old that has the mental capacity of a 9 year old has a a 90 IQ. It you had a 170 IQ at 17, that merely meant you had the Mental Age of a 28.9 year old. In theory.
So yes - half the population has an MA that is higher than their CA, and half the population has an MA that is lower than their CA. That's the way the system was devised (a system which quickly breaks down and becomes irrelevant once someone isn't a child).
Tada! As Paul Harvey says..."and now you know, the rest of the story."
The TPTB want to kill Usenet.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Thank goodness ! Anything and everything that AOL pulls out of is great news... Thieves, robbers and AOL - all the same... Charging so much for internet access and taking advantage of people who don't know any better. I hate that the "A" stands for America. Thanks goodness for NETZERO and even the Free ones... LAMOS LAMOS and they can kiss my butt... Even Further? One day soon they WILL NEVER be able to compete... and what's with that ridiculous browser - where nothing works? You figure they'd make the damn thing work for 24.95 per month... And the MORONS who STILL PAY AOL on top of DSL, wireless or cable access... Why? WHY? WHYYYY!??? For the stupid Buddy list? Get AIM for Free Morons... The hypy-dypy community? Find a website... The Adult Blocking? Get Net Nanny... I can't believe it... I just Can't SORRY FOR THE RANT...
Always- as spam became an item- this account got so much spam that I decided to make it my usenet account over my shell accounts. I used dejanews- now google groups to post.
Now- there spam filter is slightly bettter- but still shit. This has grown into an account I use to register for message boards- and what not. Can check all the email from the web.
Everyone needs a junk mail account- aol has always been mine.
Frivolity is apparently subjective, contingent upon whether or not one's income relies on the sale of copyrighted material. FYI, AOL has settled with Mr. Ellison.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
You should check out www.usenetserver.com, they have an awesome $30 for 3 months unlimited deal, and a $3 for 3 day unlimited deal to try it out. With the advent of par files, incomplete posts aren't really a big deal.
AOL is not "terminating usenet access" for its members. They simply cease to provide the service themselves. Which is really no loss for AOL members, because text newsgroups can be accessed through Google and for binary newsgroups you need a premium usenet provider anyway.
Register your own domain with a registrar that provides email forwarding. Then you have email portability. Change your ISP and all you have to do is change your forward record. Joker is the one I use, but you can choose your own.
. there used to be a sig here.....
now only the 1337'est hax0r's can use usenet. Maybe without all the pr0n, spam, and copyright infringing binaries, the servers won't be gasping for bandwidth so much.
this isnt just about usenet -- this is about AOL slowly dying out and slowly shriveling away. they lost on average last year 600,000 dial up subscribers per quarter.. about 2.4 million subscribers in 2004. all indications are that they will at lose at LEAST twice that many in 2005. more people are now willing to shell out $15 more for DSL or maybe $20 for cable internet(its STILL 23.99 for AOL dial-up) as people want faster and better times on loading sites, emailing and chatting. of course you cant forget the 9.99 services but IMO those are just temporary gigs that wont last forever. with the advent of cell phones, everything wireless and faster speeds, AOL is doomed and i will be the first to look forward to this moment..
I'd put in an ObTasteless here, but I've been out of the loop for so long on account of the spam that I just don't have the heart for it any more. [wipes a wistful tear from his eye]
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
"The September That Never Ended" refers to September 1993. While it has been in popular memory often amalgamated with the arrival of AOL posters, that actually happened in May 1992.
While the AOLers were certainly part of the endless September, it had more to do with the number of Usenet newbies from all sources hitting a tipping point.
... but real frustration with real problems -- Usenet has been all but killed by impolite people who refuse to follow etiquette ('newbie' or not), and of course, the ever-growing spam.
More constructively, you could have suggested that if people long for the old BBS-style interactions, to find some telnet BBSes. (No links handy; easy enough to search for via Google).
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
"The general contract of the method run is that it may take any action whatsoever." -- Java 2 API
What is a good Linux USENET client that supports decoding/downloading binaries, especially yyenc binaries?
There is free Usenet
It's not very hard to find
You fail the test
Go ahead and kill the entire thing. Usenet used to be a legitimately useful thing. Now it's just a cesspool.
It's time came and went. Social structures break down with "communities" as large as Usenet. Bury it -- it's been dead for years.
Easynews rulez the world!
Yes, I really do not know.
And why would anyone block it?
"The amount of spam and crossposting just made the signal-to-noise ratio too much."
Yes and then people invented News clients which could actually filter and killfile.
Google Groups is still one of the greatest sources of information on the planet. If you rely on Google so much are you really telling me you never search the groups for information? That would just be foolish.
Every year people claim usenet dead and every year they are wrong. Just because you don't subscribe to any groups or visit usenet anymore doesn't mean it fell off the face of the earth. When you close your eyes does the world disappear as well?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The frivilous copyright lawsuits link has some advertisements that make it seem that your not doing work @ work (suicidegirls.com et cetera). Just a warning...
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Oh come on, I did a search for 'me too' on google groups and it only found 4,270,000 results. Stop your whining.
Yea, but what are they going to do about you running an sTunnel over port 443 (or using NTTPs over 443) which many news group servers support?
.ZIP, download over HTTP.
Many of these Usenet users could simply use Deja News..Make that groups.google.com. The warez/pix/rar crouds can use NNTP over HTTP that many of these guys have. Select the threads, add them to a
AOL cannot block all of this.
AOL did have one of the best Newsgroup servers at one point in time, though they had the worst interface as well.
LOL!!! LOOK IM TALKING ON TEH INTERNETS!!!1111!!!111
Important Stuff
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
ME TOO!!1!!1!1
> ME TOO!
It's not like they are a Mainstream Media Corporation. Right?
Acording to TimeWarner Electronic Voting Fraud didn't happen either. Right?
I mean hey, it's not like Electronic Data resists tampering. Right?
It's just another "Fake" news source they are filtering. Right?
They're not just executing Bush's Man-Date. Right?
It isn't like some had a plan sitting on a shelf for years, they haven't been planning to systematically destroy and censor the internet. Right?
It *is* Burger King, after all. Adding an AOL CD to a Whopper might make the thing taste better.
I don't know any that get OFF the onramp - they just stay within the little AOL world, and have no desire to learn about anything else. They get their email, they have their chat rooms, and the cute little AIM icons.
They stay *right there* and never learn anything.
Yeah, and when I move to a new city I should be able to keep my old address right? Can't be too hard.
If that was an attempt at sarcasm, it was a poor example. Part of the price of USPS postage stamps goes toward postal forwarding and address change notification services for people who have recently moved.
Tim Skirvin: Now 500% happier!
how does offering less services make them any more useful to their subscribers?
Because the vast majority of the AOL crowd doesn't care about AOL's built-in Usenet facilities, providing such Usenet access does not bring enough marginal Membership revenue to justify maintaining the servers. Cutting such services helps AOL cut costs and thereby stay in business longer.
Me THREEEEE3E33333##3#
Im sure a lot of people will be annoyed that they cant get to a large part of 'the internet'..
While i agree usenet has been in pretty bad shape for years, it is still there.. and is still ( mostly ) useful..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Speak for your self please, some of us were neither annoying nor helpless.
Some of us grew up with the technology as it advanced, so we were never techinally newbies....
We also educated ourselves *before* we spoke.
Sure, in this day and age, newbies will always exist, but there is NO excuse to be annoying or helpless . If they do a little homework first, they can ask educated questions and not be annoying.. and by definition, not helpless.
And if they dont bother to at least *try*, then no, they should not have access to technology and can stay off the 'freeway'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Very true. In my university days I know I made a few online gaffes sorting out USENET, email and ftp. Fortunately, I was just one of the Legions of September who had a few old-timers help me find my footing. I can still go back and look at my early posts on Google Groups (shudder.)
The Ham radio folks call old-timers who "look over the shoulder" of novice radio operators to help them out Elmers. I had a few cyber-Elmers help me with my baby steps. In turn, I've tried to be a bit of an Elmer myself.
The main problem with a sudden and constant growth of new users is that the Elmer-to-newbie ration drops off quite a bit. It's hard to stay calm when you see that 2/3rds of new USENET posts can be solved with a single Google search. Given this recent statistic, I don't think we can expect things to get better.
Well, that and we've gained a significant number of l0s3rs, as well. Can't be helped, I guess.
I'm not even sure blocking AOL users from USENET will even have an impact. Between Google and the other big ISPs, the signal-to-noise ratio is not going to be affected all that much. Certainly USENET spam won't change, and Clueless Newbies are legion everywhere you go. They no longer limit themselves to AOL or small Canadian Universities.
-- clvrmnky
Oh well.. gotta love typos... I'm sure the intent was clear anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was going to comment on the same thing. Not only is it only a port 80 connection, but it's DOWNSTREAM ONLY.
I curse you Adelphia, and your stupid rules. If the phone lines in my small town wern't so terrible as to even make 56k not an option, there is no way I'd shell out $57 a month for a nice fast line which is idle 20 hours out of the day.
It sucks out loud that they could be held responsible if I ran some kind of illegal service. If I was selling illegal arms over the telephone could Verizon get in trouble? If I was dealing drugs out of my car, would Chevy get in trouble? If I was running form the cops, did Nike tell me to "Just Do It"?
OK, end of rant. I think someone with money for a good lawyer needs to sue an internet provider for advertising "Unlimited Internet" with all these limitations, take the money and start their own actual "Unlimited Internet" company which will let end users run whatever they want provided they don't A) go over a reasonable bandwidth limit (a message board for a bunch of your buddies to chat on is not unreasonable at ALL) and B) take full responsibility for any services they provide.
Is that too much to ask? Put it in the EULA.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Bad News. With the Giganews unlimited account once you go above so many gigs (5?) then they throttle your connection to 100k or less.
Currently i'm going with the 25GB for $21.00 plan and it rocks! unused bandwidth roll overs, bonus gigs, etc. if that isn't enough they have even more for all you binary downloading freaks out there! and no, i don't work for rocket news, just a happy customer, they have "everything" if you know what I mean. one more thing i think comcast should let it's customers opt out of the suckey 2GB per month giganews, personally i could take that $7.00 a month or whatever they are paying giganews and apply that to a usenet server like rocket news, It really sucks that comcast shut down their own news server, no more unlimited downloading of all those daily Mp3's! Waaaaa! Also i'd like to hear from those of you that know of a better news server for less $$
Okay, yeah, I'm desperately clinging to some ancient withered ideal that reeks of revolution and 'transhumanism' from like 1995, but it's sort of disturbing that "big media" is working even harder to restrict access to worldwide communications that once seemed like they would lead us towards some utopian global society of peace, happiness, and superintelligence. Alright, alright, all that really goes on in usenet is posturing and 17 year old flamewars between aging M.I.T. dropouts, but hey...
Just to be clear -- is AOL only removing its own UI to Usenet? Shutting down just their own NNTP servers? Once you have a connection established through AOL, are they going to block you from using some other NNTP server? Are they going to block HTTP access to Google Groups?
It seems that AOL users will still have SOME ways (even if it is just Google Groups) to get Usenet. and it seems to me that for AOL users, this is probably a better/easier to use interface, which is what they'd want. I'd imagine that most AOL users wouldn't know what to do with direct NNTP access anyway...
If I ran an ISP, I would fight such a law, but only because it would cost me money and thus there's no point in NOT fighting it.
So why don't ISPs offer a cheap(er) forwarding-only service for former residential Internet access customers? It shouldn't cost more than about 2 or 3 USD per month, as that's what, say, SpamCop charges for full-service e-mail.
This isn't true because you don't take into account those with an IQ of 100. If IQ distribution was a bell-curve (which I know it's not...), more people would have an IQ of 100 than any other number. So less than 50% are below, less than 50% above.
Other than that, I agree, AOL has its place.
"Want an AOL CD? Go to Burger King! They make half-decent frisbees..."
They also make tricky targets for skeet shooting. It's damn satisfying to blow the crap out of one with a 12 guage.
How will roadrunner users be affected?
Ten years too late...They ruined Usenet in 1995 when they uncerimoniously dumped their users untrained onto the Internet, and only after Usenet has become the biggest SPAM-hell on Earth do they abandon it.
/sigh
Kind of like bombing the hell out of a country, occupying it, and then just when you've reduced it to rubble, saying "see ya later!".
AE
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from shelling out a few dollars a month and running your own forums.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I simply can't see how AOL dumping Usenet could be anything but a good thing for Usenet in general. Once all the noob riffraff leave, the s/n ratio is bound to improve and the spammers will follow the noobs once Usenet spamming doesn't turn in the profits that it used to - improving the s/n ratio even more. Besides that, all those damned noobs just draw too much unwanted attention to Usenet. I can't wait for them to leave IMO.
this is Usenet, for fuck's sake.. infringing uses are latecomers, and unwelcome ones at that (if I want shitty pirate .avi's I know where to look, thanks much)
Given that various piracy-tastic protocols (helloo, Kazaa..?) that have emerged unhurt from court on this issue, it is ridiculous to expect Usenet to be the example case.
Besides, I'm not a U.S citizen (nor do I live in the USA), so I don't give a shit.. Happy timewasting to all my US friends.
Dude, you should post before hitting the pipe, not after. Sobriety aids coherency.
I know AOL used to have an email-only service for about $10/month; is that still available?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If you just want to do text, Google news works fine. If you want binaries, there are lots of usenet providers out there that charge $10 or so a month.
.... mail to news floods of spam... have you looked into gnu.misc.discuss lately?
Now that should be wrong, mixing mail spam into news..
Besides, AOL isn't removing web access such as google groups...so just how important is this article?
I went with Newshosting, which has unlimited gigs for $14.95/mo. What Comcast did is essentially a rate increase, by providing less service for the same price. I'd have switched to DSL but in this area DSL is only 768K, which is too slow.
On a vaguely related note, is there any similar service for providing small (100 groups) feeds to individuals? Slurp works, but it's a pain if you want to use it to feed other servers :-(
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Time to update that killfile to block from google.
Wouldn't the best way to tell Comcast to fuck themselves be simply to cancel your account with them and invite others to do the same? Why tell them 'Fuck you!' and pay them?
(Why couldn't AOL have dome this 10 years ago when everybody asked them to?)
Usenet is becomming more and more obscure as web message boards dedicated to single topics spring up
I still read groups I created 15 years ago. To this day they're still more usefull than the web bbs's and are a nice adjuct to mailing lists on the subject's I'm interested in. If the web BBS's vanished, I really wouldn't notice or care, but I would miss usenet and mailing lists if they were to go.
Need Mercedes parts ?
....don't want to be the one that limits or denies access to anyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the noobs should HAVE to read the FAQ and follow their TOS before they post stupid 'Me too!' and other useless drivel on the Usenet. If they won't be bothered to learn the rules, then fuck them. They can stay off. There's no point in bothering with the stubborn and ignorant, and that makes me self-righteous, then so be it, but I don't think that what I'm asking is so damned much. Is following simple and concise rules so hard? And why is it that there are always some asshats that think that the rules don't apply to them?
I met the man back in the mid 80's, but I'm not him. Apparently you come down on the side of "everything should be free." Good for you, but quite respectfully, if you worked in a capacity where you relied on written, musical, or visual content to put food on your table I suspect you'd feel very differently. As a content author whose income is protected by copyright law, although I agree today's media tends to produce watered-down, overexpensive product, there would be *none* if there were no financial incentive to produce it. "Starving artist" sounds fantastically noble on paper, until you're the one starving. :)
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Hey I'm not some confused aol user !! Wait I was on aol when it was a BB. Guess this makes me one of the under 100 IQ's. Aol has done a lot to help me fix windoze spyware loaded machines. Where am I going to earn my extra cash now ?????
Danger Will Robinson! You are now entering a condescending Unix user zone!
The only problem is finding out which servers are available....
But first you have to know that something is there and is worth a look.
I did not discover USENET in college, I stumbled across it while on dial-up AOL in 1996. FTP, IRC, TELNET, etc., are not part of the basic Internet experience for entire generations and classes of users.
A website and mailing list, monthly updates, with descriptions, lists about 400 active BBS systems, some few of which still offer a dial-up service.
"I have the strangest feeling the Usenet is finally dying its rather long-deserved death."
People have been claiming this since before I first got on Usenet, 13 years ago.
You just have to love that truth in advertising. Or perhaps they merely redifined "unlimited."
Assuming the average AOL user can FIND Google groups.
They DO have to o to a URL instead of an AOL keyword.
I used to provide tech support for AOL users trying to access a online Distance Learning site. Trying to walk the average AOL user through using a URL instead of an AOL keyword is a VERY painful process. There were a lot of people who used phrases like "Amatures", "Two bit operation," and "Mickey mouse incompitents" to describe our lack of an AOL keyword.
I'm not worried about AOL users finding Google Groups in real numbers. Most of them can't even understand that all e-mail addresses DON'T end in @aol.com
Let them sit in their little corner of cyber space, isolated from the rest of us so we can all be happy.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I would point out that Ellison was trying to protect his sole source of income in filing his lawsuit. So it really wasn't frivilous. Obnoxiously pendantic maybe, but no frivilous.
Peace,
-Joe G.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
ME TO!!1!eleven!!1!!
BOB I SENT U A EMAIL 20 MINUTEZ AGO!!1!!! DID U GET IT!?!!?!
> ME TOO!!
>1!!1!1
>
>> ME
>>TOO!
This statement is forty-five characters long.
Its not just AOLusers though. Google has been a steady source of newbies, trolls, and k00ks on usenet for a while now.
In my experience, killfilling google-originated posts is lossless compression.
Not sure exactly what the cutoff point is, or what the the throttled speed is, but I've heard many complaints about this. Mainly because those that complain about this will promptly get their account terminated by Jonah (CEO of Giganews, and a bit of a dick)
As the title says... Usenet is far from dead, in fact it's growing even bigger these days, for the comments about ISP's "killing" usenet no chance, most people that know what they're actually doing with usenet wouldn't use their ISP's newsgroup servers anyway because of low contention and completion. People complaininh that it's full of spam? uhhhhh theres a few stupid posts here and there but it's not that bad binary and text groups are split up these days, so going to alt.binaries.something looking for discussion/help you're not going to find it there. Also these comments 1-2gb for usenet accounts, a LOT of companys offer unlimited bandwidth, it's also why isp's are removing usenet because of the storage and bandwidth needed for it. Theres been a LOT of very incorrect information about usenet so just thought i'd clear some of it up.
But I almost always post form my gmail account...
Oh.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
No.
Hell no.
Unh unh!
No way!
Fuck no!!
Are you out of your fucking SKULL???!??!??????!?
Get your government off of my internet connection!!!
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
That is it. I used to have A.O.L. D.S.L. and firstyou have to hope that the software doesn't freze up wihile trying to go online. Some high-speed-internet-connection You have to log on just to get online. oh yeah and did I mention that AOL cap's you Verizon was giving me 3000/768 And A.O.L. only gave me 768/128 W.T.F. and now no more usenet A.O.L. is going to go out of buizness. And I hate the stupid commercial's Iwould like my hard-drive to fry like a mozerla stickif any person has a half of a brain you woln't get a virus by not downloading stupid stuff like from A.I.M. Fusion
My point is this:
.biz decision to drop their news servers or did they fail to mention opting out
.gov
When the ford-driving, black-shiny shoes start sniffing 119 using easily-read headers to build machine forensics based on a well-defined model of distributed heirarchies
and newsgroups to construct household and geograpical profiles and Usenet will be dead and the Internet will follow.
Spew follows:
I've had a longterm love affair w/Usenet going on 15yrs.
If it dies, my machine will be soooo lonely.
Its the best part of the net, so much to offer,
so well organized; perfectly distributed chaos in near-perfect categorization.
What a big fat target it is. Open wide for the neo-cons,
for Homeland Security, for the evangels;
cracking down on dissent and porn; making the
internet safe for the NewWorldOrder.
Everyone wags their finger at AOL while losing sight of the enlarging pictures. Was it just a
to protect their members privacy, not wanting to get caught in the fallout, the encroachments on our civili liberties.
Usenet is dead, the claim is made in the same breath which
touts google groups. what irony, News hosts are few and big and subject to scrutiny. And then we get to read:
Verisign, the first name in wiretapping, offers their NetDiscovery
verisign.com] service to law enforcement. In their words, Complete Lawful Intercept Service
And
criminal digital evidence processing work done by the DoD's Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3). The DoD blocked and traced 60,000 intrusion attempts on its unclassified networks in 2004, and wrestles with spam, illicit pornography and other common Internet threats.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 5/01/15/14 24207
We're tuned into infomunchers but surrendering our rights, Mute to that spooky sense of something lurking in
the background, part of the noise, buried in the obvious.
with its nose to the packetstream,
While we bathe in connectivity, global hive minded
social networking semantic web content junkies;
We're seen from beyond as feeders, statistics,
a number in the system, a node on a line, a point to a
point, in a torrent, in a web.
In the big picture it doesnt matter what your orientation is,
just that your orientation can be watched. The new price of freedom.
I repeat: the medium, not the message, is what gives you
away. Your flight is unimportant, its where you land that
counts. The Internet succeeded so well at empowering
individuals, at promoting statelessness, that its put
on the defensive and a line-tap on us all. A bag on the side,
of the satellite, of the switch. "Your throughput is temporarily slowed due to maintenance, load-balancing, uh, mechanical
failure, sunspots and other acts of god". Gotta love the
offical explanations. While its quietly correllating and
and modelling sigint into high-def; to determine who is who,
and where they are and what they do, their brand of car.
If our plastic debt and phone records, DMV and background-check and balance sheets, finances and assets pattern our character Its our newsgroups and our favorites
and our buddylists and our bookmarks and our contacts and our viewing habits which color our personality
This is where the gems lie buried.
while we're continuously connecting in endlessly unfolding dramas tuned in and interacting with the avatars and bloggers and webmasters someones now watching all too closely not just watching but profiling
all by scanning headers of everyone's IP
We now become what we type and what we click on and buy into or subscribe or download or join or slurp
becomes absorbed in some Metadata totality.
Because for BigBrother its the medium, they don't care about
the message. They can shut down what they dont like, but
its better to leave it be (a honeypot) and watch the logs.
Its the medium, the Ports 'o Call we visit. HTTP,
resist propaganda