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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."
So...in other words, Usenet is like the rest of the internet where there is good, valuable information as well as bad, useless (to some at least) information?
I've been hanging out in various usenet groups for years and yet to have picked up a virus that infected my system and wasn't picked up my Norton AV. I've received more viruses via e-mail then I've found in Usenet, so does that mean we should also get rid of e-mail?
Why don't we just call Roger's actions what they really are, a cost saving measure. They aren't doing it to protect the children, they are doing it to save a few cents per customer.
http://www.craigslist.org/cas/
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.
Isn't that the *point*? I like usenet just the way it is, TYVM.
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."
It's all bull. I've used Usenet for over ten years, and I have never "caught" any viruses or gotten any invitations to unspeakable sexual acts (maybe I hang out in the wrong groups...). Usenet is not as big as it was, but it's still a great resource for information.
ISP serviced Usenet is a waste of money (as is, IMO, ISP serviced web hosting). Just because they're not lowering their prices doesn't mean the user is losing out.
Usenet requires tons of bandwidth and storage, and serving it needs decent server hardware. I'm not sure anyone I know still uses it.
What will the ISP do with thr money saved? Because of competition, they'll spend it on service quality improvements for services their customers do use. If they pocketed it, they'd lose business.
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.
Competition in pricing requires some minority features to go bu-bye.
I mean, really. Everyone at /. has known this for some time that USENET has degenerated into a steaming pile. Hell, if you go to Google Groups and browse around Buddhist newsgroups, you'll find lovely spam for things involving "Clitoral Mound Orgasming Chemicals."
If you want to lament the passing of net tech, pick something geeky sexy like Gopher! It's been a long time since anybody cared about USENET, especially since the advent of web forums and competent WWW searching. Rest in peace, USENET. We'd miss you, except you have no use anymore, and we've hardly noticed you've gone.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
maybe the author should keep out of the alt.sex.* groups? there are still many,
many useful usenet groups with reasonable signal and not much spam.
And yet it's still easier to find informed technical help on many subjects, or to compare notes with peers, via Usenet than via any of the wannabe web forums full of people with too many letters on their CV and too many buzzwords in their brain. It's also one of the best places to find interesting discussion on many hobbies. Contrary to apparent popular opinion, not all of Usenet is binaries groups where people can rip material illegally if P2P is too hard for them to understand. Also contrary to apparent popular opinion, it is possible not to read all the virus/spyware/whatever posts!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
To me, usenet represents the safe, traditionalistic, slow-moving side of the internet. It's mostly populated by older people who know each other.
Find free books.
On the other hand, they can't really advertise Usenet as a feature to users who aren't familiar with it. It's too complicated, and too much of a sewer nowadays.
Spammers just suck. They showed up in this environment (that admittedly was already buckling under the load of new users), left it a smoking ruin and moved on. How much money could they even have made?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Comcast has done something similar with outsourcing Usenet access. As a side effect, there is a monthly free download quota (1GB?), beyond which you have to pay. Lucky for me that doesn't affect me much, since my main use of Usenet is as a programming reference, for which Google Groups is almost perfect (though their search syntax could certainly be more powerful). But that's just me, and it certainly sucks that Usenet is being deprecated in such subversive ways. Its main strength from my point of view is that it concentrates so much information in one seamless repository. Once it's gone, you have to rely on a disparate collection of forums and hope that Google can search them all equally efficiently, which is currently certainly not the case.
[it's full of thugs, imbeciles, etc...] "All this is true mostly of the Alt newsgroups, which were designed to have few inhibitions. Other groups, such as Comp, Sci, Soc and Humanities, fare much better, largely because they can be moderated. They contain lots of valuable stuff.
But the rise in the signal-to-noise ratio among the Alt groups has made combing through the chatter a tedious process. So useless has Usenet's reputation become..." [blah, blah, blah]
Is he talking about alt. groups or not? Why make a distinction and then act like usenet is nothing but alt.* ? Does he think it's like an ocean and you have to wade through all the alt groups to get to the moderated ones?
I read usenet groups pretty much every day. I've never gotten a virus from usenet but then I don't download binaries, either.
For instance: I like reading alt.horror for the goofy posts and pointers to movies I've never heard of. There are hundreds of posts there every day. Now I am a fan of Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, two great directors I'd never have heard of otherwise.
When I'm stumped on a technical problem, whether computer or automobile related, and web searching doesn't help, often I can find the problem already solved on usenet. Or I can find a group to post to and get help.
...and villainy, a horrid mob of pre-civilized thugs - slumming through the tenderloin district in pursuit of unspeakable acts.
I must admit I laughed at his description of a sullied usenet:
"Usenet eventually gained a reputation as a refuge for pre-civilized thugs with a penchant for imbecile grammar and vicious talk. The antics of juveniles and troubled people started scaring off others..."
Sounds like the state of most chat rooms today.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Not like the web supported internet at all right? Web pages offer defenses against virus, spammers, criminals, cheats, liars and swindlers! All web pages offer clear and concise information! You can never catch a virus from the web! And the web is chalk full of explicit stuff?
Err...wait, what are they complaining about again that they want to get rid of Web..er..I mean Usenet? It seems to me both are different implementations that exhibit the same problems. If one wants to complain that offering Usenet is an expensive service they can no longer offer at cost that is one thing. It is something silly to suggest that Usenet has to be sacked because it offers the same problems the Internet in general features.
Usenet is a discussion forum free of direct corporate control. In the comp.databases.*yourdatabase* group, critical messages don't disappear. Often the folks who wrote key parts of a system will answer technical questions. There are no flash ads, no shockwave, and no popups blocking your view of the content.
Bandwidth is not an issue for a large ISP. Having a local server reduces the need for bandwidth, if your users use the local server. Of course if you don't inform new users anything about the service, much less provide client software or a web client, of course average folks will never find out about it.
This is about control, not cost. Yahoo forums are controlled by Yahoo and generate Yahoo ad revenue. Yahoo posts won't be in Google groups. This is about Yahoo, the other comments are excuses.
Cheers,
Ian
NNTP is great for in-house discussion groups and projects. We use internal newsgroups to maintain a history of our projects. New project members can more quickly get up-to-speed by reading the newsgroup history of the project. Discussions can be restricted to certain users as required. Attachments can be included easily.
NNTP isn't limited to technical work: you can use it for any group project: critical police investigations, history of medical stays in the hospital, history of a court case, etc.
Some users are unfamiliar with newsreader software. But once they see how similar NNTP is to e-mail most problems disappear.
TMM raises a valid point, right after we read a story in Wired about how 'digg might bury slashdot', Zonk goes and posts a story that's been in discussion at digg for over a week.
e , does it really matter? Who friggin' cares. Seriously. It isn't a race, and unless it was something that actually was time sensitive (Rogers dumping Usenet is not really time sensitive to Rogers subscribers, much less the vast majority of non-Rogers subscribers who are seeing this story), then it hardly matters how timely the information comes.
The Globe and Mail story has only been up since yesterday. Even then, unless you're a hopeful-professional-blogger-meme-follower/sheepl
Enough to make it worth-while.
Quack, quack.
I've left off most of my Usenet usage, basically because websites/forums/blogs give me most of what I was looking for information-wise, and Slashdot gives me all the geek twaddle I need. I have horded a few megs of more amusing Usenet archives (alt.sysadmin.recovery and the works of Kibo spring instantly to mind), just to save for reminiscence when I'm in the old geek's home. But Usenet has definitely waned in usefulness compared to other internet resources, and it *is* crawling with spam, anyway. (That virus business is bogus; Usenet's safer than IRC. And as for obscene sexual propositions...it's the net. What do expect, a cathedral?)
I will say this, I still turn to Usenet if I can't find information on a subject *anywhere* else: it'll be there.
The author must be using Windows in the "Stupid Mode", without engaging his brain. Apparently he has never heard of "Kill files" and other blocking techniques to eliminate the trash from the UseNet data stream. One would get the impression that when he gets into his car he finds it impossible to avoid the "tenderloin" of San Francisco because he doesn't know how to steer away from that area. He probably stops for every "Why lie, I need money for booze" bum standing at the entrances to Walmart.
Just like using email, one learns that messages from unknown senders, which get by spam blockers, are never opened. And when one is curiously impulsed to open an suspecious email they always have their anti-virus program engaged to scan it first. Duh!
Because I program for a living I use UseNet at work via my W2K box to access other coders using the tools I'm using, and I've never had a problem. I never open msgs that offer "enhancement" products, pharms, or rollex watches, either. For the last eight years I've used Linux, dual booting at work and solely at home. When running Linux I've NEVER encountered any malware which was effective. I've installed Linux anti-virus programs, like f-prot, to scan my NTFS filesystem while running Linux just to be sure there aren't bugs which Norton hasn't found.
What really burns me is that the author is just like the idiots who passed the "Patriot" Act. This guy thinks that curtailing freedom is the only way to guarantee safety. If there is no safety behind prison bars what makes him think that walling off society with "politically correct" bars will work any better?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
"then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow." :)
Relativity does fail at the quantum level
That is why we don't have a Unified Theory yet. Actually it is good to question everything in science. At one time the very idea of Quantum physics was where considered well impossible.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Unless you're downloading executable programs and running them, how are you supposed to get a virus by reading Usenet?
That's silly - the same thing could be said about email. I don't know about you, but I'm currently getting around 800 spam messages a day - and while most of it is caught by the filter, that's still an awful lot. Viri and invitations to "unspeakable" sexual acts (exactly what is "unspeakable", anyway? I know a lot of people who'd consider anything except missionary-style after-marriage with-the-intent-to-procreate sex to be "unspeakable", and some who'd view even *that* as unspeakable - a necessary evil) are certainly common, as are offers for cheap medication, body part enlargement and cheap M$ software, phishing, and all the other crap that gets spammed.
Would any ISP use this as an excuse to turn off email for all customers? Of course not; the thought alone is ridiculous, and I think that shows that they're just looking for a convenient scapegoat. I'm not sure what the real reason could be, but it's probably money, in one way or another - turning off news servers means less bandwidth consumption, less hardware needed at the ISP, less administration overhead (i.e., less administrators), and so on.
Given that, and also given that most people don't use seem to Usenet anymore (at least not in the traditional form, especially since web-based services like Google Groups became available), I can understand their decision to stop offering Usenet, but I wish they'd at least be honest about why they're doing so.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Yeah, that touches on one of my pet peeves. As a self-identified Christian, it really irks me that these fundamentalist assholes are out there killing, hating, and judging other people in the name of MY savior.
Of course, to be fair, it would probably irk them to know that I drink, smoke pot occasionally, don't care if homosexuals marry each other, and identify myself as Christian.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
.. but the signal to noise is way too high... :-)
I hate to be picky - but I am sure you meant s/n ratio was too low. If the s/n ratio was too high then you'd actually find the service useful
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
This has nothing to do with the number of people using the service but rather it is all about money. There has been an ongoing battle over the last few years against bandwith abusers who cost money to the big Ontario ISPs in Canada. They argue that even though when you group everyone in the profit per person is extremely large they believe that no one should use 'unlimited' to the extent that they get there moneys worth (and I can kind of see their argument - though I disagree that this is the way to do it). A couple of years ago Bell (the DSL competitor to rogers) introduced user limits of around 5 gigs per month. This led to massive subscriber loss as everyone bailed to Rogers. Rogers secretly introduced this in a few years later and now this to lower costs as the usenet users are usually high bandwith users. They'd much rather them use google forums which are file-less. Bell has since got rid of its bandwith limits but its usenet service has 0% completion on binaries so they can subtully prevent mass bandwith usage as well.
Rogers outsourced their Usenet services to Giganews about a year or so ago, limited their customers to a maximum of 2 simultaneous connections to the NNTP server, and capped the speed. They also outsourced their customers' webhosting to GeoShitties. The service has been going steadily downhill for the past year. Time for me to jump ship.
Anyone know if any good DSL or cable providers in the Durham Region (southern Ontario) area?