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Requiem for Usenet
xoip writes "Jack Kapica at The Globe and Mail reports that '[Canadian ISP] Rogers is removing [Usenet] service without changing its rates, suggesting subscribers turn to portal technology controlled by Rogers/Yahoo, or to subscribe to an outside Usenet service -- at extra cost.'" From the article: "Aside from being based on the written word, which many game-playing kids would rather not make the effort to compose, Usenet is deeply flawed. Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers, criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals. Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Usenet requires tons of bandwidth and storage, and serving it needs decent server hardware. I'm not sure anyone I know still uses it.
Then you obviously don't know anyone worth knowing.
Being an ISP today means giving the user the most bandwidth, the least downtime and the cheapest cost. Value added services such as e-mail accounts, web home, Usenet and even security utilities is better served by third parties.
News flash: your ISP probably ALREADY (as I'm sure did Rogers) outsources your usenet access. Go ahead: ping news.myisp.com and see where it ACTUALLY goes. They buy a corporate subscription that is nowhere NEAR the cost of maintianing their own usenet servers.
I'd never heard of it before either but a quick google shows that it is (from the jargon file):
joe-job: n., vt.
A spam run forged to appear as though it came from an innocent party, who is then generally flooded by the bounces; or, the act of performing such a run. The original incident is described
In Republican America phones tap you.
Unless you were trying to be funny, the Tenderloin is a district in San Francisco (and perhaps other cities) with, shall we say, a somewhat seedy reputation.
If you WERE trying to be funny - don't.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I've been using GoogleGroups quite extensively for my (albeit read only) access for some time. (While I used to used DejaNews, that was mostly for the archives. I think that Google killed off a lot of the usefullness of the archives, but it's still nice that it's searchable.)
I guess I have used some private NNTP services, now that I think on it. But in general, the above holds true.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
You obviously do not understand monopolies. What Rogers has is a natural monopoly. It occurs because of economies of scale. The cost of entry becomes too great for any real competition to enter the market. Hence whoever managed to lay the most cable (ie. Rogers) captured the market. The government of Canada did not grant them a monopoly in any way, as you incorrectly suggest.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Google Groups is free and accessible from web browsers.
The interface is a little kludgey.
It limits 20 posts per six hour period. A Google post embeds your IP number so it is not truly anonymous.
They're not censoring Usenet, they're just no longer providing their own news server.
I have, however, heard of a "red light district," a term that seems more universal...
Shame on Google.
Is he talking about alt. groups or not? Why make a distinction and then act like usenet is nothing but alt.* ?
Strictly speaking, "Usenet" doesn't include the alt.* hierarchy at all. The term classically refers to the "Big Seven" hierarchies for newsgroups: comp.*, sci.*, misc.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, and news.* (with humanities.* being an eighth and recent addition).
A more appropriate term for the full set of hierarchies, including alt.*, k12.*, and all the other arbitrary designations, would be simply "newsgroups".
Only because the cost of posting is 0. That's how spammers can make money in most any medium.
that hasn't been wrong with it for years.
I use usenet on an almost daily basis. For programming related help, it's about the best source. In various newsgroups I can post questions and often get answers within an hour. That's far better than customer support with most software vendors, and I get it for a very low fixed monthly cost.
I know there are lots of newsgroups infested with junk, but there are also a great number of very useful groups. It doesn't take a lot of effort to separate the wheat from the chaffe and the value of the content, at least for what I'm looking for, is far above the price I pay.
Granted, not everyone will find what they want in usenet, but for some things, it's about the best source on the net.
Unfortunately the oldest reference I could find on google was only from 1989, but it'll have to do. The fact that it's sigged should be a clue that the fearmongering was already a meme then.