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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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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!
"Usenet is finally dying its rather long-deserved death."
Whats deserved about it? I still find it a useful discussion forum. Just because some groups are full of spam spouting imbeciles doesn't mean they're all useless and just because you obviously don't use it doesn't mean that there arn't hundreds of thousands if not millions of people out there who still do.
LOL!!1!
>ME TOO!
>> I was there when AOL enabled usenet access. The
>> flood of users with no netiquette or, as it eemed
>> to me at the time, common sense, drove me out of
>> almost every newsgroup I followed.
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)
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.
blah blah lameness filter blah blah
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.