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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."
I'm looking for invitations to unspeakable sexual acts?
No, I don't want a free iPod
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.
Most of the time when I'm using usenet, I'm not looking for something. I am looking to get hit with random content like what other people think is good or interesting. Its fun to explore the mp3 newsgroups and just download some random mp3s and learn about new music.
your chances of catching [...] a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place.
;- )
I think they're missing on what people are looking for on usenet in the first place
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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.
Indeed, Slashdot seems to be losing its positions in the dupe posting market fast...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
> Already posted on digg three times now.
Woah! Digg already duped this article twice! That's it Slashdot, I'm switching!
In other news today, the Atlantic ocean is rather wet, the Great Attractor is rather far away, and the Pope is rather religious.
I thought the creationist mob were blockheaded... then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
Don't talk about usenet!
...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.
alt.fading.usenet.dwindles.declines.ain't-what-it
alt.remote.past.!dead.!gone.!forgotten
alt.sacred.format.preserve.continue.cherish
alt.noble.cry.resound.ring.echo:
"alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb!"
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I first used USENET in 1985 and I was frankly astounded. It was like having a club, but instead of being local it was world-wide. The topics were so numerous and the opinions so wide-ranging. I began to think it would be the start of some kind of global democracy, where everybody got to have a say.
But even then the signs were there. My first introduction to a flame-war was quite unintentional for a neophyte, but I quickly learned this was more like the Wild West than High Tech. You could have your fair share on intelligent discourse but there were many traps for the unwary and pretty soon you were being bombarded from all sides. It wasn't spam back then, but it was the idea. You learned to give out minimal information and never gave out your email address to anyone you didn't think you could trust.
The came the Web and suddenly everyone and his uncle who could afford an Internet connection could join in and USENET lost its quiet charm. Anyone who used it for a while got annoyed at the same questions being asked 1000's of times and the FAQs became a joke because no newbie would bother reading them. Sanity only seemed to be maintained in the moderated groups, but it was lawless fun in the alt.* groups. Pretty soon they were being overrun by the first generation of spammers and at that point I got out.
They say you can't go home again. True, but it seems the spirit of USENET lives on anyway, in places like Slashdot, and the Internet as a whole. When you think about, blogging is nothing more than having your own moderated newsgroup, and any website can become a focal point for discussion and dissemination of information to the like-minded. USENET is far from dead, but its legacy is well established, and a few of us hope that its spirit never truly dies.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
I think think any viable alternative to usenet would have to require that all newsgroups be moderated. It would also have to have much better security. (E.g., a public key for each newsgroup with the private keys held only by moderators.) The encryption part could be made painless and transparent with the right software, but there's no getting around the labor involved in moderation. I see no other way to keep the trolls and spammers down to acceptable levels.
"People have been predicting this for years!"
And yet this is evidence that it's actually happening.
Just because predictions sometimes start becoming reality doesn't mean that the actual events aren't news, or of interest.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Cheers,
Ian
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.
What exactly are "pirate stimulating late-night conversations?" and why would I want to have them?
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
/ Summon Bevets.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
1. Insults to my question
2. Useful answers
Additionally, I read a few of the SF Bay Area ba.* groups. There's some spamming, trolling, and flaming, but not so much that I cannot find and track the useful conversations.
What a bunch of bull.
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
I suppose like, "Yarrr, matey, before we go sleep it off in our racks, pass me that bottle of rum and I'll tell ye o' the time we caught this fat merchant freighter off the coast, yarr..."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I use SBC's Usenet service. I get tons of ebooks from there, I get tons of babe pictures from there, I get tons of tech info from there (less so recently due to time pressures).
The only problem with Usenet is that unless the newsgroup is a niche group like alt.comp.freeware or a thoroughly technical group, or a moderated newsgroup, it will be inundated with porn and other spam shortly. But even some of the babe newsgroups are easily usable. If somebody bothered to put a spam filter on newsgroups, most of the spam could be eliminated, but that'll never happen.
Viruses? Never seen one in three years. I've seen a handful of posts from people who have said, "Don't download this, it's a virus." That's it.
Other problems? Same as in real life - morons are everywhere. Deal with it (we Transhumans are going to in due time.)
The ISP is simply lying and trying to save a couple bucks. I would expect SBC to follow suit, since their Usenet service is crappy to begin with - their retention sucks. I'm convinced they deliberately damage the binary newsgroups because their completion rate is hideous in almost all of them - virtually NO multipart binary - at least if it's an MP3 or other media - gets through. Fortunately a lot of ebooks do get through. I've been meaning to get a subscription to a real Usenet service for some time.
In short, there's nothing seriously wrong with Usenet that a spam filter wouldn't solve, but using your ISP to access it is not the best idea.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Enough to make it worth-while.
Quack, quack.
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.
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.
Yes. As ISPs drop usenet services, programmers will stop using the Usenet to ask and answer questions. Deja will not have any new info and it will become less valuable as a coding resource over time if people stop posting to Usenet.
'Course, this is but one of many requiems for Usenet. Remember when AOL installed their Usenet gateway? That was the end of Usenet too. As long as good ISPs don't follow Rogers lead, Usenet will be fine. Short a few Canadians, perhaps, but fine.
.sig: file not found
Both of whom are rather eclipsed by what I've come to call the "devolutionists", that is, the anti-learning, book-burning, everything-bashing clods, a few of whom infest /. Devolutionists (wait, it'll catch on) insist that there should be NO learning, that everything is TOO hard (no, you can't make it easier: those breath strips that dissolve on your toungue are too hard.), and that I'm a bad person just because I LEARNED and believe that OTHERS CAN LEARN, TOO. Devolutionists resent all advancement of the human race since the Dark Ages, and can't wait to get back so they can curl up in their safe little manure pile. No kidding!
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.
Shit! If it's already on digg for two weeks then it's probably all over the net. It really looked like a hot release and I was hoping to trade it. I could really use a boost in the rankings. I remember the days when slashdot had all the 0-day newz first, it's now just fakes and dupes. I think the scene is dying and slashdot is just the first to go down.
roflmao.
God, that hurts.
Thank you for ruining my lunch. Coke shot form the nose and mixed with Beef Stroganoff is just not at all pleasant-looking.
from TFA: Its democratic dream offers . . .
It's a democratic reality.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
According to this article you could post a picture of that to Usenet and probably satisfy somebody's sexual food fetish.
.agrippa.
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
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.
I'm a SysAd at a small (5000 subscriber) ISP in California for about 5 months. We recently stopped offering Usenet after I did an audit on the NNTP server. I found we only had 2 separate IPs in the logs using NNTP and the server was downloading 2-6Gb a day. So I took the files in the spool and filtered for names of Usenet groups. What did I find? Mostly foot pr0n. Were were paying I don't know how much for how long so 1 or 2 users could feed their foot pr0n habbit. I had seen enough, it was going down. We got 1 call to complian and that user left us (quite angry too, don't mess with a man's foot pr0n habbit =). On the plus side we made money since the useage on our OC3 has gone down 30% since I offed the server. I still have the output of my filter. We keep it on one of the file servers here for amusement.
And there is the difference between USENET and Slashdot right there..
On USENET, there is absolutely zero chance that someone would have failed to quote "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash." This, of course, would be followed with an off topic conversation twenty threads long about whether Churchill ever said such a thing or not, finally ended when the entire thread degenerates to a discussion of Nazi's.
On Slashdot, someone will backhandedly mention rum, sodomy and lashes, and from there we'll just drift off-topic three threads deep, moderators slamming us with "Offtopic" all the way while we slowly degenerate to a fascinating treatease on totalitarian regimes circa 1940.
Frankly, I'm much more proud of my Slashdot contributions. If it weren't for bad karma, I'd have no karma at all!
- Zarq
I'm surprised that either of the users didn't sue you.
As an ISP, your company should lose its common carrier status by probing the datastream in the manner you did.
There is a difference between checking out the bandwidth utilisation and probing inside somebodies data.
Besides, I wanna download the rest of my footporn, can you zip it up and sent it to me, you already know my ip.
liqbase
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.
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.
I'm an IT pro, and use the Slackware, Hylafax and a handful of other newgroups daily. For many niche topics this may be the only viable source of current information. This service cut is a pain for me, but I'll just have to pay a 3rd party for the service and pass the cost along to customers.
More importantly though, this action removes the default abilitiy of hundreds of thousands of subscribers to POST to the groups. It's those questions and comments that keep the groups alive. For example, if I've got a stupid Windows EventID I can't track down, I'll turn to the groups for clues. Or if I'm spec'ing out new hardware I'll check out relevant newsgroups for anecdotes. C'mon, everyone seems to be deriding the groups, but after your web search turns up squat don't you click on the Google Groups link to see what's there? Aren't you often helped tremendously? (I'll often post a follow-up answer to my own question just so I can find it in the future if need be.)
Google Groups, et al, are a great interface for mining pre-existing data in the groups, but if nobody is posting new content then they'll just become a window into a static history. And that would be a shame - even for the Rogers' help desk flunkie who wondered what my "Usernet" complaint was about - beacuse we all need _unfiltered_ access to information.
I've called the "Office of the President" of Rogers Communications to voice my complaint. I urge other subscribers to do so - frequently! If Sony can get their ass handed to them, then just maybe we can prompt Rogers to reconsider.