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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.
Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.
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.
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.
"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).
You are part of the problem
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
"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
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.
I don't disagree. But there's a place in the world for nostalgia. In my case, it's nostalgia for a centralized/decentralized discussion system that nobody owned and nobody controlled, but that everybody went to and behaved relatively well in. I was just writing an email to someone about how basically, this column is about being a little wistful that the small town I grew up in is now a big city. The big city has many advantages but it's still valid to miss some of that small town charm. The hammer - I mean the town - is the Internet, by the way.
I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
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.
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
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.
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.
ME TOO!
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
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...
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!
"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?
The Attorney General of NY started pushing on ISP's like Time Warner and AT&T to filter/moderate alt.* groups and/or hand over the names of the posters. Time Warner dropped alt.* altogether and the pressure is building for the rest to do the same.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
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 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.
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)
"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.
This is just resetting USENET so that the first two rules are back in place. Move along please.
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.
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.
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.
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
I dunno, what's a metafor you?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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
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.
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
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
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]
They still have pretty good fetish porn. Chicks in rubber and PVC.
And here I thought techno chicken was weird!
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.
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.
Predictions are dead!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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