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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.
and the original post And yes, he is alive, well and still reachable at the easily-despamed email address used there.