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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."
I use it all the time!
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
Certainly misleading. Between the headline and the summary, I assumed this was a story about some official cancellation of Usenet. Instead, it's someone pining for the good ol' days (of free pron, if I understood right after skimming TFA).
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.
I'd say dumbed down interfaces. A good newsreader is much friendlier than a webforum. The problem is that you have to install it first.
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Actually Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a easy to use web front end to Usenet.
That is why Google Groups is infinitely better than Yahoo groups and the others you mention.
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.
I do hope not.
For one thing, Google Groups is currently acting as the equivalent of an open relay to all of Usenet, resulting in a vast increase in the amount of junk messages. They should be treated by other Usenet servers in the same way that we treat any other open relay: ignore anything coming from it until it gets its house in order. I fail to understand why Google being Google exempts them from this treatment. :-(
For another thing, Google Groups sucks as a Usenet interface, and numerous clients do a much better job of it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
To be fair, google groups does contain groups that are not part of Usenet. And Usenet contains groups that are not in google groups.
So while related, they're not the same.
Wasn't Google Groups the old Deja usenet frontend originally?
Well, that started off as "Deja News", during which time it was quite good, although IIRC it still had annoying banner ads. By the time it was renamed to "Deja.com" though, it had begun to suck, with fruit-machine-like ads down both sides of the page and branching out into other stuff.
The news archives side got sold to Google later on, which was actually a major improvement over deja.com's annoying Las Vegas style pages...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
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