Slashdot Mirror
Another Nail In Usenet's Coffin?
Karamchand writes "Today news.individual.net in an email to its more than 250.000 registered users announced that they won't be able to continue offering free Usenet access. While it provided text-only groups many people relied on individual.net's service to take part in one of the Internet's older services.
In a time were a working news server is not a selling point for ISPs and most internet users never heard about this service, will this be another nail in the coffin of Usenet?"
Check out http://www.talkaboutnetwork.com/
Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups. However they are not indexed by centralized servers like Usenet, so it's as easy to find web forums. It would be nice if the most popular forum software like phpBB, VBulletin etc, have some sort of common standard that allows them to be listed by topic, indicating some statistics like number of members, posts, activity so people can quickly choose a forum.
http://www.yottanews.com/ has been offering free 1GB per month accounts. There are plenty of other ones out there as well.
A full binary feed is about 1.2TB per day; not within the reach of the home user (Joe Sixpack), nor within the reach of the dedicated amateur (The top 1% of Joe Sixpacks who have a 19" rack in their closet) nor even the Really Generous Corporate Sponsor (Hi, OSDN! Thanks for Slashdot!).
A full feed of text groups, however, is probably only about 2 GB per day - a server that can provide 90-day retention of text groups is well within the (bandwidth and hardware cost) reach of the dedicated amateur who lays out $100-200 or so a month for his or her hobbies.
Because USENET is a store-and-forward network, and because bandwidth and hardware are getting increasingly cheap, there'll always be an open text server or two out there. Worst comes to worst (or is it best comes to best?), there may not be any one open text server that "everyone" uses, but a diffuse network of hundreds of 'em, one or two in every city.
Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
You mean like George Bush?
comp.lang.lisp is fabulous. When I was involved there (lost my ISP with a good news server and have tried paying for a news server but demanded a refund due to absolutely terrible quality and desolate group population and message retention), I was really impressed not only by the community but also by some of the names that would show up to post from time to time.
Slashdot sends interviews off to famous programming language architects once in a blue moon. On comp.lang.*, you occasionally discuss language design features with the guy who invented them on a personal basis.
That's not even the worst part, the fact it takes 12 hours for what you say to show up, and by then you have gotten 30 replies.
:)
That's wierd. Usually when I post via Google Groups, my post is there a few minutes later.
Are you talking about the time that it takes for the article to be propogated to other NNTP servers? That's been a problem with some Usenet server since the beginning
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
You got modded "funny" but I'll try to answer you seriously, just in case you're actually curious.
First off, Wikipedia will probably tell you everything you might want to know about it and more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
In short, UseNet is what we had before the web was interactive and thus had things like forums - hell, before there was a web. It functions something like a mailing list. Basically, a big network of news servers all act as mirrors for a vast collection of categorized forums ("groups"). For example, there is the comp group, about computers; comp.sys about specific computer systems; comp.sys.mac about Mac computer systems, comp.sys.next about NeXT computer systems, etc; comp.sys.mac.advocacy, comp.sys.mac.programming, and so on and so on, about more specific topic.
You use your news client to "subscribe" to a group or more, which means that it will contact the news server you use (which may be a free or pay service, may or may not require username and password, and so on) and download all the messages from them, so you don't have to browse through the entire massive collection of groups each time to find the one you want to read. Basically like a bookmark. This makes it different from a mailing list in that there is no actual list of subscribers anywhere - you just tell your client to retrieve messages from that group on your news server. Any messages posted to that group on your server get shared with all the others and mirrored in their copies of that group.
The actual news client and post/response system functions almost identically to email, and a lot of the old traditional nettiquite rules were invented there. Unfortunately thanks to the combined efforts of Microsoft and AOL, and most of the rest of the mainstream email/usenet client makers, most of those rules have been thrown away completely, leading to practices like top replying, which in turn does not encourage people to trim their quotes properly, and encourages people to think in flat (instead of threaded) discussions, and so on... sigh. I miss the old days.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Click on Show Options at the top of a post, then click on Reply.
Then you get a text box with the quoting done.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The only sad part about this story is that there may not be as many new users of USENET if ISP's aren't offering it for free. Other than that, it's just a bunch of crap.
There are new and old people on USENET constantly. Why, exactly, do you think that this ISP decied not to offer USENET access anymore...because there was no one posting there? Uhm...no. The reason that they stopped offering it is that it is a monster to maintain because of all the traffic. USENET is the most valuable and the most underrated resource on the internet. Yes, I said it, and yes, I mean it. For detailed technical information and answers to tough questions there is nowhere else to go. Product reviews, information on music you want to check out, whatever. It's all there.
Let's keep it real here, okay? Most internet users (including IT "professionals") are too dumb to figure out how to use a newsreader, and FAR too dumb to understand how to evaluate the quality of information you get from google groups. People whine about, "Ohhh, the quality of information on message boards SUCKS, you can't learn ANYTHING from them". What a load of shit. If you have a brain in your head and understand the idea of crossreferencing information before you commit changes on a server that a few thousand people are connecting to, then you can really get a LOT of information from USENET and solve a lot of tough problems quickly. I find good, solid solutions to technical problems CONSTANTLY through google groups. I don't think a week goes by that I don't search it at least 10 times for various things.
Oh, but we have web forums! God forbid people should allow their words to convey their meaning rather than having pretty pictures and fancy emoticons to cover up for the fact that they are just stupid assholes who no one wants to hear from anyway. It's such a joke when you hear people complaining about how "rough" certain web forums are. They don't even know the definition of a "troll" and they think they invented flaming. (Can I get a rolleyes smiley here?).
This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot. I'm sorry, but it's true. USENET is a one-stop-shop for all kinds of amazingly valuable information and if you don't see that, then you're missing out. Go download agent and get a clue.
I run a web hosting/ISP company, and have offered on several occasions to install news software for my users. No takers, though. The one user I've got who responded said he just uses Google Groups these days. Why mess with NNTP when Google indexes everything anyway, I guess?
Well, how about running your own local server... And collect only what you are intrested in?
Only if you have a really fast connection or don't want binaries. The program you should Google for is Leafnode.
The binaries groups are at least 200gig per day pushed from the main news server feeds.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
R T F A. news.individual.net was always a text-only service. Almost everyone who wants usenet binaries has been using pay services for years. The binaries are safe; people pay for porn and MP3s, it's the text groups that are suffering, first from spam, second from idiots posting with Outlook who ignore conventions, third from ISPs who provide spotty service; fourth from motherfuckers who use the Hipcrime tools to create huge amounts of nonsense posts to swamp groups they don't like; finally from Google with their groups interface which gets worse every time they revamp it (eg: allowing replies to ANY post, no matter it's 10 years old).
Google groups is fucking awful. For example:
1) There's no way to follow threads properly. When you go into a group, it doesn't mark which ones you've already read or not, so you have to go through the entire lot.
2) It doesn't show long posts all at once, you need to click on 'Read the rest of this message' to read it all, which is fucking torture on long threads.
3) You can't change your settings once you've signed up.
4) Frames.
5) Different threads with identical subjects are lumped together.
6) Posts with no-archive set don't appear at all, making a lot of threads completely unreadable.
And that's just with the old version. The new version is a hundred times worse. They haven't fixed the problems with the old one, but they've taken away all the GOOD bits instead. The previously simple, compact thread-list which made browsing the newsgroup pretty easy, is now replaced with a completely bloated list which takes up EIGHT lines per thread, rather than the usual ONE.
You can go to the old version at groups.google.co.uk, but they've crippled it so you can't reply to a post. When you try to reply, it gives an error about not being able to retrieve the post you're replying to. I mean come on, all those fucking genius PHDs and master-programmers, and they can't get something right that Deja was doing right ten years ago? I can't believe that a company that constantly boasts how clever and talented they are, can actually make an interface go BACKWARDS.
The motive is obvious: profit. If they dumb it down, fuck over all the 'old' users, and try to attract the drooling masses with a bloated cartoon interface, they can get more ad-hits. Bollocks to usability or functionality, bollocks to the integrity of one of the Internet's oldest services, nothing is sacred from the latest dot-com raping it for profit.
People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't see how that can be when google groups is so poor, unless they're concentrating all their resources on gmail, because it's the new 'glamour' service. Although I suppose eventually it will go the same way as google groups: They'll come out with a new and improved 'beta' version, with a crippled awful interface ten times worse than the original, then put some bug in the old one so people can't go back to it.
I know this can/will reach to -1 level but...
I think every clueless trolling story accepted to slashdot and all those "me too" self acclaimed geeks, mods abusing their power to downmod whatever comment they want to censor are nailing slashdot's coffin.
Just 4 months ago "$ thing is dead" post was a joke on slashdot and now its being accepted as a story!
>and I realised: usenet was dead ....
>but why ? really someone tell me why ?
a) The Internet became mainstream.
b) Because of a), the main group using Usenet shifted from programmers/scientists/intellectuals (ergo, people actually *worth* listening to) to brainsick war veterans, (whose primary reason for using it was the fact that they were deranged and antisocial to the point where nobody offline wanted anything to do with them) sociopathic college students, paedophiles/sexual deviants of various different stripes, and the truly hard-core mentally ill individuals who inhabit groups like alt.religion.scientology and alt.conspiracy.
c) Genre/group boundaries virtually aren't respected at all these days...certainly on the alt.* heirarchy anywayz. Crossposting is probably more the exception now than the rule, which means that unless you've got a killfile a mile long, having a coherent conversation is extremely difficult.
d) The protocol has become obsolete and redundant, and has been replaced by special-interest CMS driven Web sites which generally require passwords to join. Because such sites require passwords for posting access, the forums hosted by them do not experience casual, drive-by trolling by the sorts of idiots one generally encounters on Usenet.
e) Also because of a), Usenet began to be increasingly used as a supplement to the p2p filesharing networks, which also is an application that the protocol was never designed for. Hence, not only did this result in some of the text-related traffic dropping off, it meant ISPs were now being asked to carry an obscure, dying protocol with an increasing level of large binary traffic, free of charge.
f) Again because of a), Usenet has now also been inundated with a very high degree of spam. So this, taken in conjunction with the rest of the above, have together had the result of making the protocol largely unusable, and certainly undesirable when compared to the alternatives. Even its' destributed nature has been made obselete by such advances as Yahoo groups...traffic through those go to everyone who wants it, and nobody who doesn't. The groups are also generally moderated in order to ensure intelligent/sane discussion, and to filter out spam. In other words, the available alternatives to Usenet are superior in every possible respect.