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Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has discontinued its provided usenet service, once provided to all its high speed customers. First with the cap put on its customers several years ago on amount of traffic provided as part of the customer high-speed package, as of September 16, the service is no longer provided.
Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream."
Does anybody still actually use usenet for anything other than the binary groups? I haven't touched it in a decade, mainly because the spam got so bad.
I gather this is about some kind of service which was provided, huh?
A provider gets paid for connectivity and extra services. As Comcast now discontinues one of their services, I guess the monthly bill gets a bit trimmed as well!
Or are they really the moneygrabbing bastards they are made out to be?
While it's sad to see universal USENET access go, it's been out of the mainstream for about a decade.
september is finaly over...
Bastion may be too strong a word for a service that most current internet users never used and don't understand. At the same time usenet plays a significant role in the history and development of the internet and it's sad when familiar, original stuff is deprecated or deleted.
Big deal. I'd say that 99% of Usenet users use it for the binary groups and they pay to get those through a provider that carries them. The non-binary groups have mostly been worthless for a long time now and that's all Comcast and similar providers carried. Those who can't live without comp.lang.perl or whatever can pay to get it, if they wish, through one of many providers so it's not like it's impossible to get Usenet now.
Wtf is that supposed to mean? I have zilch clue on how to parse that.. it seems to have zero correlation with the preceding and following sentences in the summary. I mean seriously, you don't really need a degree in Literature to write 3 decent, interconnected sentences..
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Just block any and all binaries (including HTML, thank you). That will bring down the amount of traffic by so much that it is not even relevant anymore. Also the amount of hardware that is needed is so much less.
The only thing you need to do is add a spam filter and you can have it running on a single machine. Retention of 30 days should be enough.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It is a sad day when ISPs toss out usenet. Usenet was and still is to a lesser degree what many of of got hooked on. A free, generally not moderated and everyone had access to it. Now, we digress into 1000's of web sites, /. included to exchange ideas. While /. is large enough with a wide audience and is good, most web based boards are horrid, operated by a ego driven owner and never even get my book marks.
My ISP, Shaw just outsourced usenet to someone who can't keep it running. I guess we too are gut off. And no, the google interface does not cut it.
I have found memories of Usenet from the days before http. Back then there were around 2000 groups, and most of the participants were from academia. It (and IRC) was the first real place I can remember interacting with a global community, and it was quite enjoyable. Of course the self-control and self-regulation that kept the original Usenet usable went out the window as the public at large came online. The original intent of Usenet has been replaced by the online forum. So instead of a central repository of information, all properly categorized and viewable within a consistent client application, we now have the web-based forum. The information is spread far and wide across the internet. The interfaces vary vastly depending on the software and its configuration and theme. The information is spread out across redundant and competing sites. Information can suddenly be lost as a site goes down. Information can be deleted at a whim depending on who is running the site.
I certainly miss what Usenet once was.
Better known as 318230.
I mean come on , who wants to waste time searching out some website to post a question or find a discussion when you just need access to a news server and the lot is available immediately.
Anyone who doesn't use it just because they think its old fashioned and uncool because it doesn't have the "ooh shiny" factor is a blinkered idiot.
I just got an AOL account. I was told to come here. I have to start my computer and it's asking for the ANY key. My computer didn't com with one. What do I do?
I still use usenet to ask programming questions. . I have loved to follow discussions on comp.lang.c and comp.std.c. I have learned a lot just looking at the archives. I had recently come across comp.lang.python and am excited about
I really think usenet still has a place on the web, a very useful place.
They've just removed a service from their lineup. A service I used to use all the time when I was on Comcast is now gone.
It boggles my mind. I was with Comcast back in the @Home days. Back then we had unlimited Usenet, and up to 4 email addresses. Service was 4 Mbits/768Kbits.
So, then @Home folds, and Comcast takes over the service directly and we go to:
1 email address
No Usenet
1.5 Mbits/128Kbps
for the same price.
Now, admittedly, it's gotten better since then. They upped the speed, increased the email addresses and gave you 2 GB on Giganews.
But now they're going down the path of taking service away. THere's no more Usenet, there's a 250 GB Bandwidth cap (which is plenty of bandwidth, I know...).
For what they offer for Internet, you should be paying $19.99, and not $55.00.
Things like this are what makes FIOS so attractive to geeks.
Andy
"The non-binary groups have mostly been worthless for a long time now"
Oh really? Which ones? I regularly post on 3 non binary groups and read 2 others and theres plenty of traffic. Perhaps you should try usenet one day instead of blowing smoke out your backside.
"Those who can't live without comp.lang.perl or whatever can pay to get it,"
Oh how magnanimus of you. Perhaps you'd like to pay extra to a 3rd party for using the web after you've already paid your ISP for net access too since you're clearly some kid who thinks the web=the internet
...removing the full text of the declaration of independence or the constitution or the bill of rights from history textbooks? It's what the internet was founded on, even if it's not used/remembered well. it's still dirt cheap to maintain, too.
this is just comcast's continuation of cutting corners wherever they can and making the users pay for it.
RTFA. They're disconnecting it on October 25th.
John
This is a significant alteration to the service provided and (certainly) comes with no reduction in cost. Somebody who wants out of their Comcast contract and has the requisite tenacity should be able to get out from under them and switch to somebody else.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
soon people will tell me I can't use Gopher anymore.
Since the Linux Kernel developers use USENET as the core of their development communications channel, I think declaring USENET obsolete is a bit premature.
...
Anyway, this might be the last thing I post, as I have just discovered that bad things can get transferred via HTTP, and so I have to block port 80
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This is probably the very reason they're shutting it down. I doubt there's any good argument for doing so from a cost-saving perspective.
This is one more way citizens...err...terrorists can freely communicate.
The real problem is that Usenet is the medium which has the greatest claim to rights under the First Ammendment.
All of the weblogs like Slashdot and such may be prettier, easier to use, and *might* have a higher signal-to-noise (Usenet is even worse than Slashdot, though it doesn't seem possible.) ratio, but they all have an owning party who accepts responsibility for their contents. Usenet is unowned, merely hosted, and therefore comes closest to free speech, in the political sense of the word.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No. That's Comcastic!
"The bad machine doesn't know he's a bad machine."
Comast has restricted groups for some time, and we all knew that this total shutoff of Usenet for Comcast was coming sooner or later.
So what? Comcast's stripped down Usenet was practically useless anyway.
Use a service like Easynews.com for Usenet instead. I've been with them for years and they're great.
>But every web forum sucks as a web forum,
>this is a hard and fast rule.
Really?
Do you maintain that this would apply to a forum on Microsoft vacuum cleaners? I highly doubt it . . .
hawkk
The article summary says...
The page linked in the article says...
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
Well, the guy who says "Usenet is still relevant" got modded down to "troll", as a way of saying "I don't agree" I think. If another disagreeing guy who really doesn't understand what "Troll" means mods him down -1 one more time, he his "0", the AC level which means his opinion will be effectively censored as most people browses at "1+".
The abuse on his post alone proves why Usenet must live on.
The non binary groups doesn't have that much traffic as they are only serving to Usenet's original purpose: Free speech in text without control.