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R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
CorinneI writes "In a way inconceivable in today's marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called 'newsgroups' shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past."
Netcraft confirms it!
Think of the children who read alt.startrek.furrydom.localgettogethers
Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.
Same thing, different name.
it was about alt.binaries.mp3s
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"Usenet was where people once went to talk â" in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today."
Internet company profits have zero to do with the decline of USENET as a discussion forum. In its heyday, it was the only Internet-wide forum. It's been supplanted by web forums of every conceivable niche. Web 2.0 beat it out, plain and simple.
RW
I use it all the time!
please stop posting the opinions of bloggers as fact.
Giganews FTW - how long will they hold out against regulators, I wonder.
---- You are fully entitled to my opinion.
Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.
The world moved on and left this protocol behind.
... now back to the bit mines.
My 1+ year subscription to EasyNews would indicate otherwise...
The obit is premature. Usually when a service "dies" it would mean it's no longer available, but anyone can still buy usenet access here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here.
And that is by no means a complete list. If anything, usenet may actually return to a more usable medium again, now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore. Then again, it may well not -- it's not like all the illegal traders will just give up and go away, so I guess it depends on how much money the **IA, the BSA, and the morality police want to spend on "eradicating the problem".
Caveat Utilitor
I worked in ISP support for years and USENET was dying well before child porn was a nail in it's coffin. Probably has something to do with message boards with much friendlier interfaces, or that ISPs never went out of their way to try to explain what usenet is.
Either way, the newsgroup support call was kind of a rare thing, like finding a Yeti or something.
people stopped caring, and now it's going away as essential from an ISP POV. There are still ways to get NNTP feeds, so it's not completely toast.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Nothing to see here.... Move along... ickstay otay hetay anplay acotay!
It has certainly been marginalized. There are still plenty of pay-to-use Usenet providers around.
If they end up dropping the binary groups... who cares? Google hasn't announced that they are dropping their mediocre (but useful) usenet client service. There are plenty of usenet groups still active - usenet may be in decline.. but hasn't that but true for so long already its practically a joke? Lets face it - there is still a need for readily available, easily searched (and filtered), unmoderated discussion groups.
alt.beloved.usenet.gone?.withered?.dead?
alt.black.day.is.is.ever-shall-be
alt.thoughtful.pause.pause.pause.pause
alt.brief.check.make.perform.check
alt.noble.usenet.remains!.lives!.cheers!
alt.brave.usenet.!surrenders.!bows.!gone!
alt.silly.blog.!informs.!researches.!educates
alt.dumb.blogger.drools.mashes-keys-at-random.drools
alt.credulous.slashdot.reports.dramatises.alarms
alt.trusty."alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb".remains.endures.twinkles
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Usenet still thrives if you pay for good usenet service. It certainly beats hunting down ISO's and peers for any things.
It was back in 1983 when Usenet traffic on our server surpassed the whopping total of 5 MB per day. All via UUCP, and mostly (if not all) serial modems at around 2400 baud, IIRC.
Somehow I think Usenet's still alive and kicking. And using up far more than that today.
Let me know when traffic goes back down to that level. Then I might agree.
"Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet."
No need to read any further...
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Back in the early 90s, there was this one classmate who was a brilliant programmer. He wrote a pascal program that somehow continuously downloaded porn from newsgroups, ie. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. This was in the days of the 9600 baud modems, and before the Internet was even a household word. I didn't understand at the time what he was doing, or how he was doing it, but enjoyed the fruits of his labor. This was even before video on computers was prevalent, so it was all just images. Actually I remember downloading one "video" that was really just an ascii-fied version of a pr0no. sigh.. the good ol' days.
One thing I love about reading old Usenet posts is how innocent and safe it all seemed before the Internet boom of the 1990s. People often had their full names and even phone numbers in their sigs. You could sign into a worldwide network and still be trading messages in your own little clique of a dozen or so people who shared an interest.
Then Eternal Spetember happened, and chased most of the decent discussion to quieter and more moderated email lists and web forums.
Usenet's current status as a haven for spam and pirated binar^H^H^H NOTHING ELSE is a far cry from what it used to mean to a lot of people.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
From TFA: "It's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin."
That would seem to fly in the face of everything I know about both human nature and the internet.
For me, the reasons my (once extensive) Usenet usage dropped off was 1) insane amounts of spam, and 2) ease of use of torrents (at least with regards to binaries).
Mind boggling. USENET. Dead. It doesn't even need an explanation as to why it's retarded, at least not to someone who has interesting (technical) discussions there on a regular basis.
You just got troll'd!
Usenet is alive and quite well. Actually I was on it this morning (before I read this article).
The fact that less-informed internet users don't generally know about it is IMHO a good thing.
I am recreating my entire collection of photos from a certain magazine and I am only through 2004.
"Child-porn investigations have doomed one of the last remnants of a smaller, kinder Net."
Can some one please tell me what investigations have doomed Usenet and how?
"Imminent Death of the Net predicted. Film at 11."
^^
Prohibition didn't work then, and it still doesn't work.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
... and yet I still "remember" the good ol' days before Eternal September! ;)
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
I wish there was some indication in the summary that this isn't really news. It's just a lamentation of the bygone days of Usenet. The details about ISPs dropping alt.* have already been repeatedly reported on /.
As with all the other stories on this: Boo-hoo, ISPs aren't giving away free usenet. If you really want it, find a 3rd party usenet server. If my ISP took away email, I wouldn't notice because I use a different address. Verizon took away my usenet and I didn't notice, because I use a 3rd party usenet server.
And again if you haven't read it in the comments of previous postings on this story, a 3rd party usenet server is practically REQUIRED for anonymous viewing/posting of the illicit content they are trying to prevent. The pedos all sign up with offshore providers and pay for it with anonymously mailed money-orders, and access it through anonymizing proxies. The ones who don't are quickly and easily arrested with a single warrant to the ISP. The smart ones, who survive, and are thus the big-time posters, are not and can not be prevented in this manner.
alt.binaries.* isn't killed by ISPs, it's killed by spam and superior communication mechanisms.
Coz your post is dead accurate about the whole usenet sense of humor.
I loved:
alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack
alt.sex.bestiality.barney.die.die.die
and all the many alt.*.whilst.wearing.rubber.knickers groups.
Not that I ever *read* any of them, but it made my heart warm knowing they existed.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Usenet will never die until the last news server goes down; it'll just fade away.
Even "fading away" is a little pessimistic. Usenet still has too many benefits for real discussion - consistent interface, a wide variety of tools, killfiles, newsrcs, universal access through the flood-and-fill protocol, spam fighting, the wide variety of cultural forces that Usenet introduced - and the world is slowly coming around to accept them in other protocols. Even if another article were never transmitted via NNTP/UUCP, the lessons of Usenet will be taught to the next protocols - or, if not, then the lessons will be re-learned after they are poorly implemented a few more times.
Me, I hope that a smaller (read: binary-free) Usenet might lead to a resurgence of popularity, as people realize that they can easily pull down a full feed of the text groups to their private machines and share them to the world, just like any web server in the world. It's a *little* quixotic, sure, but not insanely so.
Don't bother reading the article. It is a non-interesting opinion/blog piece with very little supporting data.
My own little anecdote, I was on usenet (rec.windsurfing) earlier today. If it wasn't for the overwhelming spam, I'd continue to use some of the other groups as the people who are left are a pretty committed and knowledgable group.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
... the glitz and glamour of MySpace...
Not sure this author is credible enough to be taken seriously if he thinks that MySpace is glitzy and glamorous.
:q!
1. the government anti-child porn crusade did not kill usenet. alt.binaries bloat, child porn included, killed usenet
2. if the government is more precise in what they shut down (ie, if they shut down just alt.binaries), then the effect will be counterintuitive: usenet can experience a rebirth
it wouldn't be that hard to remove all encoded material from usenet. just set up a simple rule and restrict by size. once you do that, and usenet becomes text only again, usenet can be reborn to satisfy what made it so great in the first place. its social networking lite
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Funny, I was on there yesterday, some of the groups had 100,000 posts since the day before. When they say the newsgroups are dead, they are incorrect. They should have said real discussions on the newsgroups are moving to yahoo groups or google or specific forms or web sites. Actually that move to web based discussions happened about 4 or 5 years ago. So this article is rather late and meaningless.
Hell, Gopher isn't even dead.
Oh, and look, they have all the alt.* forums there too!
So, unless the entire Usenet network gets taken offline..which is unlikely, then no, it's far from dead.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
forums were there long before web 2.0. popular scripts and communities built on phpbb, invision date much earlier than the bullcrap buzzword that is the '2.0'.
what the hell is 2.0 i STILL dont have an absolute idea, despite i am doing web development for a living.
Read radical news here
I think the same thing is happening to e-mail, at least e-mail over public mail servers. With the advent of new communications methods, it's just getting less and less worth the energy required to cope with the parasites (spam and such). People can still exchange interesting stuff via YouTube, but I bet that gets destroyed by spam soon enough, too.
It's probably some rule of evolutionary biology: if you create a pool of low entropy, a cloud of parasites will spontaneously arive, like maggots to meat, to eat it and destroy it. Then I guess you move on to the next thing, huh?
Pity we don't simply hunt down and destroy the parasites in our own midst, so that we can spend less time and cleverness keeping ahead of them.
OMG people, we have php forums, get the hell over it! Usenet is ANCIENT! Are you still running DOS too? Upgrade already! I hope they demolish IRC too cuz that's a klunky, ancient technology too and not the cool Stargate type, the uncool, as old as the internet kind. We have real messengers now! Seriously, this is not the end of the world.
You've obviously never used usenet or IRC. If you think MySpace messages are as efficient a way to communicate as either of those systems, well, you sir, are an idiot.
Usenet is doing quite well. The programming-related newsgroups are in fine shape. "comp.lang.python", "comp.lang.javascript", and "comp.databases.mysql" have heavy traffic from knowledgeable people, including developers of the underlying systems. It's much faster to see the day's updates on Usenet than to page through the inflated dreck on a half dozen PHP-based forum systems.
I was a bit disappointed when the C++ standards committee moved their discussions off USENET, but that committee isn't getting anywhere anyway.
ISPs have been nothing but a bane on Usenet allowing idiots free access anyone who seriously uses Usenet for anything learns fast to get an account from a dedicated provider not the pile of incomplete shit most ISPs have.
Shit like this just says they have no idea how to do what they say they are going to do i remember reading an article a couple years ago proudly proclaiming the success of a 3 year investigation into providers of kiddie porn that resulted in 5 arrests come on anyone with some decent Google skills can probably find more than that in an hour
juenger1701
Reading the article left me with more of the sense that the author lamented the social aspects of USENET, now supplanted by more glamorous (and ad supported) counterparts.
It's the decline in peering, particularly at the ISP level, due to binaries that he points to as the final nail in the coffin.
While he decries the proliferation of binary traffic as anathema, the last paragraph sums it up thus: "It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion."
And therein lies the truth. As long as some "old schoolers" refuse to be seduced by the web frontends for social ties, or insist on using text to distribute binary materials, you can be sure the USENET will be with us for some time to come, "child safety advocates" notwithstanding.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
My local ISP only has 3 day binary retention, and a very poor selection of groups. Anyone using usenet for the binaries pays for a service like giganews.
As for the old usenet, where people had intelligent discussions, it has been dead for a long time. Private internet forums have replaced it.
I would much rather there were an easily accessible forum where people who wanted to post pictures of naked children would go... seems like that would make it a heck of a lot easier to track them down. Now they're probably spread out over five thousand underground websites and it'll be twice as hard to catch them. Dammit. I shouldn't have said "twice as hard". Ick.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Death Of Usenet has been predicted since its birth. Nothing to see here.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
On Slashdot in 2000?
No, it was on USENET itself... in 1995.
This bloke isn't mourning Usenet, he's mourning the end of the September that Never Ended.
Usenet's biggest problems really started when AOL joined Usenet. The other ISPs followed on from that... people said that September ended when AOL left... not so, it won't end until the last big ISP is gone. Then maybe it'll be time for Usenet 2.0...
I can't think of a single messenger service that comes close to IRC in terms of usefulness, all messengers I know about are designed for conversations with 2 people (they support more but it's a lot of hassle and involves inviting people to conversations, rather than people just joining)
Try reading past the headline next time. Maybe even to the conclusion of the story. That usually improves the quality of your comments.
I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
Is what killed the internet. At least what it was and should have remained.
What we have now is some evil bastard child.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Usenet has always had child porn. None of this is actually about child porn, this has been discussed before. In fact, thanks to the NZB file Usenet has been gaining popularity like wildfire the past few years and THAT, I suspect, is the real reason Usenet is being dropped by ISPs. It was fine to have a token NNTP server when nobody used it, but once it started costing real money it got the axe.
As an avid user of Usenet(the binaries groups, I admit) nothing has changed. There may be a few less people reading messages/downloading attachments now, but I won't notice that.
He misspelled ditzy and calamitous.
I have a sneaky suspicion that this is only the beginning of the truly free sectors of the net being shut down. With net neutrality in the dangerous position it is in right now, it feels as if a more controlled, monitored, and 'signed-off upon' internet is right around the corner.
My prediction:
Welcome to Comcast's service tier selection!
Core Net: $49.95/month
The core-net pack is the basic, introductory-level internet access, suitable for the less-experienced internet user. With this package, you will be able to access the core sites of the internet including:
Google.com
AOL.com
CNN.com
MSNBC.com
AP.org
etc.
Core Plus:$89.95/month
Core Plus is aimed at the more heavy internet user. With the core plus package you will have access to the more 'fringe' internet sites. Along with all of the core sites, you will also be able to access:
Slashdot.org
Ars-technica.org
xkcd.org
myspace.com
facebook.com
youtube.com
etc.
Questionable Content: $400/month
Stay away from this package. The questionable content package will allow un-restricted access to the whole of the internet, including the indecent, unpatriotic riff raff. This package includes everything not listed in the first to tiers of service.
--
And by squeezing the less affluent, the free net will be murdered.
So long everyone, and thanks for all the fish.
a.e.w.d.d.d had lots of imaginative posts on how Wesley should be done in, plus plenty of flame wars when people started conflating Wesley the character (yuck) with Wil the actor (cool frood).
No sig? Sigh...
The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts a body on the cart]
ISPs: Here's one.
The Dead Collector: That'll be ninepence.
Usenet: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
ISPs: Nothing. There's your ninepence.
Usenet: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
ISPs: Yes he is.
Usenet: I'm not.
The Dead Collector: He isn't.
ISPs: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Usenet: I'm getting better.
ISPs: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
Usenet: I don't want to go on the cart.
ISPs: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Dead Collector: I can't take him.
Usenet: I feel fine.
ISPs: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
ISPs: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
ISPs: Well, when's your next round?
The Dead Collector: Thursday.
Usenet: I think I'll go for a walk.
ISPs: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
Usenet: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences Usenet with his a whack of his club]
ISPs: Ah, thank you very much.
The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
ISPs: Right.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
USENET was always a very poor system. It's amazing anybody ever used it. You only receive some of the posts and you never know if your posts are really posted and who sees them. It was always a TREMENDOUSLY flawed system that has no place in even YESTERDAY's internet world. Let alone today's. When has the last time anybody used USENET for anything remotely serious or even interesting?
That BSD is dead too?
It's resting (sorry, had to).
But more seriously, where's the #1 forum to discuss C programming? comp.lang.c. Where's the #1 forum to discuss DSP? comp.dsp, so much that other DSP "forums" only provide an interface to it. Where's the #1 spot to tell people your new theory as to how FTL travel is possible using hidden dimensions in the aether? sci.physics.
So you see, it's not dead, or even resting, some of its branches died, some others are still thriving.
You just got troll'd!
There are still a number of people I keep up with on Usenet (NNTP). That said, I finally ditched my ISP's shitty NNTP services. They use Limelight networks and I get frequent disconnects, frequent article number resets, etc.
Switched to Motzarella and it works fine with Gravity 2.60
Time to break out the greatlyexaggerated tag.
They still have pretty good fetish porn. Chicks in rubber and PVC.
I dread the day Usenet is no longer in a Comcast package.
alt.sad.wherewillyoufindyourchildporn.now?
Nothing to see here, please move along. Premium services have been about the only viable source of Usenet for awhile now, even just for the text completion and retention. As long as they have a market of people willing to pay (including me) for that access, nothing is set to die any time soon.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
As all followers of the *BSD troll understand, the only way to truly know if something is dead is to look at the numbers. So we must measure the number of posts to usenet that mention usenet and see if that number has gone up or down over the past few years.
"Child-porn investigations have doomed one of the last remnants of a smaller, kinder Net."
Why yes, I believe their stated goals include dooming said KinderNet...
goodbye sci.electronics.repair, I barely knew ye. Glad to see the government is focused on chopping off the arm rather than explore antibiotics for that infection.
* Making waffles just so I have something to Twitter *
the year of Linux on the desktop. ;)
First top-post! Usenet started dying for me when that became a crime worthy of vituperation.
I use UNSNET just about every day. I like it because I can get information and binaries with out having useless marketing crap streamed to my computer. This is just marketing FUD. Sure, I now have to pay for a service since my ISP decided to block the binary groups but the fee is small.
--
My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
Guess I should have quoted something for that to make sense.
>First top-post! [wikipedia.org] Usenet started
>dying for me when that became a crime worthy of
>vituperation.
> Just because mainstream internet providers are dropping it doesn't mean it is dying. Usenet is immortal,
> like Dracula, it will never die.
SPAM: [after SPAM's cut off both of the UseNet's arms] Look, you stupid Bastard. You've got no arms left. ....
UseNet: Yes I have.
SPAM: *Look*!
UseNet: It's just a flesh wound.
SPAM: Look, I'll have your leg. [Recieves a very sharp kick] Right! [Chops off one of the UseNet's legs]
UseNet: Right! I'll do you for that!
SPAM: You'll what?
UseNet: Come here!
SPAM: What are you going to do, bleed on me?!
UseNet: I'm invincible!
SPAM: You're a looney.
UseNet: The UseNet always triumphs! Have at you! Come on then. [Hopping on one leg towards SPAM]
[SPAM chops his other leg off, leaving his body upright on the ground.]
UseNet: Alright, we'll call it a draw.
SPAM: Come, Patsy!
UseNet: Oh, oh I see. Running away, eh?! You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!!
[Fade to black.]
Netcraft: Bring out yer dead. [Hits gong]
Mass Media: Here's one.
Dead UseNet: I'm not dead!
Netcraft: What?
Mass Media: Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
Dead UseNet: I'm not dead!
Netcraft: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Mass Media: Yes he is.
Dead UseNet: I'm not!
Netcraft: He isn't!
Mass Media: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Dead UseNet: I'm getting betta!
Mass Media: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Netcraft: I can't take 'im like that! It's against regulation!
Dead UseNet: I don't want to go on the cart!
Mass Media: Oh, don't be such a baby!
Netcraft: I can't take him.
Dead UseNet: I feel fine!
[Mass Media knocks UseNet dead]
if the government is more precise in what they shut down (ie, if they shut down just alt.binaries)
This will only kill the binary pron, leading to a new rebirth of ASCII pron!
If we wanted to don our tinfoil hats, we could come up with an alternative reason for killing Usenet, instead of kiddy porn or the mafiAA.
Usenet may be one of the few remaining places on the Internet that might pretend to have First Ammendment protections. Here at Slashdot there are discussion forums, but Slashdot has some form of control/culpability for them despite any disclaimers. If I were to post the Secrets of Scientology here, the Church of Scientology would certainly be after me, but they'd first go after Slashdot to get those secrets removed. (Of course then they're inviting the Streisand Effect, and they'd have to remember the Wayback Machine, but I'm sure they'd try.) But the essence is that Slashdot is a commercial entity hosting contributed content on its servers. The same can be said about pretty much any weblog out there.
The same cannot be said of Usenet. There is no single choke point for Usenet, like there is for a weblog. There is no single point to send a C&D letter to. Furthermore, it's fully possible that the author on Usenet is carefully anonymous, and is therefore untracable. Even finding the original feedpoint may be problematic, and require serious geek assistance.
On the other hand...
I was there on "Green Card Day". I remember seeing it the first time, then seeing it again in the next group that I followed, then again and again.... There may be something inherently unworkable about mixing anonymity with complete freedom speech. I suspect our founding fathers thought that we'd use our free speech more wisely than I do. I still believe that it is at times important to be anonymous, while at the same time retaining first ammendment protection, but I also believe that claiming those dual rights is FAR more important than Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts. I have no idea what a solution might be, other than to make some "cost of anonymity" great enough to prevent spam, but have no idea how to do that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
(Yes, deliberately provocative subject. Please read on.)
UseNet originated at a time when a vast portion of its network was built upon store-and-forward technologies such as UUCP, BITNET, and various homegrown protocols for the smaller sites. If you could do store and forward you could probably carry newsgroups.
Today, everyone has interactive Internet access. That's why no one is scrambling to "fix" UseNet. Today's users Google for what interests them, and they eventually find themselves on a relevant message board. That message board is probably not replicated to thousands of other servers across the globe, because the whole world can already reach it directly.
The only nuisance is that you have to create accounts on all these systems. Hopefully, technologies such as OpenID will fix that.
(And yeah, there are plenty of smaller message boards that thrive specifically because they are smaller scale than UseNet. I've been a BBS sysop for 20 years, and our community is thriving because everyone has the opportunity to know everyone else without having to deal with a 1% signal to noise ratio. It also helps that we offer both text and web based user interfaces to the same message boards, so we can be equally as welcoming to newbies and old-skool green screeners.)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
My first usenet post was in 1984. The company I worked for had usenet access, and yes I have nostalgic memories of those days. Some of it was just the novelty, the sense of discovery. I understand and sympathize with a lot of what the article is talking about.
But things changed, as they always do. To me the change became noticeable as more dreck, noise and flaming one had to filter out to get to the interesting posts, and I started to disengage. Then my provider became more difficult to work with. I can remember not too long ago, after a long absence, going on sci.physics with a question. A physicist answered it, but the thread was full of crazy talk from various people with wacko theories. That kind of thing always happened to some extent, but I was a bit shocked by the sheer volume this time and wondered how that serious physicist could bring himself to devote time to perusing sci.physics for legitimate questions.
In the past, there was no other place to go for the kind of things usenet provided. Now, there are other places to go and I get the feeling that usenet is being left more and more to the loonies. Granted, sci.physics is probably more of a target than most groups. Something like comp.sci.c++ would probably have a better signal to noise ratio (if it exists, I haven't checked). The last group that I used to regularly engage was sci.econ, and by engage I mean I'd lock horns in arguments with others that were not just flamefests. I remember sci.bio.evolution was heavily moderated for obvious reasons, creationists were always trying to infiltrate with their own ideas.
Actually, slashdot has a bit of the old flavor. Sure there's lots of noise on the channel, but good stuff as well. However, slashdot doesn't have the breadth of usenet and it's up to the higher authorities to decide what topics get selected.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
As long as Torrent have ratios and all the good stuff is on Private Trackers... usenet will always have a home with use leeches *for 15$ a month*
"The year of linux on the desktop"..
"The next search engine to beat google"..
"Windows is dead"..
"Usenet is dead"..
It seems like more and more people are making more and more outrageous predictions & claims.
I guess with all the noise out there people need a way for their blog to stand out.
If they're wrong its a case of "oh well, maybe next year" but if they're right they'll claim they're prophetic or something and use it to get more advertizing/readers/whatever... and yet nothing changes, the internet goes on.
Hold on.. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1316257 OMG!! the internet is gonna end.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Not when the quality of the comment is to land a +5, Funny.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Please can you all stop posting to this thread: have you forgotten the first and second rules ?
The store and forward broadcasting scheme has definite merits as a means of distributing information in a community. I think that the Twitter / Indenti.ca - laconica / RSS reader tools of the world will eventually re-collapse into a new version of Usenet, without anonymity, and a slightly different feature set.
Usenet is dead... long live Usenet.
This is just resetting USENET so that the first two rules are back in place. Move along please.
So as a complete child who's been raised solely on Web 2.0, I've only heard of usenet as a legendary relic. I am however well adjusted to *chan. It seems like usenet and *chan share something in common though, both have users that complain of influxes of new users. In fact that's one of the reasons why there are so many *chan sites. Old users discontent with new users branch off, buy server times and urls, set up *chan software, and form new communities until new users take notice of the new *chan site.
If you read the article you'd realize the writer was speaking "metaphorically"
it's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites.
Didn't we have a R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2007 R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2006 R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2005 R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2004 R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2003 R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2002 articles too?
Democracy is the theory that the common idiots know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
ISP's have been shutting down there Usenet access for years. That is the reason I went to astraweb and eventually giganews well over 7 years ago. These providers are making money and show no indication of changing there business plans from $$$ to no $$$.
When you wave a red flag, and say "Don't look in this box", you attract more people that want to look in the box then if you had kept your mouth shut.
Thank you retards, for making up news articles, and telling the world what general direction to travel in to get illegal wares. You have had a profound effect on preventing child porn and piracy.
That's awfully subjective. I find the GG interface to be an exercise in masochism.
I use pan at home but am forced to use GG at the office because my employer (the federal gummint) blocks NNTP at my site.
I argued that being in a direct support role they'd cut off one of my primary research tools but I didn't win the argument - so now I have to use GG at work.
It's bad, but it's not worse than no Usenet at all ;-)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
> Yet here we are, on a web forum, and not on USENET.
I read Slashdot on a web forum for exactly *one* reason: I have *no choice* (AFAIK), there is no USENET interface :-(
(Before anyone suggests it I tried the GNUs extension nnslashdot but could not get it to work.)
Usenet takes a fair amount of bandwidth, disk space and such to operate for an ISP. Especially since most of the traffic is binaries.
So when the police said "Hey, we found some child porn on your servers" the ISPs were more than happy to jump up and say "Ok, ok, we'll shut them down!"
To the customers they report "We have had to reluctantly shut down our servers because the government made us do it."
But internally they're like "Thank God! We finally had an excuse to shut that horrendous waste of resources down."
It's sort of like how an company uses "budet cuts" as an excuse to get rid of all the people they actually wanted to fire, but were too lazy to go through all the paperwork.
Can I have Usenet's stuff when its gone?
You want to get rid of older technology because it is "klunky"[sic], but you're offering PHP forums over Usenet? Seriously, name one PHP forum that offers the comparable threading, kill-files and other niceties that Usenet clients have had for decades...
In the interest of the first rule of USENET, my post shall be quick and somewhat vague. As a former user and lover of Xnews I must ask you, have you not heard of GrabIt? Though you'll have to get used to NZBs instead of crawling the group, the ability to shutdown and startup long queues anytime without having to wait for the software to wake up from what seems like a catatonic coma is quite valuable. Of course, I had less than a gig of ram back then.
USENET is dead in internet protocol terms. Usage has shrunk to such a small size and there are so many better alternatives, that its numbers will continue to decline to near oblivion. Yes, there may be a handful of gurus exchanging Linux binaries, but you're not going to see forums full of next generation users.
I gave up on it as well a couple years ago, and I was an avid user. The groups I posted to started to dry up to a trickle as everyone migrated to better forum interfaces. My current ISP doesn't even offer USENET service.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You are CLUELESS. Do some real research before you proclaim things "Dead". All the ISP's that have turned off Usenet had the worst nntp servers on the net. Good riddance. R.I.P Sascha Segan: 1980-2008 Oh wait I must be using your awesome ability of claiming things dead when they are still live and healthy. Last thing. just because our idiot lawmakers here in the good ole' USofA think it's a great idea to get the network providers to turn of Usenet (something they have been looking for a good excuse to do FOREVER) only make a small blip on the global Usenet. ITS GLOBAL. IT's the intertubes man get a grip. Ok i'm done...
What a horrible article with a sensationalistic title. The only good thing I can say about that article is that at least the writer understands the technical aspects of usenet, unlike some of the articles I have seen lately. Claming "Usetnet is dead" is what makes him an idiot. I hope usenet is dead..FOR HIM.
I love the newsgroups and have used all aspects of them daily since the mid 90s. When I discovered binaries in 1998 I couldn't believe how ingenious it was. I have had a premium news service for the past 5 years and it's the one bill I pay every month with joy...Usenet is not dead - it's only gotten better. But they WANT to kill it.
If the ISP want to discontinue them they're stupid. It only bothers me in so much as I feel that is the first step in a campaign to ruin them, but due to the way usenet works, it would be a difficult task and would basically require removing all freedom on the internet (which is something these groups want, that is their goal - make no mistake about it - the corporate/governmental groups that are pushing this sort of thing want to turn the net into some bastardized bowlderized version of a three-way cross between early AOL, the home shopping network and MSNBC. Fuck that.
Maybe Freenet will become relevant after this.
why RAR had a 'split into 20MB pieces' option...
For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
But have you checked the date? It's finally October 1st!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Good riddance.
Mmmm. So you basically use Usenet as a binary firehose and you download from one big centralized location (the premium server.) You're just making my point. Usenet as I was celebrating it - highly decentralized and thus "ownerless", yet a socially central one-stop forum for text-based communication on a wide variety of topics, died a while ago.
I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
If anyone was actually reading the article, they would have noticed that the headline sucks. The author is waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of usenet. Any article that has "AOL users started the demise" kind of talk is bound to be stupid anyway. It's not dead, it certainly isn't alive in the way it was in the early 90s. It's no longer the super secret nerd channel, it's the searchable, accessable, useless channel. You know, improved... or web 2.0.
Actually it was spam that killed Usenet for me. It became impossible to interact with normal people around five years ago, after the spammers started hijacking Usenet forums.
I am convinced that Cuomo was lobbied by the RIAA and MPAA and used the "child porn" defense as a ruse to close down the last frontier of free media.
What's a metaphor?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Not much different than a daily crying about PC gaming being dead when NPD only reports on retail sales of certain retailers. Let's not forget the increasing popularity of digital distribution & MMOs.
Usenet is no different since everyone forgets the subscription sites that provide high speed access to a plethora of newsgroups.
Welcome to life... naysayers are always lurking about everything people find joy in, good or bad.
I see your point, and you are correct about my missing your meaning in that respect, so I apologize for calling you an idiot on tha basis.
You have to unserstand that I love usenet (for the same reasons as you likely) and have seen several articles lately characterizing it as some "child porn haven darknet" and describing it in a way which clearly showed the writer had no concept of usenet, it's history, or how binaries work. I read your article and appreciated much of it, but I am just pissed off about the whole thing.
I don't just "download binaries and use usenet as a big firehose" i use all aspects of usenet. I post and read text based threads, I download a lot of stuff - most of it non-copyrighted (but not all)....The point I was trying to make is that it is too soon to declare it dead.
If some ISPs stop carrying it, that won't stop everything, but you are right - the more nodes (or however you want to characterize it) it loses, the weaker it becomes in it's decentralization.
Hopefully many ISPs will not stop carrying it. People who want to download bins usually aren't doing so thru an ISP account - What about Europe and Asia?
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Maybe not, but if you're currently using Usenet, would you mind telling me how you got access? My ISP does not offer any Usenet access at all, and while there are lots of sites offering "access to all alt.binaries newsgroups with no bandwidth limit" for an admittedly rather reasonable fee, there must be some reasonable way to just get access to the discussion newsgroups.
I read the article because somebody sent me a link to it. I clicked on the "discuss" link, something I very seldom do, only to see the author engaged in a flamefest with detractors, one of whomesaid "I gave you worse on slashdot" so hopped over here to look. Yeah, that's usenet, even if NNTP isn't shuffling the bits to "hundreds if not thousands of sites around the world"
The cabal still runs the net and there's still a talk.bizarre party at the end of the summer.
Need Mercedes parts ?
No doubt about it, Usenet begot the Internet and it's genetics are apparent in the social networks of today. But, I probably won't use the Usenet that I knew circa 1984 any more than I'm likely to dust off my Comodore64 to surf it.
There are lessons to be learned from those early days that are lost on Web 2.0 newbies who think they're inventing the wheel rather than sporting a new ride on a road that was laid long ago.
I am looking at alt.news.usenet.demise.predicitions-by-asshats right now and I can't see anything to suggest this is true.
Life needs more saving throws.
I dunno, what's a metafor you?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Better than a 3some.. afterwards.
You know, being a niche service is not such a bad thing. As you have probably noticed, the best things in life have to be sought out. I'm OK with Usenet being under the radar.
Some Usenet providers will grant free access or for a very low cost with the caveat that you won't be able to download binaries. So no alt.food for pics of sandwiches.
Search for free Usenet servers.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
www.usenet-access.com. They are 6 bucks a month and you get 2 GB per day. An unholy shitload of groups with the retention from hell. I've been able to snag stuff going back almost 2 years. I know they are a reseller for someone, I just don't know who. I've been using them for almost 6 years and never had issues with them at all.
Possible issues are, well 2 Gb per day but hell that an average of 60 GB per month. And you can only have 3 simultaneous connections but hell they are only 6 bucks a month.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Also downloading for offline reading & permanent storage is a lot easier with Usenet. Thunderbird is a bit wanky, but does it.
Usenet can also be adapted for use as a company forum. One big webhosting company uses an NNTP hierchary instead of a user forum, with a universal password to access it. There are pluses & minuses, but it sure is simple. The features are client-side. The downside is you have to have the archives to search for answers.
Free and unrestricted access to a useful resource leads to overuse that eventually renders that resource unusable to anyone.
When Usenet was in its heyday, before the September That Never Ended, access was very much restricted. When I first got on in the mid-80's, you pretty much had to have a university computer account. This meant that people who abused the system were easily identified and either straightened out, or kicked out. Every September, there would be a flurry of nonsense and misbehavior from the new accounts, which died down after about a month or so, as the majority learned the rules, and the losers and abusers got kicked out.
Things were also aided by the fact that the total number of users was relatively small, which kept things manageable.
Once access to Usenet became easy, anonymous, and free, the doom was unavoidable.
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Ah, someone will make breakfast and hand out towels.
I drank what? -- Socrates
ME TOO
What IS happening outside the US in this story, I wonder?
I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
It seems like more and more people are making more and more outrageous predictions & claims.
Sometime in the late 90s, Wired ran a cover story that contained an assertion that "the Web is dead."
That's about when I canceled my subscription.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I've heard of grabit. I searched long and hard for a usenet "harvester" program. The one I settled on was called usenet explorer. I really don't do much "strip mining" of usenet anymore. So Xnews works nicely.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Not. As the article says "as long as two computers". So this will push the porn people underground and the servers willbe harder to find. Unless the FBI can monitor rounters for the usenet protocol.
www.newsgroups-download.com offers a $2.95/month plan: 500MB/day, 8 connections.
Long live Usenet!
A metaphor is a cool breeze on a hot summer day.
Or is that a cliche?
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
but something like meth should be illegal forever
of course there will always be morons who take meth. that doesn't mean fighting meth hasn't had an impact
if there is a better way to fight something like meth rather than illegalization, i'm all ears, i'm interested. but most schemes for fighting something like meth that normalization are rather fruity pie in the sky schemes that obviously would fail in the real world
illegalization of something meth ar eimperfect, but no approach is perfect in fighting evil drugs. or do you believe something meth is a perfectly fine drug that should be legal, like a nice glass of wine? (!?)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Only if it's sunset, while walking longingly on the beach...
I drank what? -- Socrates
Who needs Usenet when there is access to it via Google Groups? When I am home, I am fortunate enough to get access through my regular ISP, including the binaries (which I don't use). When I am at work, during lunch, I visit it through Google Groups. In fact, I just posted a question on comp.lang.python.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
... on psu's vm/cms system. I think our client was written in REXX.
In my boxes of college papers and tests, I still have an archive of rec.humor.funny and alt.folklore.computer on floppy.
I witnessed the BOFH posts their first time around. I also saw Ramero's 'bow down and suck my knob, pitiful doom god' when it first aired, but I can't remember the group, but it was before the split that included .games. Then there were the links to the ftp sites (http wasn't around yet), where I became fascinated with the PC Demo scene. A few years later, it was the constant flamewar between Mike Vandeman, usenet kook, and the residents of rec.bicycle.off-road. The group became moderated because of that, and died soon after.
Ahh, those were the days.
Usenet=Snake Plissken of 2008 "Swear to God Snake, I thought you were dead..." "Yeah, you and everybody else!"
I lol'd. This twat is bitching about text usenet. Binaries live on!
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What about Google Groups...they host the Usenet Discussion groups and they're free.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
alt.boo.frickin.hoo
And it probably will be killed off as there is no way to make loads of money off of it.
hey, people learn from mass media...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Google groups is a pain in the ass to use. They are great when I'm researching something or just wanting to take trip down memory lane. Take a trip through comp.sys.amiga.* and remember what the big deal was about.
But compared to a full function news reader with thread control and kill files, it's a poor imitation.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.unix-wizards/msg/13aa7081ac516aff?dmode=source
Either Usenet isn't dead yet, since there's folks like Giganews and Google Groups and such, and you can note people have been predicting the death of Usenet for over a decade.
There's the other way of looking at it, which is Usenet quit being useful for anything but porn and warez a long time ago and thus, Usenet's been dead for a long time-- some people will tell you, since September of '93.
Either way, the timing of this article is a bit questionable. It's either been dead, or not dead yet. It's not Recently Dead Now...
When I started on Usenet, right after the flood waters receded, you had to know someone to get a feed from them. I used to get my daily usenet fix over a 2400 bps modem to an amiga 500 running dnews 1.13, I think. I was a collaborative effort.
Maybe in the future usenet can be reborn but with in a closed system again. You have to know someone to get a feed from.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
The difference between Usenet and independent forums, is that forums will come and go, but Usenet persists. Usenet archives (for the most part, Google) keep the old content available, but when web sites that have forums go down they'll take their forums with them-- you can only hope that archive.org will save them, but searching within that is not so easy... I can still find messages (much of which with useful information) from Usenet back in the 1980s. How many independent forums will still have their content available and searchable in 20 years? Not many, I expect...
$3/month for 10 GB. Enough for my TV downloads.
I remember like it was yesterday.... Back in '96 we had an nice, friendly Usenet where people happily filled each other's requests and there was hardly ever spam. We didn't need no stinkin' P2P connection. Then came the PAR files so people stopped sharing and next came those long-haired, dope-smokin' Napster users and their RIAA and the MPAA and pretty soon this quiet community had been turned upside down. Now we've got spam, dutch-language movies, cross-posters and virus galore.
Get off my lawn, ya hooligans!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
slashdot articles. This is a fine example of a slashdot article where one above all should avoid clicking on the link to tfa, as it smells opinionated blurb that should not be given one single click in ad revenue.
Google Groups doesn't support score files, is slow as heck, depends on a net connection for interactive use, etc.
My SOUP packet reader (Yarn) has none of those limitations.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Is there a way to make Usenet P2P?
Say something like submitting your post and post header+md5sum to both FreeNet and Usenet. When you query for forum posts you can get the list from Usenet and from FreeNet, request all the files that are available locally from Usenet, and the rest request from FreeNet. Either the Usenet server or the client could do the submitting.
This has the advantage of leveraging longer retention, filling in missing posts either censored or otherwise, and detecting broken/tampered with posts.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
If I had modpoints, I'd mod the parent up. Seriously though, he's right. The story concludes with the author reminescing about 'the old days' of usenet... To quote:
"It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone"
Now that I understand what you were trying to say I don't really want to gut your argument, although I am wondering how much these particular ISPs dropping usenet will really afect it....
- since googlegroups are still accessable from these ISPs afterward and most binaries people use premium services, and much of the rest of the world seems to have a much better handle on using this stuff and does not tend to go along with the "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" approach currently abused in the US.
I definitely remember how cool it was in the mid 90s to participate in the alt groups, and this was even after the AOL influx started, you could meet people with similar geeky or obscure interests and they'd be like an instant friend.
I used to trade live recordings of bands (which is a large part of what I get from binaries these days); I even custom made binaural mics for people when requested - they'd send money and I would build them and there was never even much of a concern of people ripping each other off...so I get your point about how that is kind of a bygone era - but, all of the millions of people worldwide who participate in the newgroups do bring something that those earlier days didn't have - that is a lot more info, a lot more material, and a lot more experience - good and bad...SO all in all I just hope usenet stays strong and weathers whatever crooked or ill-informed but well meaning politicians and money grubbing corporate whores throw at it for whatever reasons.
So what is everyone going to DO about this?
/. watching the internet die around us. We sit here among the few pay enough attention to watch the ship sinking, but we just bitch about it.
Day in and day out we post to
I don't know enough about usenet or software to make a fix, and I'm sure most of us in the same catagory... but what can we do to fight the death of the internet. To stop the one free land in the world from being picked clean by these people?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
May I add another 'No, it's not!' to the comments?
ISP-based usenet has always sucked. The retention was lowsy, the propogation was poor (if they even let you post) - or they simply outsourced to one of the Big 3 [giganews,usenetserver,eweka.nl] [http://top1000.org/#stats]
For those of us who know about it, Usenet is thriving - there's more data passing through it than ever. GN is adding 240days of binary retention (which is insane)
With the combination of NZB files [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB], and SSL, you'd be nuts to ever use a torrent again.
Speed + security + real files.
There are bunch of services:
Combined:
BitNabber.com [Combines NZB + SSL Usenet access]
Usenet only:
Giganews.com [240 days retention, SSL]
Supernews.com [Cleanest / most spam free usenet server]
UsenetServer.com [Solid service, SSL]
NZB Services:
http://www.newzleech.com/ [Free, but automatic, so results will vary]
http://www.binsearch.info/ [Free, also automatic, but with SSL]
NewzBin.com - [Premium + Invite only, but the goliath of NZB sites]
I believe the jargon file has "Death of USENET predicted" listed as its example of the "Film At 11"
Also, isn't this a dupe?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/04/2224201
They still have pretty good fetish porn. Chicks in rubber and PVC.
And here I thought techno chicken was weird!
Mind giving an example of what we're missing?
(Note to mods: This is an honest question, no sarcasm intended or anything)
Haha, is that the author of TFA scolding some comment he doesn't get, and being modded flamebait because of that? Please do wake up to 2008, Sascha, what you are missing about Usenet is now called Slashdot.
For me and some other people here, Usenet has never been much more than a repository for binary files, and yes, that's since before 1993.
It's ok for you to turn your back on it, though: Usenet belongs below the radar.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
there is a way though it takes some preparation. On the other hand it may earn you some extra geek points.
1. get yourself a IPv6 tunnel and get it configured ...
2. after you saw the logo jump at ipv6.google.com, check IPv6 Newsservers
3.
4. free usenet!!! (incl. alt.*)
where the ... probably involves testing which of the servers actually work, not all of them did when I tried it, and adding one or more of them in pan. Not an ultra fast download but still an excellent reason to start with ipv6.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
How depressing. I discovered Slashdot through Usenet, specifically the 'scary devil monastery'.
My life is way cooler than it was, but it's still poorer without the magic, infinite simplicity of Usenet, that microcosm of what the Web is now.
Back then I just had one little identity and way too much free time. Now I earn my living through airwindows.com (a domain I've owned since like 1996) and am even, right this second, frantically avoiding a self-imposed deadline for a webcomic I started at tallyroad.com (I may possibly be the oldest slashdot user operating a webcomic). I picked the registrar (Gandi) through searching Slashdot discussions. I'm doing all this over broadband on a computer with eight gigs of RAM.
But I will never forget what it was like to be posting to Usenet on a 33 mhz Mac Performa 575, pumped because I had a Global Village 56K modem, marvelling as it took hours to download the full group list of that moment.
Yeah- I was there when that was happening :) not right at the beginning, but I was there. If you don't believe my senile ramblings- check my beloved Slashdot ID#. hehehe.
by commercialising the 'Net. Trial sometime in 2020.
Wait... So they're preventing AOL'ers and their big ISP ilk from accessing USENET? Is this a return to the golden age?
This is awesome for usenet.
It's not that Usenet is becoming less popular... it's just that its appeal is becoming more selective.
The Author of this article is a dickhead, it's no diffrent than the idiots who cry "Email is dead".
There are too many self obsessed assholes these days who belive that if they stop using something so must everyone else.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If you read the article you'd realize the writer was speaking "metaphorically"
you must be new here..
"I'm not dead!"
"'Ere. He says he's not dead."
"Yes he is."
"I'm not!"
"He isn't."
"He will be soon. He's very ill."
"I'm getting better!"
"You're not. You'll be stone dead in a few minutes."
Have gnu, will travel.
I wish web forums could be read with a news reader. Forums like Slashdot and all those phpBB-forums out there. You would just add http://slashdot.org/ to your news client and then read Slashdot in the news client instead of a web browser. News clients are a simply better at managing threads and notifying you of new messages compared to web browsers.
Why is it so surprising to people when I tell them that methamphetamine is *not* illegal, it is available by prescription from a doctor, and it is even prescribed to children sometimes? Just because something can be *used* illegally does not make it illegal (hint: guns).
Palm trees and 8
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D230383,00.asp
But that's still too paid-by-the-word (or ad) author-centric-blabby.
Looking around, I can't find any better analysis. Everyone else is doing exactly the same: pretending to reminisce.
Well, I had good times there, but fuck it. Times change. And you can download AdBlock for your Firefox.
If only there was a way to go straight to the print version.
So you're saying that you enjoy fucking up thread continuity because you're too damn stupid to use a REAL news browser...and no, Outhouse Express is *NOT* a news browser, it's a mail browser with a sloppily shit on extension. At least you were intelligent enough to get yer stupid Webbie ass the fuck off Usenet, cause really, filth liak you just doesn't belong on teh grid.
well, if you're a cheap bastard and don't need binaries, there's groups.google.com
I like my beverages with warning labels!
But know this: The more people insist Usenet isn't dead, the stronger my will to never ever begin using it in the first place.
Say hello to my little sig.
http://pastebin.ca/1089011
> Is there a way to make Usenet P2P?
Usenet *is*, or at least was, p2p.
Not that long ago, usenet was transmitted from node to node over phone lines and uucp. Many people had their own computers running usenet sites at home. No ISP required. No paid usenet service required.
BTW, Usenet started in 1979, not 1980.
Articles arrived in compressed batches and were unpacked and spooled on your local disk. This made the user interface very fast. None of this slowly downloading an article at a time on demand. Someone consistently annoys you? Just put them in your killfile.
The the web came along, and suddenly everyone needed an IP connection to use it. For some reason people decided to stop using usenet, and today it is difficult-to-impossible to find a usenet feed. Some people decided that the volume had grown too large, and if they couldn't carry everything they wouldn't carry anything. This is silly. The expression "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind. If the binary groups are too large and not useful, don't carry them. Real Unix wizards compile from source anyway.
Web forums are extremely slow and inconvenient compared to a good newsreader, and have nothing resembling the community that usenet had. We should bring back usenet, (the distributed, for-free version, not the centralized for-profit version) fix the problems (like spammers), update things where appropriate. If you need more reasons, I could mention the parties. Where you could meet strange and delightful creatures known as "women".
"read the article"??!?!
You must be new here.....
You forgot to mention all the: "iPhone Killer!!11".. "gPhone Killer!@#!".. "eee PC Killer?!?!@".. headlines that were all over the place before any of those products were even out (and still arn't out in the case of android).
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-activists/1991/12/8/420
For the longest time Usenet was top dog. For any given topic, the largest and most informed chatter was on Usenet. And of course, all the other topics were right next door. Life was grand.
That was technically savvy people used the Internet. The Web was either just another protocol or hadn't been invented yet.
Trouble came when a generation of Internet users came to view Internet == WWW. Usenet wasn't the web. It didn't work like the Web. They didn't understand Usenet so they didn't use it. Sure, there were Web interfaces to Usenet but they always seem to combine the worst features of Usenet and Web forums. Most everyone learns to hate them in time.
At first, the Usenet die hards resisted. After all, web forums sucked and the most knowledgeable people were still on Usenet. But after a while, the Web forums became bigger than Usenet. They still sucked but if you wanted an answer that's where you needed to go.
These days, Usenet isn't top dog in much of anything. I still run a private news server but I find I read it less and less. My favorite topics, old and new, have mostly moved to web forums.
'Nuff said, for those who know.
Wait, you can use Usenet interactively without an internet connection, using SOUP? So it generates fake messages?
Just thinking about USENET really takes me back. Back to the distant world of circa 1991 or so, when I was a geeky junior high school kid into the local BBS scene, and, this thing called "The Internet".
Ah yes, The Net, back before the web.
It was defined by the local UMass VAX/VMS system that had dialup access some friends of mine had stumbled across, which could get you into telnet, ftp, IRC, USENET... MUDs, MUCKs, MUSEs, and all sorts of other combinations of cool interactive textual programmable hangouts starting with the letters MU.
Man, thinking about USENET... I used to hold auctions, and bid on auctions, through rec.arts.anime.marketplace. This was before you could go to video stores and find walls and walls of anime. And of course before ebay, so "auctions" on the Internet were impromptu things done through email, with updates posted to the mailing lists.
Then there were the internet-connected BBS systems you could telnet into, and set up a real internet-based email address in, and then you could sign on to all sorts of neat mailing lists run by Majordomo and the like, such as NE-RAVES, Future Culture... I remember when a guy on Future Culture killed himself, it sent a ripple through the online community. Because back then, it really felt like you knew all these people on The Net. It was such an obscure thing. Barely any of my peers even knew what it was, and my parents barely had any idea.
Now my Mom met here boyfriend on E Harmony, and EVERYONE is on the Web, and everyone has an email address...
Man, the "old days", it really seems so quaint in retrospect, doesn't it? Back when if I had been a little more forward thinking, I could have registered every domain name in existence. Before URLS were on every commercial on TV (man, I remember the first time I saw a URL on TV, that TOTALLY blew my mind!)
And as dorky as it sounds, it seems like a very, very profound thing, a blessing even, to be alive in the generation that got to see the shift from essentially no internet (in the mainstream), to what we have today. Which is obviously still VERY much the baby stage of something much, much greater and profound.
Some day, people will wonder what it was like to be alive during the birth of whatever the Internet becomes, much as we muse today about what it must of been like when humans first realized they could convey meanings with symbols and pictures...
Wait, isn't the reverse true? With the usenet disappearing from easy and cheap ISP access, don't we lessen the number of people who do nothing but spam? Sure one can use Google Groups and set up a few spam posts, but that's not as convenient as having a Verizon NNTP server for free and automate your evil doing. And people who love the usenet and want alt.* can still use Google Groups or other free sources to catch up on their favorite groups, right? Am I way off base?
"I dunno, what's a metafor you?"
That's easy: it's like... well, nevermind.
And really, who can doubt this?
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Predictions are dead!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Indeed, the decentralized USENET was arguably the first digital P2P broadcast medium. You cast your message at the servers and it bounced hither and yon.
I clicked on it cause it sounded like a good deal, but it looks more like...
Daily-limited newsgroup accounts per month
500MB/day $2.95 USD
1 GB/day $5.95 USD
2 GB/day (recommended level) $11.95 USD
4 GB/day $23.95 USD
A metaphor is as confusing as a simile.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I love the hidden simile some girls wear.
I drank what? -- Socrates
"Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership."
Apparently, he's never heard of 4chan.
Something to tell to grandsons.
So you're saying that you enjoy fucking up thread continuity because you're too damn stupid to use a REAL news browser...and no, Outhouse Express is *NOT* a news browser, it's a mail browser with a sloppily shit on extension. At least you were intelligent enough to get yer stupid Webbie ass the fuck off Usenet, cause really, filth liak you just doesn't belong on teh grid.
sniff....sniff....wipe... I always get so choked up at these kinds of things. It's a sad day indeed.
Judging from the floods of binaries prefixed with "FTD (number)", and/or with a URL in the Subject: line, it looks like most of the Netherlands has migrated to a message-board/web-based front end to USENET called Fill Threads Database, and the rest of Europe has similar equivalents.
FTD's also known as "Fuck The Dutch", because it appears that none of the FTD users have any idea that they're actually "posting to USENET". I don't think I've ever seen any of them actually reply to a USENET post. (Probably cuts both ways -- I doubt that their web forum has any capacity for them to see a USENET poster replying to their post with a "Dude, thanks for posting XYZ's latest album" or "Dude, your post of XYZ's album has a big scratch in track 12.")
www.usenet-access.com. They are 6 bucks a month and you get 2 GB per day. An unholy shitload of groups with the retention from hell. I've been able to snag stuff going back almost 2 years. I know they are a reseller for someone, I just don't know who. I've been using them for almost 6 years and never had issues with them at all. Possible issues are, well 2 Gb per day but hell that an average of 60 GB per month. And you can only have 3 simultaneous connections but hell they are only 6 bucks a month.
I started paying $15/mo to NewsHosting after TimeWarner dropped news service. I get 8 connections, 80 day retention, and unlimited downloads. The unlimited downloads did it for me since 60GB is useless to me. For July I downloaded over 100 GB. It's at least $7 cheaper than the best unlimited package from GigaNews. I don't need more than a month or so of retention and 8 connections is plenty. I use probably 4 at most. If you don't download binaries then, yeah, 2GB/day is plenty.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Can't believe people take PC Magazine seriously any more. I mean really, when you have to resort to calling Usenet dead to sell papers...
This guy probably thinks usenet's dead because Google archiving of it has gone from bad to worse. Either that or it's dead because his ISP stopped maintaining a news server. But usenet is not dead, in fact it's working just fine as the tens of thousands of groups that just came up in tin from on my local ISP (via supernews) prove.
But then usenet never was about being popular, or archiving, or graphics, or forums, and it doesn't lend itself to making money.
The many follow-on attempts to replicate usenet fall short of what still works great and is still the easiest way to get _content_ without the fluff or marketing.
No, usenet is not dead, not by a long shot, though there will always be those who will say it is to make a buck. There will probably also continue to be those who want us to think usenet is dead in order to sell their own profitable version of usenet, but follow the money and you'll find only wanna-be television content, as in most profit driven media, and lots of ads. Bottom line: Usenet will not advertise in PC magazine, and usenet will not die.
Why are you?
What have you done that we should think is worthwhile?
Why should anyone pay attention to you?
You do realize you just linked to it from Slashdot?
still eagerly and naively waiting for Eternal September to end...
Perhaps Green Day were onto something.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I heard Kim tell a caller that Newsgroups were full of viruses and he should avoid them at all cost! Guess the alt.hardware and alt.support and forums are evil groups?? Problem is, nobody wants to educate new users of how to get around in Newsgroups because of the porn and piracy except beyond this, there are some helpful groups too. As more companys develop forums though, and less education to new users is given on Usenet, it probably will just float away in a giant spam turd flush? We'll be the ones still using it like our parents still have Vinyl records!
Yeah, I was going to ask how much bandwidth is USENET daily? Because everyone seems to have quite a bit of extra disk space, why not do your own USENET server? If EVERYONE did (like everyone used to), then it would be cool again. Other than USENET, there's no good forum syndication. Sure you have RSS and stuff, but it doesn't lend itself to multi-hop groups. Maybe a modern version of NNTP could be built on HTTP/XML? I know there are web-based newsreaders and stuff, but it seems like the problem is actually getting a feed, for free.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
anyone remember the flood of meows, then later the completely unintelligible machine-generated spam ("sporgeries") that hit a.r.s. and other groups circa 1998?
At one point I saw 100 genuine posts and 5000 sporgeries... in a day.
Wait... So they're preventing AOL'ers and their big ISP ilk from accessing USENET? Is this a return to the golden age?
BR>Only if it also means losing the spammers...
Not 1993 yet, though, not by a long time.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
www.Usenet-News.net offers non-expiring block prices. The biggest is $66 for 300GB. If all you want is text, that's probably enough for the rest of your life.
Is this another idiot journalist who thinks that because he lives in America, then the Internet ends at the 6-mile limit. Or is it a 200-mile EEZ because you've got weak neighbours?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Klibido, if all you want to do is leech binaries (i do), then klibido is quite simply the single best piece of software i have ever found for it.
FallenSword, a free MMO you can play at work!
I haven't needed to use an NNTP client in years for binaries, just use Easynews web-based global search interface instead. Regex search across all groups, option to output search results as thumbnails, automatically repairs files server-side using the PARs, even unrars the contents of multi-part archives so you can just download the unarchived files directly over HTTPS. It fucking rocks.
Last I heard it was around 2 TB a day.
So to keep a month, it would "only" need 60 TB space.
So what now? As somebody who loves reading about the 'good ol' days' of Usenet, phreaking and when the Internet was free and young, where can one go to find the same level of community?
I've tried visiting Usenet groups, but as stated their knee-deep in spam. Telnet BBS boards are virtually empty and to be frank, confusing and unnecessarily limited for today. Web forums don't begin to have the same community or in-depth discussion.
I guess I'm asking - what is (if there is one) the modern equivalent of Usenet?
That's because we don't like moderately phrased, reasoned opinions with facts, or predictions that come with caveats and margins for error. Blogs with that kind of boring realism are only read by accountants and statisticians – two groups that, ironically enough, don't make up a large proportion of news turnover.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
although they warn against it by making mention of the spam you always get when you read/send messages on Usenet. Doesn't bother me any.
I've used GG for years, Deja News for years before THAT, and a usenet client ("Free Agent" for any of you old-timers who still remember that 16-bit monstrosity). I find GG to be a great front-end for usenet. It's not quite as good as Deja News was, granted. But it still beats the *shit* out of any stand-alone newsreader, particularly when it comes to older threads or when you want to see someone's posting history. About the only thing the stand-alone newsreader is still good for are binaries, and those are going the way of the dodo bird (thanks to our government nannies).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sure, but why? That would break 20--30 years' worth of high-quality Usenet software for (AFAICS) no good reason.
What obviously needs work is the message format itself; character sets and so on. A new RFC has been in the works at USEFOR for years ... dunno if it's done yet, or if anyone will care.
But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites.
Translation: The old gang has moved on from usenet, so rather than realize that this happens eventually to any social group, i've decided to declare the entire medium dead.
This guy sounds like he's about 15, feels like he's the center of the universe, and thinks he has all the answers to all the world's problems "if only the adults would listen".
Response to article. Stop talking out your arse and grow the fuck up.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Last I heard, that was almost exclusively warez and p0rn. Don't know what the bitrate is for the rest of it, but it must be a tiny fraction of 2TB.
Oh my GAWD, how stupid are these people?
Kids, UseNET predates and exists independently of the handful of megacorp ISPs who just caved in to sociopolitical pressure. For those of use who get their NNTP access from another source, absolutely nothing has changed. I could go download any media I wish, this second, from any newsgroup I wish, including anything posted in the alt hierarchy in about the last 3 months.
These companies haven't stopped anything, they just want to look good while they continue to fleece you. I'm so astonished that anyone considers this event notable, I can't even laugh, although it is fucking hilarious.
Yep, UseNET's dead, nothing to see, better go find another playground :) *wink wink*
350-500MB/day for non-binaries.
Definitely doable over residential connections, IMO.
Funny, I just logged on last night.
I really wish people would pay more attention to posting things in the appropriate groups. I hate having to wade through all that professional incest porn in the amateur porn newsgroups.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
While binary files certainly changed Usenet radically compared to the netnews I started using in 1981ish, long hair, dope smoking, and Dutch-speaking weren't anything newly introduced by Napster users :-)
And cross-posting was always fine, as long as you posted to appropriate groups and weren't trolling. (Well, and as long as you didn't forge headers to let you cross-post something to net.announce and non-moderated newsgroups, which had seemed like a good idea at the time.) The best-known act of spamming on Usenet, Cantor&Siegel's green card spam, deliberately *didn't* cross-post - it posted separate identical-body articles in ~6000 individual newsgroups, so you couldn't just delete the thing once when you first saw it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most of my Usenet posting was done under various !-path addresses, from machines whose names probably no longer are in use, though some of my mid-90s stuff was on @-format addresses that also don't reach me.
For quite a while, one of my big spam sources was web archives of mailing lists I was on, though by now that's drops in the ocean.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is newsfeed volume still doubling every however-often?
There was a while in the early-mid 80s I used to read all of netnews, and a bit later I used to read it by printing it out on 4-up double-sided laser printer (except for net.singles, which was too large), plus I kept a couple of days of limited newsfeed on a spare server with a 32-MB disk.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To those who marked this "troll" -- you obviously don't remember the days of QWK packets. That's how a SOUP reader works -- you download things as part of a batch, and then read it interactively without any need for a network connection.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The normal process is as follows:
(1) Use nntp via cron at night to harvest messages from the newsgroups you want to participate in as a batch from USENET. I use an OS2 tool called VSoup for this, though others like Souper exist. slrnpull uses a similar type of approach for offline reading via slrn, BTW.
(2) Convert the results from #1 into a SOUP packet for later use by a SOUP packet reader. This is analogous to an old BBS-Style QWK door creating a QWK packet for you.
(3) When you want to read USENET, start the SOUP packet reader (in my case Yarn, though there are several other readers which read that format including MultiMail for Linux). No nntp required.
(4) At some point, when you want to send replies back, you send them back in a batch using nntp.
I suspect you'd be quite surprised how efficient it is to grab the few thousand messages in the background and then read through the threads with no need for any network connection. There are no pauses at all. It's so much faster than the Google Groups interface that it isn't even a contest...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Yes, running a local news server would accomplish something similar. In my case, though, both mailing lists and nntp newsgroups are harvested and imported into the same database (e-mails can be filtered into "pseudo-newsgroups with threading), and each can be scored against to remove trolls. This isn't rocket science -- Yarn has been around for a long, long time...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
He asked about "usenet" not specifically text, and the subject line was "giganews" which offers the whole thing, not just text. If one was going to stick to exclusively text newsgroups, you could probably keep the banwidth down to a few hundred megs a day, or a couple gigs at most per day I'd guess. However, there's still a lot of spam pron even in the text newsgroups, so you might have to do jpg filters, which might filter out some legit jpgs.
My understanding of NNTP is that it is push, not selective pull.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
You still require an active internet connection to read messages, all you are saying is you can precache the messages. You can do exactly the same thing with and webpage. It is essentially the same task to crawl a Google group and precache it all.