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Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June
Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it. From the note that subscribers received: "Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Declining newsgroup usage in recent years has highlighted the need to focus our resources on other priorities, such as increasing our Internet speeds and providing new services, including Cox Media Store and Share. We understand that our newsgroup subscribers may want to continue accessing Usenet. Therefore, we have worked with leading newsgroup service provider Giganews to offer special pricing for Cox subscribers."
Gripes Existential Wombat: "$15++ a month for something Cox provided as a part of the service? Of course they will be reducing everyone's monthly tariff by the value of the service they no longer provide. Yeah, right."
Oh, great. There goes my sex life.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Yes, Usenet is unreliable, slow, expensive, and full of broken files. I can't imagine anyone would use it when torrents are available for fast, anonymous encrypted transfer of data. Who wants to pay an extra $50 a month for Usenet?
The thing I hate most about Usenet is the hard work involved. It's not like a torrent where you can just download a file. Instead you go through folder by folder, picking out parts of a file (sometimes up to 1000 parts!) and then stitching them together, unzipping and FINALLY playing the file.
Please mod me up. It is important that all torrent users know that they should keep using torrents.
Signed, Happy Usenet Customer
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."