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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?"
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?
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?
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
For those who don't get it:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that- never-ended.html
There are still some very good groups out there. They tend to be very highly-policed (either as officially moderated groups, or via a cadre of regulars who keep things firmly ontopic.)
comp.lang.c is a great example of this. I owe them a LOT regarding my growth in understanding of C.
In the days before widespread internet usage, a significant percentage of the participants in Usenet were college students. Every September would see an influx of newbies who didn't have a clue about Usenet conventions and would disrupt things until they were educated. When AOL gained Usenet access people referred to it as "the September that never ended", referring to the fact that there was now a constant influx of clueless newbies.
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.
Install the slashfix extension.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
and the original post And yes, he is alive, well and still reachable at the easily-despamed email address used there.
I think it is a good question as it highlighta a current reality. A ton of people, who you would otherwise think would know more, have no CLUE what Usenet is. Example, and I was stunned by this: I signed up a few months ago for cable internet access via Time Warner Road Runner service. During the discussion phase I had with the company reps that I bumped into I inquired about access to Usenet and what is their IP/address for RR usenet service. Of three people I talked to over the phone, NONE knew about it and the conclusion was Time Warner RR did not offer it. During the installation of the cable modem I talked to the youngling, mid to late 20's guy, that did the work (A real live Time Warner employee too as he was in a TIme Warner cable truck..) about Usenet access. The fellow went blank and had never heard of Usenet. Anyway, long story short. Eventually I managed to find the information FROM a Road Runner web site about the address's for the RR usenet/etc servers. Of the FOUR contacts I had with RR none of them knew of Usenet. Totally amazing. Perhaps this is a good thing as that means less ignorant clueless fucks are using Usenet.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
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.
That's a known bug in Firefox which seems to have greater effect on people with slower internet connections. It will be fixed in the next version (it's currently "fixed in the trunk"). In the meantime, as others have commented, you can fix it by increasing and decreasing the text size (ctrl + mousewheel or ctrl + +/-).
I do agree that it is ridiculous that Firefox 1.0 was let out the door with this bug. For people on slow or even medium-speed connections, this bug happens a lot, and many have no idea how to fix fix it. I have friends who tried Firefox and decided that they hated it because of this bug. I'm guessing the developers are all on fast connections and thus had no idea how often this bug manifests.
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!
It's by definition because that is the INTENT of the IQ scale. Much like 100 degrees is one of the defining achor points in Celcius, defined to be the boiling point of water *by definition* (in other words, if it turns out not to be the boiling point of water, then the Celcius scale is wrong and needs adjusting, not the other way around. 100 is the average IQ *by definition*, and if that turns out to be wrong, then the IQ scale needs to be adjusted to match (and it frequently is, which is why someone's IQ can shift without them becoming any smarter or dumber. Their rating can shift because the anchor point of 100 shifts when the average of the population is revised.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Sheer crap. The group died when the last remaining Great Ones (Zeno, Carrot, Miller, Lenore, Vinnie) disappeared or died, leaving a bunch of wankers to run the place.
Alt.tasteless is running on fumes and has been for years now. Oh sure, occasionally someone new comes along and tries to breath some life into the group, but honestly the group sucks more than Spammy when she's short of cash.