Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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'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
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.
"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."
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!
(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!
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?
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)
*plonk*
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.
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.
Oh come on, I did a search for 'me too' on google groups and it only found 4,270,000 results. Stop your whining.
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.