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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."
it was about alt.binaries.mp3s
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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
So do I! It is still a great place to exchanges ideas and stuff. Just because mainstream internet providers are dropping it doesn't mean it is dying. Usenet is immortal, like Dracula, it will never die.
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!
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.
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.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
Frankly, that's the only one I care about. Sure, there is TONS of porn, but there are also respectable (non porn) files out there as well. When my wife missed an episode of "Dancing With the Stars" a while back, where did I find a copy? Newsgroups. When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups. When I wanted some ideas for how to set up my garden, where did I turn to? You guessed it, Newsgroups!
There are some things that no Web site can offer that you can only find on Usenet. That stupid Dancing with the Stars thing is an example. It was not available on any website because it is protected (even though there was absolutely no other way of retrieving it). With ISP's starting to block P2P, we should always be able to fall back on good ol' usenet.
Which brings me to the point you mentioned about spammers. Spammers are relatively easy to avoid on Usenet. The bigger problem is spyware, viruses and trojans. However, the beauty of Usenet is that someone can reply to a post with bad intent and say something like, "Do not download! VIRUS!!!" You can't do that on a non reputable or hijacked website. All you can do is hope that the file you downloaded really is the XP drivers for a new "Vista Only" system and not a virus that will zap your HDD.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
That's actually quite doable. Making forum software that is feature-competitive with newsreaders is totally viable. That's not what concerns me.
A bigger problem (which web mail suffers from, as well) is that web forums are a way for a server operator to make decisions about the features you get (as well as how/if it is integrated with other content, whether for good (I won't go into that, here) or ill (ads)), rather than leaving those decisions to the client.
I really see it as technological step backwards.
As an exercise in absurdity, imagine if we applied the same trend to the web itself. In addition to "web mail" and "web forums", imagine "web web", where your browser window contains a widget consisting of code loaded from someone else's server, and that widget has features similar to a web browser. Oh wait, we have that: Flash and Silverlight.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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...
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!
The demise of Usenet was a long time ago, and coincided with the introduction of the web-based forum.
And this is the single most damaging thing to the availability of information to happen to the Internet, at least until the Wiki came along (which hasn't necessarily solved the problem in question). When there was Usenet, there was one (okay, maybe two) places to find an answer to a question on a given topic of expertise. Now, with the move to isolated independent web-based forums, of which there may be at least a dozen or more possible places to find information (not to mention a multitude of competing general question sites like Yahoo Answers et al), the odds of finding an answer on the Internet to a question have gone down, because the probability that the person with the answer to your question visits or has visited the web fora you visit has gone down.
In short: Used to be everyone would use one or two Usenet groups both to ask and answer questions, now everyone uses any given number of the much larger set of web fora on the same topic. It actually has become less likely to find a good answer to a question these days.
(And at least on Usenet even if no one could answer your question, you'd be certain to get lots of entertaining snark from regulars.)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Yet here we are, on a web forum, and not on USENET.
But this isn't a universal forum. USENET encompassed any topic and was the most widely read set of forums. If you wanted an answer to a complicated technical question, it was the best place to go. If you wanted to discuss obscure music theory, it was the place to go. If you just wanted to sell your old sofa to local people, it was the place to go. It was frequented by geeks and non-geeks.
Web forums don't do that. They're all specialized and there are too many of them. Slashdot only covers topical news of interest to geeks. Web forums have always been complex to use, almost always requiring registration to write, sometimes even requiring registration to read. You'll find tens of forums all devoted to the same topic. One newsreader would keep track of all your news groups you were interested in, and you could add and remove them as you wish; what keeps tracks of the hundreds of forums I may be interested in and provides the same interface to them?
The problem with USENET dying is that there is no replacement for it! This isn't the case of horse and buggy being usurped by the automobile. It's more like playgrounds being replaced by televisions.
I think USENET started going downhill when the spammers and advertisement took over. There's still activity on USENET, it's just been declining steadily.
Personally, I never liked the Google/Dejanews twist to archive postings for eternity. In the old days (get off my lawn!) it was a place just for discussion, not to get your words down for posterity. Once I learned things were being archived and searchable, I definately felt I had to ask less stupid questions...
MTV is basically just HSN without an 800 number.
You can buy cheap 18-year-old sluts on HSN now?
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.