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."

Comments

Who cares?

[LostCluster]

The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files. The average "$100 for a limited time for a Triple Play of Internet, TV and Phone" user doesn't know it exists and wouldn't use it anyway. So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.

This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content. If you want to get one HBO show... this price will likely make it more cost effective for you to get HBO through your TV pipe, a reduction of traffic on the Internet that should make your community's connection work better.

Re:Who cares?

[Jorl17]

Cowboy Neal does, you insensitive clod!

Re:Who cares?

[Dan667]

better service? That is naivety or a blatant false statement.
The fact that they will not be charging less even though they are providing less service hits the nail on the head.

Re:Who cares?

[Enderandrew]

Bingo.

It doesn't cost Cox that much to provide the service. They're dropping it basically because no one needs it, except for piracy and such. This is more of a move to cover their asses in the wake of the ACTA treaty.

Re:Who cares?

[CRCulver]

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.

The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python, comp.text.tex and gnu.emacs.gnus are just a few that I read daily. While you are right that the average subscriber doesn't know about Usenet these days, the Slashdot crowd ought to be upset that ISPs are dropping Usenet servers.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet was *not* superseded by Google Groups. Google Groups is just a crapping web front-end to Usenet. There are still a lot of good groups in Usenet, certainly more than what you describe. A lot of language standards still perform discussions on Usenet. The only issue with Usenet is all the idiots (trolls, spammers, jerks, pendants) have caused many of the truly smart and helpful people to leave, but you can still find people whose knowledge and skills easily over match your typical person on web-based forums (such as this one).

Re:Who cares?

[Blakey Rat]

The fact that they will not be charging less even though they are providing less service hits the nail on the head.

For 99% of their customers, they're *already* not providing that service.

Re:Who cares?

[NecroPuppy]

I would state it as, "they're providing a service that 99% of their customers don't use, or even realize is there".

So, for those 99% of the customers, there isn't a visable loss. Cox thus views it as, "they weren't using it before; why should their payments go down. If they want to use it now, their payments will go up."

Capitalism in action.

Re:Who cares?

[coaxial]

The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?

So we should just use a crappy web interface when there are vastly superior stand alone applications, is that what you're saying?

Every time some protocol gets eliminated. Every time things move from the open to the closed, the proprietary, the world sucks just a bit more. Interaction quality goes down, and you end being able to do less and less.

Let me guess. Twitter is better than email right? After all, a 140 character statically allocated array is enough for everyone. Or are we supposed to all be sucking at the tit of Mark Zuckerman's stolen walled garden?

This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content.

Actually it's a price hike for everyone jackass. When cost stays the same, and service goes down, you're actually paying more for less. It's the oldest trick in the book. Haven't you noticed that your box of Wheaties is smaller, but costs the same?

Re:Who cares?

[Random Data]

"Superseded" normally implies improvements. While Google/Deja provide a long term archive and searching support, they're nothing like as useful as a dedicated client to a newsgroup server for actually taking part in discussions. It's similar to the reason people use mail clients rather than just Gmail: you have more control over how you interact with others.

Re:Who cares?

[TDyl]

Being a pendant, I'll probably swing for this and you'll hang for that 'n'.

Re:Who cares?

[0100010001010011]

And I'd wager most customer's don't even know their ISP provides e-mail. They use gmail, hotmail, etc.

Heck I own my own domain and I don't even use my ISP's e-mail (other than SMTP), but if they canceled e-mail service I'd sure as hell want a discount.

Re:Who cares?

[thittesd0375]

I believe it is more accurate to say that they are not raising the price on everyone to keep an outdated service active for a few.

Re:Who cares?

[rfuilrez]

Really, it's a better idea IMO to use a 3rd party email service. Either a paid service, or a free one such as gmail/hotmail/yahoo. This way if you move, change ISPs for whatever reason, no longer need the ISP etc, you don't lose your email address. I've had my gMail account since it was invite only beta like 5 years ago. In that time I've moved and cancelled / signed-up for ISPs probably 6-7 times.

Re:Who cares?

[ascari]

It's an outrage! What is the world coming to? Next they'll block gopher and archie and uucp!

Re:Who cares?

[betterunixthanunix]

Interestingly, uucp is still seeing some use in remote areas of certain countries, where the Internet infrastructure is not built up. The idea, as I understand it, is to use uucp to copy batches of email onto a mobile system (or just a flash drive), then physically move that system to the next computer, exchanging mail and whatnot, eventually exchanging email with the broader Internet. Slow, yes, but better than nothing at all.

I am sure gopher and archie are still used somewhere too.

Re:Who cares?

[diamondmagic]

Who ever said they would be charging less? That is naivety or a blatant false statement.

It's a matter of priority. An ISP (or any business for that matter) has limited resources and needs to decide how to allocate them to maximize satisfaction (that is, profit). Cox, my ISP, has decided that other needs are more pressing. For example, I noticed my speed just went up, and they did in fact increase my speed. I don't know if it's related but the point is things like the extra speed isn't free, and they decided there is a better use of the resources currently going to Usenet service, due to demand.

Re:Who cares?

[JustNiz]

Wrong wrong wrong.
Yours is a pitiful argument. Just because you or even the majority of users don't use some aspect of the internet is not a good excuse to make a blanket assumption that no-one uses or wants it.

Your points sound similarly misguided to the malicious blurring that the RIAA and MPAA are trying to make around P2P, in that all P2P is by definition illegal regardless of the fact there are many legitimate P2P sites and P2P is simply an efficient distribution protocol, not a DRM circumvention mechanism in itself.

I use USENET legally and Google Groups and other free sources just don't provide what I want. Firstly, they dont cover binary groups and secondly they aren't nearly as easy/convenient to use, so your argument that other things have superseded USENET is entirely wrong.

In real terms it probably costs Cox next to nothing to have a USENET server sat in a rack, so the real savings of cutting it off are going to be minimal, probably just the electricity for an old server box that they've already re-tasked from other upgrades.

I'm surprised you really expect to see any noticeable improvement in other service areas as a result of Cox no longer suporting USENET. I seriously doubt it. All that this will mean is (probably literally) a few tens of dollars of extra corporate profit that we the users will never see the benefit of.

Personally I hate the idea that ISPs are being allowed to redefine "internet service" to just mean port 80 traffic. Cox's own advertising confirms I paid for an internet connection not just a web connection. I don't see why I should now be obliged to pay extra to keep the same level of service that I've had for the last 5 years.

Re:Who cares?

[interval1066]

Capitalism in action.

Sure, but in this case, I dunno that Cox are being the complete ass clowns they usually are. I was a big time usenet user, long ago. Lately, I've forgotten myself that it evens exists. Yes, I'm sure that there are die-hards who will take issue with this. To them I say "GET A LIFE". There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests. Besides, usenet has become a huge pornography distribution network with a few anecdotal, non-porn topics anyway, who really gives a sh*t if isp's are getting a little tired of carrying it. There's better ways to distribute porn than usenet as well. Usenet was one of those great protocols that came with this new-fangled internet thingy. Now its a little passed its prime and ready for pasture. Let it go.

Re:Who cares?

[betterunixthanunix]

"The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?"

Compared to my Usenet client, Google Groups, Slashdot, and every other web based system are a collective joke...and I am sure there are better Usenet clients than what I use (KNode). Usenet also has the advantage of being distributed -- or did Slashdot suddenly start exchanging comments with other systems (can I peer with Slashdot?), which came in handy when a Usenet server I used to use was shut down; I just pointed my client to another server, and the same discussions were all immediately available.

Really, when it comes to text based discussions, Usenet has a lot of advantages. If all you care about is using the latest cool looking technology, I guess that does not matter to you, but some of us actually do like the discussions on Usenet. There are still a number of very nice discussions on technical topics, such as cryptography, math, and various programming languages. Usenet is not just for "illegal content," even if that is all you ever used it for.

As for better service...well, let's put it this way: when Time Warner stopped running its Usenet servers, there was no increase in the quality of service I received from them. The quality of service remained identical, as it has with other ISPs. Cox just wants to turn a higher profit by ending a service that a minority of customers were using, and to claim otherwise is either naivety or outright lying.

Re:Who cares?

[VGR]

"Capitalism in action" implies customers who are displeased with the change can take their money to a different, roughly equivalent service.

Re:Who cares?

[timeOday]

The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?

It's sad how proprietary services are displacing open standards on the Internet. The rise of Twitter over email is another example, and web chat over IRC is another.

It's sad because it shows complete freedom / anarchy doesn't work very well, not even in so-called "cyberspace." There goes another generation of utopian aspirations :(

Re:Who cares?

[JustNiz]

Seriously, what resources?
I hardly think that running a USENET server is a massive drain. Its probably some old box that they're already re-purposed from an earlier upgrade. Maybe $100/yr for electricity?
Even all the client->server connections are local to the Cox subnet so USENET doesn't even put a load on their internet backbone.

Re:Who cares?

[SailorSpork]

AT&T, Comcoast, Time Warner and Verizon have all discontinued their newsgroup services. What is a surprise is that there are (were) ISP's that still had them.

Re:Who cares?

[JustNiz]

That would be my choice if Cox didn't have a complete monopoly in the city I live in (Phoenix AZ).

Re:Who cares?

[nacturation]

Interestingly, uucp is still seeing some use in remote areas of certain countries, where the Internet infrastructure is not built up. The idea, as I understand it, is to use uucp to copy batches of email onto a mobile system (or just a flash drive), then physically move that system to the next computer, exchanging mail and whatnot, eventually exchanging email with the broader Internet. Slow, yes, but better than nothing at all.

Reminds me of the good old BBS days and dialing up long distance at midnight to exchange email between systems. <sniff>

Re:Who cares?

[mcmonkey]

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.

What you describe is not just most of Usenet, but most of the Internet itself. Would you be OK if Cox discontinued all Internet service, but continued to bill customers?

In fact, 1) Usenet is lot more than the dark alleys of the internet.

2) What does Google have to do with it? So what about Google Groups? What about options? There is Gmail, does that mean there should be no other email option?

3) What about all the things my newsreader does that Google Groups does not? Saving threads for reading off line, killfile, etc.

4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?

The truth is Usenet does some things better than your "zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites."

Re:Who cares?

[stonewallred]

Doesn't the same pipe carry the same data, as in the pirated HBO show versus the actual show being sent from HBO? And would not the pirated copy be smaller and have less impact than streaming it to the customer?

Re:Who cares?

[slick7]

So much for alt.slack and bob dobbs

Re:Who cares?

[pavon]

I use USENET legally and Google Groups and other free sources just don't provide what I want. Firstly, they dont cover binary groups and secondly they aren't nearly as easy/convenient to use.

Honest question here. I understand why people would prefer to use a real news reader as opposed to mailing lists or web forums, as they are much better tools for the job. But binary groups? That is like preferring to get binary files as shar email text rather than an attachment. It was a hacked in use and I never saw the appeal apart from piracy.

What features of USENET make it better for obtaining legitimate binaries compared to FTP or HTTP or Bittorrent?

Re:Who cares?

[Pharmboy]

If you want to get one HBO show... this price will likely make it more cost effective for you to get HBO through your TV pipe, a reduction of traffic on the Internet that should make your community's connection work better.

Wrong. The the people who were using Usenet now use a different service for Usenet, then the amount of traffic overhead will INCREASE, not decrease, as now they have to use the pipe on BOTH sides of their IPS's servers to do so, raising the amount of traffic on the backbone side exponentially, as each user requires a separate connection, which is impossible to cache if they are to different providers. Granted, they will only be fetching what is requested instead of every single Usenet msg, although it is unlikely that Cox was already serving binaries groups, which make up the bulk of Usenet traffic. The amount of traffic on the customer side of the ISP's network will increase slightly due to higher likelihood of bad packets/resends.

Likely, the users of Usenet on Cox's network were not downloading porn/binaries anyway, as almost all ISPs don't carry those groups. People looking for illicit files were already getting them somewhere else.

Re:Who cares?

[diamondmagic]

People like to throw around competition as a core concept of capitalism but that's just marketing, really. In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection. It would be redundant and a waste of natural resources that, again, would be put to better use providing new service to people, or more likely, serving an entirely different function in a different industry altogether.

Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."

Re:Who cares?

[Hognoxious]

They rank right near the top is customer sanctification.

Well that's a small blessing but it's not the holy picture.

Re:Who cares?

[ArcherB]

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.

Exactly! This is why I care! OK, I could do without the spamming and illegally shared copyrighted files.

Re:Who cares?

[xero314]

That would be my choice if Cox didn't have a complete monopoly in the city I live in (Phoenix AZ).

Interesting since I know plenty of people in Phoenix that have providers other then Cox for their internet access. But I guess you have never heard of DSL, or other alternatives to cable.

I think what you meant to say is that you would switch if there was an option you preferred over Cox. But the reality is, you have decided that losing Usenet isn't enough for you to want to switch to one of the other providers.

Fact is, there is no area of Business which Cox has no competitors, unless you narrow it down to a specific method of content delivery (a.k.a cable).

Re:Who cares?

[PopeRatzo]

Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."

Ah, to be young...

Re:Who cares?

[toastar]

Wait cox didn't offer real binary access for free up til this did they?

Re:Who cares?

[JustNiz]

Nothing other than availability.

Personally I'd prefer a (free) comprehensive and up-to-date ftp or web-based version of all the content on alt.binaries.emulators but there isn't one that I've found.

Bittorrent is just too damn slow and annoying, especially if no-one is seeding the file you really want.

Re:Who cares?

[Artifakt]

We have RIAA sources claiming that ALL torrenting involves illegal files, and clueless judges who seem to believe them, and you have to ask why USENET beats torrents for legitimate binaries? Uhm, maybe because the crazy and clueless that seem to be running all too much of our society might just point to the torrent software itself as part of their 'proof' you were pirating their content.
        Maybe some local cop has heard just enough about Bittorrent to 'think' he knows you are up to no good, or some person you work with 'thinks' you're stealing content just for mentioning torrents. As long as the industry shills continue to spin torrents as 100% for illegal purposes, why not use something they don't talk about, at least as much.

Re:Who cares?

[brentrad]

Doesn't really make any difference that Cox finally shut off their usenet. I used it 5+ years ago when I lived in Phoenix, but the completion was terrible and the retention was like 3-4 days. Giganews FTW: 600 days retention and completion is great, unlimited downloads and unlimited bandwidth for $25 a month.

Oh sorry, I forgot rule #1 - usenet? What's usenet? ;)

Re:Who cares?

[brentrad]

The big cost in running a usenet server is the hard drive storage space. Although Cox only had 3-4 days retention, so that expense probably wasn't too bad. But if usenet is a service you provide according to your TOS, you have to pay someone to keep it running, provide refunds if the service is offline, then you have to deal with the headache of copyright violation take-down notices, and the possible legal liability of having copyright violating files (and child porn) residing on servers you own. I'm actually surprised they didn't shut down their usenet service before now. The writing has been on the wall for ISP-provided usenet for 5-10 years now.

Re:Who cares?

[JustNiz]

DSL isn't as fast and doesn't come with TV so if I switched my internet to DSL my TV+internet monthly bill would be greater and I would have less bandwidth. For all I know, DSL doesn't come with USENET either.

Unfortunately Cox has a monopoly on cable in my hood.

Re:Who cares?

[QRDeNameland]

4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?

Because a Usenet server must synchronize a lot of data (over 5 TB per day at this time according to wikipedia), even if no one is downloading anything from it. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Usenet, but if an ISP truly has no one using their Usenet servers, then I can certainly see them having a rational cost benefit to discontinuing the service.

That said, with the linked graph showing the traffic on this "dark alley" increasing six-fold over the past six years, it would seem that tales of the death of Usenet are highly exaggerated.

Re:Who cares?

[S-100]

I care. There are still some very active text-only USENET newsgroups. For example, rec.games.pinball is the number one on-line discussion location for that subject, and averages many hundred non-spam, non-porn messages per day. Cox just couldn't be bothered supporting the trivial bandwidth needed for the text newsgroup hierarchy. And Google Groups is good for searching the archive, but its web interface is pretty pathetic compared to a real newsreader (e.g. Thunderbird). You also have to deal with GG's frequent brain farts, random lapses, email address munging, etc...

Fortunately, there are some decent free text-only USENET services, such as Eternal September (nee Motzarella).

Re:Who cares?

[Hognoxious]

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.

You exaggerate - it's not all good.

Re:Who cares?

[GreatBunzinni]

Honest question here. I understand why people would prefer to use a real news reader as opposed to mailing lists or web forums, as they are much better tools for the job.

Who says usenet and other media such as mailing lists and web forums are mutually exclusive? They aren't. They are nothing more than interfaces to access data. After all, there are services which offer access to the same content wether through mailing lists, web forums and also usenet server. For example, take a look at Trolltech's Qt lists. Every web forum and mailing list could as easily be accessible through a usenet interface. After all, in the end it's just that: an interface.

Re:Who cares?

[carp3_noct3m]

Seriously, just because the stereotype of usenet is "dark alley hackerspace" anyoen who has ever even semi-used it knows thats not true. A friend of mine uses usenet combined with RSS feeds to get all kinds of information (IT Stuff) that you just don't get anywhere else. I bet the GP has never even used usenet. and yes, we should be upset that ISP's drop a service without at least a gesture of reconciliation, like a coupon for $7 off giga or something. As a matter of fact, I have a strange feeling giga dealt with cox in some closed doors meetings and said," look, you drop costs by dropping usenet, and we get customers, win win, now go screw your users over" and cox, being your classic greedy corporation jumped.

Re:Who cares?

[Scooter's_dad]

You still didn't figure it out. It's "passed ITS prime." No apostrophe.

Re:Who cares?

[misexistentialist]

Mod parent up. Usenet is only used by handful of geezers trading obscure ascii porn. We should all forget about it. Everyone uses TPB nowadays.

Re:Who cares?

[spazdor]

DSL is just as fast as cable, at least the way that residential providers do it.

I mean, sure, technically speaking a DOCSIS HFC network has higher last-mile capacity than an equivalent DSLAM, but when have either cable or DSL speeds ever depended on anything other than the provider's oversubscription ratio?

And as for television... Every internet connection comes with TV now.

Re:Who cares?

[GreatBunzinni]

There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests.

Name one and I'll explain to you how it sucks and how in contrast usenet is far better and has been for decades.

Besides, usenet has become a huge pornography distribution network with a few anecdotal, non-porn topics anyway

That's very odd. I've been a faithful usenet user for around 5 years and I never saw porn on the newsgroups I subscribe. On the other hand, newsgroups such as comp.lang.c constantly get over 3 thousand posts a month, comp.lang.python also gets around 2500 post a month, comp.lang.c++ gets over 1500 posts a month and those are one of many newsgroups dedicated to specific details regarding a measly programming language. There are countless newsgroups dedicated to APIs, protocols, programming paradigms and any sort of hobby you can imagine and some of them do keep a pretty respectable post count. And yet, with zero porn on it. How is that possible?

who really gives a sh*t if isp's are getting a little tired of carrying it.

I would, if that was my ISP. Thankfully, my ISP has been providing usenet access since I've started using the net. I really hope they don't discontinue it.

There's better ways to distribute porn than usenet as well.

All you do is yap about porn. What a fixation you got there. That's all you do online? How did you got the time to take a pause from it to browse slashdot?

Usenet was one of those great protocols that came with this new-fangled internet thingy. Now its a little passed its prime and ready for pasture. Let it go.

How exactly does a protocol "passed it's prime"? And even if that made any sense at all, the Network News Transfer Protocol specifications were released in 1986 while the world wide web, along with the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) arrived in 1990. Does that mean that HTTP has already "passed it's prime"?

Please at least try to claim what you really wanted to claim: you don't use usenet (at least for something other than feeding your porn habits) and as you don't use it you believe it somehow sucks. Yet, that doesn't make it true, does it?

Re:Who cares?

[dryeo]

Canadian, not US but my ISP still has Usenet though they did drop all the binary groups a couple of years ago. Still it has been at least 15 minutes since I've posted to usenet (comp.os.* and mozilla.* mostly).
My last ISP just subcontracted with supernews for usenet instead of dropping it.

Re:Who cares?

[The Archon V2.0]

I was a big time usenet user, long ago. Lately, I've forgotten myself that it evens exists. Yes, I'm sure that there are die-hards who will take issue with this. To them I say "GET A LIFE". There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests.

So, your definition of "getting a life" is doing the exact same thing you're doing now... on a different part of the Internet.

Re:Who cares?

[flyneye]

This will probably also affect Coxs claims about speed as their Usenet servers were their fastest feature. Compared to their other features this is the one that made their service worth the money. Legal or illegal it was the fastest way to soak up content. Obscure, I doubt since those who originally used it, likely continued. Those old enough to remember testing their service are probably among its users. As time progressed and other internet content services like Youtube, Pandora and even P2P services popularized the next wave of internet users didn't bother to use Usenet, partly because setting up a proper client took some brains and effort. The same amount of people continued to use those servers, they are only being liquidated for the bandwidth. The ratio of people using it is the only change.
           

Re:Who cares?

[diamondmagic]

Just electricity? There is also labor, system administration, networking (you have to download the messages from other networks, of course), hardware, other capital costs (storage space), customer service, and legal costs, and probably other weird things that I can't even imagine. It is relatively cheap, yes, but not so cheap that it's a priority when only 1% of your customer base is using it.

Re:Who cares?

[Wansu]

  AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon have all discontinued their newsgroup services.

That pretty much put the quietus on USENET. That and Craigslist reduced traffic on the once busy local forsale groups to a dribble. USENET was essentially dead at that point.

This didn't stop the illicit activity. It just drove it underground.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the service you were using for $15 per month (that you now want deducted from your service) did not cost you $15 per month.
It cost you (Bullshit Guesstimate) $1 per month. Because everyone that wasn't using it (also paying the $1) was subsidising your access to it.
If everyone on the entire network started using the service (and paying extra) I am sure the cost would either go to free, (or closer to the actual cost per customer - in my example $1).

An example for you.
there are 1000 customers on ISP lets call them "Dox".
Dox pays 1000 dollars per month for access to a service, lets call it Dudenet.
They pay this in time it takes to coordinate with Dudenet, (meetings etc to negotiate contracts or whatever), time it takes to maintain routing rules, and the estimated cost for repairs related to the service ETC. (you know, its not just pay usenet for access, its pay a dude at our workplace to remember how to fix it when it breaks etc everything).

To cover this cost, Dox charges each of its customers $1 ontop of their plan (or allocate $1 of their internet fee for the payment of this cost) and go on their merry way.

In the future, Dox find out that 60 people use Dudenet. 60 of their 1000 customers use a service that costs them 1000 dollars per month to operate.

So they STOP charging their 1000 customers for the right to access Dudenet. It wasn't getting them customers. It wasn't driving increases in revenue. It was just costing them 1000 dollars. (didn't add customers, meaning they spend that 1000 dollars they COULD have spent elsewhere, on dudenet for 60 people).
But, they want to give those 60 people NO access to dudenet, but it still costs $1000 to run it. So instead of charging 1000 people 1 dollar, they charge 60 people 15 dollars.

Wait cry the 60 people (and the other 940 that never used it, but heard about it on slashdot and can see a reason to try to get money back for a service they never used)! if it costs 15 dollars you should reduce my plan WITHOUT dudenet by 15 dollars so I pay the same amount later after I get Dudenet!

now, I have chosen these numbers for a reason.
dudenet in this situation will cost Dox 16.66 cents to operate for the 60 people.
So those 60 people are getting their dollar back. (and Dox is even absorbing 66 cents in lost profit from those 60 people!).
Dox is earning $1 more from 940 people. But this lets them spend 940 dollars on getting oh I don't know, an IPTV service. or I dunno, anything, hell making more profit. Either way. The 60 people that use Dudenet ARE getting their $1 back AND are paying the cost of access to Dudenet. Win Win for reality. 940 customers pay for stuff they might want (not dudenet obviously, though perhaps its just a more financially stable ISP - no one likes it when they go bankrupt) and 60 people learn the real cost of dudenet (not free).

Learn to think people. Why might they do this?

Re:Who cares?

[ar1550]

Oh! I see what you did there.

Yes, Usenet is absolutely an outdated service. No one over goes there anymore and it is certainly useless as a platform for distributing all sorts of binaries.

Re:Who cares?

[cybercobra]

The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python,

Nope, it's a mailinglist far as I'm concerned: python-list

I could care less if the newsgroup counterpart went offline tomorrow; for me, it'd just mean less spam and no more invalid "From" addresses in posts.

Re:Who cares?

[nanoflower]

A Usenet server doesn't have to handle 5 TB of traffic unless it is going to carry every newsgroup out there. It's entirely possible to get that traffic flow down to a much manageable level (probably no more than a few megabytes a day) if you only carry the text groups. Even if you want to carry binary groups you don't have to carry everything. So an admin can set the level of traffic to match what they need and not see everything coming into their server only to be dropped down the bit bucket.

Re:Who cares?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I could care less if the newsgroup counterpart went offline tomorrow; for me, it'd just mean less spam and no more invalid "From" addresses in posts.

And no more contributions from the people who use comp.lang.python.

Re:Who cares?

[alexo]

Or get a vanity domain for less than $10/year.

Re:Who cares?

[IntlHarvester]

Seriously, just because the stereotype of usenet is "dark alley hackerspace" anyoen who has ever even semi-used it knows thats not true.

Usenet providers have marketing themselves as semi-illicit file sharing services for some time, so I can see why people think that way. ("Download ANY file!" was one slogan).

Meanwhile the text groups have no marketing or promotion outside of Google Groups (which is even buried on google.com), which means most people under the age of 40 or so have only heard about it as a source for filez.

Re:Who cares?

[mitgib]

Are you unsatisfied, or unsatisfied if something cheaper comes along? Unfortunately most people chose the later,and then we wonder why so many jobs have left, when all we do if feed these crappy corporations in America, but wish to bitch and moan about them with the same breath. You, a collective, not personal you, need to truly take a stand, and if it means it will cost you more to voice your displeasure, it costs you more. I have not shopped at Wal-Mart in 10+ years, they are the main reason you go into any rural area you see blighted towns. I do not frequent fast food chains, or any chains for when I eat a meal out. If I do eat out, it will be a family owned establishment, if I need to by a product, it will be a hard search, but I will buy it at a locally owned, hopefully family owned business. Does this mentality cost me more? Sometimes it does, but I know I am helping to keep my neighbors employed and food on their families table, and usually at a reasonable wage.

Now for your television watching habits to be specific with your post. Do you even need cable? Are your viewing habits requiring it? I, like most in America, have few choices, local cable, one of the satellite providers, or over the air broadcasts. I've chosen over the air for the network shows, I do time shift them with my PC, then hulu or the networks themselves have their programming available over the internet with fewer or no commercial breaks at all. There is very little programing I do not have some type of free access to without stealing it. So I have no need to pay for cable, and I'm sure you could buy nothing as well. I do get my internet service from the locol cable company, and as long as I do not use their DNS servers, it works just fine, 99% of their trouble is they have no clue how to do something as basic as provide stable DNS for their customers. So again, how serious are you really? I was one of the mom and pop internet providers in the 90's, my (ex)wife and I provided good a living and respectable benefits to dozens of employees until the higher speed connections were becoming popular and the little guy really didn't have a viable way to compete with it. I've since moved to the east coast, and you see people acting desperate for an alternative to their local monopoly internet provider, but like yourself, they don't really hate them that much, as when a real alternative is provided, the majority would rather get that $5 bundled discount.

Re:Who cares?

[alexo]

The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python, comp.text.tex and gnu.emacs.gnus are just a few that I read daily.

No newsreader needed.

Re:Who cares?

[CRCulver]

Because a clunky web interface controlled by a single provider that has no killfiling, offline storage or syntax highlighting is clearly better than Usenet diversity.

Re:Who cares?

[Compaqt]

In Korea, only old people use Usenet.

Re:Who cares?

[alexo]

Because a clunky web interface controlled by a single provider that has no killfiling, offline storage or syntax highlighting is clearly better than Usenet diversity.

Never claimed it was better, just that you won't be cut off from your favourite content.

Re:Who cares?

[jc42]

So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.

Alternatively, we might note that the usenet code originated as one of those "open source" projects, and the code is all available. It was originally designed to distribute individual newsgroups via site-to-site links (first phone lines, then TCP links), and the code is still capable of doing that.

It's quite feasible for geeks and nerds like us to grab the software, find other subscribers to the newsgroups you want, and arrange for your machines to "mirror" the newsgroups that you want. There's no need to pay a big company to do it for you. And if you do that, you'll have much faster access to your newsgroups, since they'll be residing in a corner of that 500-GB disk that you got for your nice new server last year. And instead of reading via a clumsy, bloated browser, you can pick up one of the nice plain-text news readers. You can also write your own programs for playing with the newsgroups, extracting stuff for your database, etc.

This should be easy for anyone who reads /., right?

It's somewhat of a shame that the corporate world managed to take over what arose as a distributed news system stored on users' machines, and then charge (some of) us for what was designed to be a freely shared, user-supported system. Maybe now that the ISPs are trying to scuttle it (and not lower our monthly fee to compensate for the loss of a service), we should be seriously talking about taking it back from them.

Re:Who cares?

[Antidamage]

> Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."

Well, no. Try this:

Putting someone else's resources to work where they are most urgently needed: communism
Putting someone else's resources to work where they will return the greatest profit: capitalism

Seems to me need would indicate you as being some kind of commie red. Which I fully support. Always put people before business.

Re:Who cares?

[jc42]

There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests.

Name one and I'll explain to you how it sucks and how in contrast usenet is far better and has been for decades.

One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.

Now that the ISPs are abandoning usenet, we should be explaining how the open-source usenet software works, and restoring the older site-to-site distribution system. It's usually far superior to the browser-based forum implementations.

Re:Who cares?

[Daengbo]

It's past its prime.

Re:Who cares?

[taucross]

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

Re:Who cares?

[LostCluster]

HBO uses multicast/broadcast... the same stream is sent to everybody allowed to decode it at the same time. A Usenet copy is sent to just one user at a time.

Re:Who cares?

[Bing Tsher E]

You could always just ditch television. It's really a 20th century thing anyway. I mean 'broadcasting'??

Re:Who cares?

[Bing Tsher E]

I have not shopped at Wal-Mart in 10+ years, they are the main reason you go into any rural area you see blighted towns.

Actually, the small town that I live (near) in has a Wal-Mart and it might appear that the town is 'blighted' by it. However, they moved to a new building not too long ago, and the former Wal-Mart location is now a thriving flea market. And I'm sorry, but the tradtional 'small town merchants' rolled up the sidewalk at 6PM. Wal-Mart is 24 hours. That's liberating, if you're a geek or live any kind of a non-traditional lifestyle at all. It's actually possible now to live way out in the country and not suffer from Main Street fascism as in the past.

Just because Wal-Mart drove the old-line small-time merchants under doesn't mean they destroyed the entire market for everything. Many of those small-time merchants were charging extortionate marked-up prices because they had a captive small-town customer base to screw.

Re:Who cares?

[JWSmythe]

    I had a few friends comment to me about your post. The general consensus is that you're just flame bait. "Get a life"? Getting a life would imply actually stepping away from the computer and ... well ... getting a life. You suggested Internet based alternatives to the service, which is anything but getting a life.

    There were probably good reasons that Cox ditched Usenet, which is probably that such a small percentage of their users ever used the service, and the requirements were large enough that it wasn't worth keeping.

    You, I, and almost everyone else have forgotten about it. Last time I ventured towards it, the signal to noise ratio was so insane I wasn't sure if anyone but spammers used it. I could assume that Cox had to process more abuse complaints than they had legitimate users.

Re:Who cares?

[Bing Tsher E]

Maybe they should continue to run a usenet service, but strip binary attachments and limit message length to, say, what a text body that any reasonable human could read in 45 minutes.

Re:Who cares?

[nabsltd]

WHOOSH!

Re:Who cares?

[JWSmythe]

    I've been buying connectivity for only connectivity for years. I don't get a discount because I don't use their POP, SMTP, Usenet, or even DNS services. I've moved around a lot, and using different providers each time. For a short while, I added the provider email into my mail client each time. After a while it was just annoying, especially where my new account would mysteriously start receiving spam even though I never used it and never provided anyone my address. So for the last few years, mail goes to my domain or a few common mail drops, and I collect it from there.

    Several times, I asked providers for discounts because I didn't want any of their extra services. They simply wouldn't provide them. They aren't obliged to provide any services beyond the contract. If you look at your contract, I'd be willing to bet it doesn't even mention Usenet, except for possibly in the acceptable use policy.

    Even though handling Usenet could be kind of pricey, I doubt it would be very much in terms of cost for them, except for maybe the load on the abuse department.

Re:Who cares?

[Bing Tsher E]

fidonet

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The other great thing about usenet is that there were so many fascinating discussions that happened there and to this day you can read any of them. The creation of linux is right there, for instance.

  Everything on every forum you've ever read disappears as soon as someone stops paying the bills. Someone could cure cancer, invent a teleportation device or make plans to colonize another planet. And no one will have any clue how it happened or what led them to this idea or that because the posts all got deleted when facebook went under...or the owner of the forum/website got busted for selling pot or whatever.

But now there is this walled garden thing happening. All correspondence is through certain channels like IMs, facebook, etc. Back in the day the entire internet looked at what MSN and AOL were trying to do and responded by turning them into a joke. It's starting to feel like we've rebuilt the stupidity of AOL and MSN intot he websites we currently use. The sad part is, all the smart people are pulled in as well. We no longer point at aolers and laugh and then go back to do something interesting. Now we tend their virtual crops and superpoke them back, and then we upvote or downvote their comments.

On second thought...if the result of the internet is to turn us all into one big glob of retard, maybe it doesn't matter how it happened or if it's preserved for historical purposes. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Re:Who cares?

[westlake]

On the other hand, newsgroups such as comp.lang.c constantly get over 3 thousand posts a month, comp.lang.python also gets around 2500 post a month, comp.lang.c++ gets over 1500 posts a month

Granted.

But Cox Cable has 2.9 million digital cable subscribers, 3.5 million Internet subscribers, and 2.2 million digital telephone subscribers - and Cox is only one of many domestic providers.

In that context, 3,000 global USENET posts a month to comp.lang.c++ is nothing.

Re:Who cares?

[Dishevel]

But what about alt.barney.die.die.die?

Re:Who cares?

[MemoryDragon]

Not really, many dicussion groups are on usenet, but most of them never came out of the mailing list age (which is a pity, since mailinglists are a major pain), but fortunately there are services like gmane which provide a usenet frontend in front of most major oss mailinglists.

Re:Who cares?

[Macrat]

DSL is just as fast as cable, at least the way that residential providers do it.

ATT 6mbs/1mbs = Comcast 20mbs/5mbs?

Re:Who cares?

[williamhb]

One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.

What you describe as a "serious problem" is also its major benefit. In no particular order:

• Because the group-reading software is just the browser, you know everyone has got one, they haven't had to set it up separately (no more "I'm using my work computer now... what's the nntp server I need to configure into my news client again?")
• The site has control of the interaction and can change it as needed -- for instance introducing post-submission editing of posts, retrospective moderation, private sub-forums, the Slashdot moderation system, tagging, and other features
• Usenet readers generally have a bad design decision in them: they represent conversations as trees. This means conversations split at every post, and (especially for controversial topics) turn into a bunch of two-person arguments rather than a single community discussion. Forums do not allow forking of the conversation, and this means it's more likely to remain a community discussion
• Forums do not depend on the software at your ISP. For instance, deleting a Usenet post tries to propagate a deletion but there is no guarantee any given ISP will honour the deletion; with a forum it either supports deletion or does not -- it doesn't say "I dunno, it'll be deleted to some people".

Re:Who cares?

[binkzz]

What features of USENET make it better for obtaining legitimate binaries compared to FTP or HTTP or Bittorrent?

Speed and availability. You're only dependant on the speed of your usenet provider, which (if you pay for it) is usually very fast. I download far faster from my usenet provider than from any FTP or HTTP I visit, let alone torrents. Plus when something's on usenet, it'll stay there until it reaches your provider's retention. No one can delete it, no moderators, no MAFIAA. Also, torrenting music and videos is illegal where I live, but dowloading them via Usenet is not.

But binary groups? That is like preferring to get binary files as shar [wikipedia.org] email text rather than an attachment. It was a hacked in use and I never saw the appeal apart from piracy.

HTTP uses the same hack, although its encoding isn't as efficient. FTP is better, but you'd have to know where to find what you want and hope there's some kind of search.

Re:Who cares?

[Grundlefleck]

3) What about all the things my newsreader does that Google Groups does not? Saving threads for reading off line, killfile, etc.

Don't really know if this would satisfy your requirement, but I've subscribed to Google Groups and through POP access I receive all the messages in my email client, for offline reading. And decent email clients should provide filtering matching killfile capabilities, I think. Can't recall using Usenet, so I may be wrong to think the two are comparable.

Re:Who cares?

[timftbf]

The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?

Aside from the minor issue that there's still no web interface for any of these forums (Slashdot included) that comes within a hundred miles of a decent newsreader client... Hell, none of them get within a hundred miles of 'trn', which is, what, 20 years old now? Yes, some of them you can get as an email feed, which is sort-of OK with a decent threading email client, but then you hit the culture-clash between the people expecting email conventions, and the people expecting it to work like a web forum.

Re:Who cares?

[xaxa]

What you describe as a "serious problem" is also its major benefit. In no particular order:

• Because the group-reading software is just the browser, you know everyone has got one, they haven't had to set it up separately (no more "I'm using my work computer now... what's the nntp server I need to configure into my news client again?")

What are the my web proxy settings again?

• The site has control of the interaction and can change it as needed -- for instance introducing post-submission editing of posts, retrospective moderation, private sub-forums, the Slashdot moderation system, tagging, and other features
• Usenet readers generally have a bad design decision in them: they represent conversations as trees. This means conversations split at every post, and (especially for controversial topics) turn into a bunch of two-person arguments rather than a single community discussion. Forums do not allow forking of the conversation, and this means it's more likely to remain a community discussion

/. is displayed a tree.

Most readers will let you ignore a whole branch of a tree, or all posts from a specific user (with a single cilck!), or posts matching other criteria (subject, length, etc).

That makes wandering off-topic more-or-less a non-issue. It doesn't get in the way of the on-topic discussion. It also means a single discussion can clearly split into two on-topic discussions, and everyone can see who everyone else is responding to. Try viewing /. in "Flat" mode and seeing if it makes sense.

• Forums do not depend on the software at your ISP. For instance, deleting a Usenet post tries to propagate a deletion but there is no guarantee any given ISP will honour the deletion; with a forum it either supports deletion or does not -- it doesn't say "I dunno, it'll be deleted to some people".

Google cache?

Re:Who cares?

[Thing 1]

I have not shopped at Wal-Mart in 10+ years

Ah, the old "rooting for inefficiency with my dollars" shtick. (The Amish should have patented that.)

Re:Who cares?

[modmans2ndcoming]

and the small town guy could not purchase good made by slave labor in china.

Re:Who cares?

[williamhb]

What are the my web proxy settings again?

Almost never entered by individual users.

/. is displayed a tree.

Slashdot of course being famous for never devolving into deeply threaded arguments amongst small numbers of people...

Most readers will let you ignore a whole branch of a tree, or all posts from a specific user (with a single cilck!), or posts matching other criteria (subject, length, etc).

And most actual readers (people) will never use those settings. Given that discussion behaviour depends on the actions of a forum-full of people, it doesn't matter if "I'm alright Jack", if the others wander off because of all the forking and devolution into one-on-one flamewars (and the market stats are that they have wandered off) you haven't got your discussion.

Google cache?

And when was the last time you said to yourself "I don't think I'll visit the forum today even though it's up; instead I'll work out the Google Cache URL for the forum topic to see what might be there instead"?

Re:Who cares?

[groslyunderpaid]

mod parent up informative, greencastle PA comcast giving me 20/4 and that's not even highest level of service. DSL can't come anywhere near that, century link's highest package is 10/.9 at about the same price of $55 a month.

Re:Who cares?

[Binestar]

Ah, the old "rooting for inefficiency with my dollars" shtick. (The Amish should have patented that.)

I try very hard to not shop at Walmart either, but it isn't because of prices. I've found that buying clothes from walmart that they wear out much faster than buying from Kohls. I don't know if they use thinner threads or what, but I get holes in walmart clothes while they are still in relatively new condition.

As for Groceries, I could probably save a bit of money buying from walmart as opposed to Wegmans, but I have made a choice to vote with my wallet on business practices. Wegmans has been voted into the FORTUNE top 100 companies to work for every year from 1998-2010, with a first place posting in 2005 and 2010 was voted third. I am pretty sure most of those years were in the top10, but am not going to do the research.

Walmart on the other hand specifically hires part time workers and keeps their hours low so they do not have to provide benefits to them. Source.

Re:Who cares?

[TrekkieGod]

Gmail is WAY better than dedicated clients, if you have more than one machine/device

It's called imap. And gmail allows imap access, which is awesome.

or use public terminals a lot.

When using public terminals, the web interface is better, obviously. That's the only time I ever use the web interface, though. It's not that we're saying we don't like the availability of the web interface. It's just that given the option, some of us prefer their own mail clients.

Re:Who cares?

[drinkypoo]

Now that the ISPs are abandoning usenet, we should be explaining how the open-source usenet software works, and restoring the older site-to-site distribution system. It's usually far superior to the browser-based forum implementations.

It seems like you could have a forum that was a news reader, and store your forum posts as news, and make everyone happy... if only NNTP had some kind of archival functionality, rather than "take all this news I've got and eat it, then delete it when it expires" I guess you could just disable expiry?

Re:Who cares?

[ultranova]

Usenet readers generally have a bad design decision in them: they represent conversations as trees. This means conversations split at every post, and (especially for controversial topics) turn into a bunch of two-person arguments rather than a single community discussion. Forums do not allow forking of the conversation, and this means it's more likely to remain a community discussion

Except that this is a great feature. It allows subtopics to branch from the main discussion, which in turn allows both the topic and any related insights to be considered without these subtopics disturbing each other. This particular thread - talking about the ideal discussion system, which was spawned by talking of the design of newsreaders, which was spawned by talking about newsreaders vs. web forums, which in turn is a subtopic of Cox screwing with its customers - is a perfect example.

Besides, all you get with a "flat list" forum is that people still answer specific posts and have two-on-two discussions with other people joining in, those various subtopics simply get mixed up into a near-incoherent mess. That's only to be expected: IRL, it's only in formal meetings where people talk one at the time; in all actual "community discussions" they form small groups talking about various things that may or may not be on topic. Then they wander from group to group, taking insights from these little discussions with them and mixing them in new ways.

Trying to force the discussion into a linear progression is both useless and counterproductive even if it was succesful. In fact, if I were to design a forum, I'd simply put everything into a giant tree, rather than do an artificial division between "articles" and "threads". What does that do, anyway, other than expire perfectly good discussions prematurely? Oh, and of course I'd offer an NNTP interface, with various top nodes as newsgroups.

Re:Who cares?

[psykocrime]

I am sure gopher and archie are still used somewhere too.

Indeed.

Re:Who cares?

[interval1066]

Please at least try to claim what you really wanted to claim: you don't use usenet (at least for something other than feeding your porn habits) and as you don't use it you believe it somehow sucks. Yet, that doesn't make it true, does it?

I shouldn't respond to your nonsense, and I won't, other than to say I was of course right, your a die-hard usenet fanatic, and you object to others maligning an essentially useless technology. Slap yourself in the face, wake up, and try to get a girl friend. That's about as the best advice I can give you.

Re:Who cares?

[operagost]

I'm only 37, and in college I discovered it as a source for Star Wars fanboyism and alt.wesley.die.die.die.

Re:Who cares?

[Retron]

What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.

And some useful discussion. For example, uk.sci.weather is an active newsgroup (I post in it daily, as do others) that's surprisingly free of spam. There are people on there who wouldn't dream of using Web-based forums.

That said, Usenet has been ignored by the masses for so long... most of my friends have never even heard of it. My ISP provides a free (non-binary) feed and I reckon the cost of that is pretty insignificant. It's only when binary groups are involved that bandwidth usage etc soars!

Re:Who cares?

[cayenne8]

"Really, it's a better idea IMO to use a 3rd party email service. Either a paid service, or a free one such as gmail/hotmail/yahoo. This way if you move, change ISPs for whatever reason, no longer need the ISP etc, you don't lose your email address. I've had my gMail account since it was invite only beta like 5 years ago. In that time I've moved and cancelled / signed-up for ISPs probably 6-7 times."

Well, it isn't THAT hard to get yourself a domain, and build and run your own email server. Postfix is a great little tool.

If I have some down time..I just do a temp changover of my domain to gmail where they can host awhile...change ISP's and backup on my email server again.

I can reach it from anywhere I'm at....using squirlmail...even use a web interface.

Re:Who cares?

[Greg_D]

Usenet has more monthly posts than digg, reddit, and slashdot combined, and that's without taking into account binary traffic and spam.

Re:Who cares?

[spazdor]

Does Comcast actually give you 20Mbps to the internet?

Or do they give you 20Mbps to the CMTS, from which you share 100Mbps with 50 other subscribers?

Re:Who cares?

[jc42]

... if only NNTP had some kind of archival functionality, rather than "take all this news I've got and eat it, then delete it when it expires" I guess you could just disable expiry?

Yeah, I think that has been fairly common at sites that run a specific NNTP feed for a few tech newgroups that they use. It's not unusual that at least the tech newsgroups get "archived" this way at multiple places around the Net.

I did this at one place where I worked. We were developing software to implement a number of standards, and I was one of several "part-time sysadmins" on our main machines. I set up an NTTP feed for newsgroups that discussed the standards, and also for several standards-related mailing lists, and arranged for all of them to be archived on one of our machines. This was in the 1980s, before the advent of the Web. Today I'd also put those directories on the Web, and set up a simple search facility for them. Of course google would also scan them, so you could use that to do the searching. But for such specialized data sets, you could also implement a local search facility that "understands" more of the data than a big, generic search site would.

Re:Who cares?

[ETruss]

Comcast did the same thing over a year ago. They stopped providing Usenet access and told us to go to Giganews if we wanted to continue. When I called to complain and ask how much they would reduce my access charge for the missing service, I was told (of course) that there would be no change in the charge and that they were doing it because "Usenet is the main distribution system for child pornography". I was so stunned at the stupidity of that statement that all I could do was hang up.

Re:Who cares?

[groslyunderpaid]

speedtest.net showing right now, 21.19/3.55. Part of my upload is skewed by ip phone but not much.
 
I have seen downloads sustained over 2MB per second.

Re:Who cares?

[xero314]

DSL isn't as fast and doesn't come with TV so if I switched my internet to DSL my TV+internet monthly bill would be greater and I would have less bandwidth.

Supporting my original statement that there are alternatives, you just happen to prefer Cox over those alternatives. Just rubs me the wrong way when people bitch about not having options when they clearly do, and just don't like the alternatives.

Unfortunately Cox has a monopoly on cable in my hood.

If you get specific enough, every company has a monopoly on something. In this case Cox does not have a monopoly on anything substantial, since cable is just a transport medium not a good or service. They have ISP competition and they have Media competition. What they really have a monopoly on is being the best priced provided for the services you want, and that is not really a monopoly at all.

Re:Who cares?

[diamondmagic]

Well, communism implies central planning, one person telling everyone else what they demand, and that's no good, because even if you could accurately forecast what everyone wants you have no way to calculate what is the correct production structure to satisfy them. Capitalism, on the other hand, uses profit as the method of economic calculation, as the means of balancing demands with supplies: Profit means you can introduce more supply to that area, and a loss means that those resources would be better served elsewhere.

With that in mind, you can't put "people before business," within a context of individual rights it's the same thing.

A "need" is just a highly-ranked want, saying we "need food" is the same thing as saying "I want food above all else if I want to survive" or something like that (since survival is typically the highest-ranked want of all).

Re:Who cares?

[wdef]

Personally I hate the idea that ISPs are being allowed to redefine "internet service" to just mean port 80 traffic.

Yeah but, unfortunately, those who say this is capitalism at work are largely right. The web is big business, big advertising. This is one reason Google and others have pushed hard on the move to webapps, RIAs, online video etc. It's all about the web and has been for years.

Usenet is still very useful, but not to advertisers. Not anymore, not compared to the huge volumes on the web. On the web, "spam" is that banner ad or annoying flash ad embedded in the page.

Also I don't think powers that be have ever liked the anarchic uses of usenet eg the potential for anyone to start some group and talk about anything.

Re:Who cares?

[KshGoddess]

I'm less than 37, and I remember usenet being somewhat useful in my youth, but as I'm not a professional or even much of a hobbyist programmer (I like learning new languages, but haven't come up with a good project for myself), the fact there's still comp.lang.whatever doesn't really mean much to me. I don't think I've found a use for usenet in about ... 10 years. I belong to specific discussion boards for specific topics, and have never looked back. With resources like google and wikipedia, not to mention books made on whatever topic I'm interested in, the wild wild west days of usenet as the place to go are happily behind me. (usenet, archie, gopher... none are more than a fond memory for me these days)

Re:Who cares?

[interval1066]

So, as you can see, that baseless comment on usenet's post volume is not only baseless but also badly thought out.

But that still doesn't change the fact that usenet is by and large populated by uber-geeks and porn surfers, and the ratio of the latter to the former is by magnitudes larger, and both are slowly withering anyway. Folks like what they are used to. First time kids who start using the net in earnest do not clamor for their news groups. Tell me I'm wrong.

Usenet is dead except for piracy...

[nweaver]

Usenet is pretty much dead except for piracy, subsumed by specialty web forums for those who are after communication rather than warez. And if you still want it for communication, Google Groups offers a free gateway IIRC.

EG, NNTP may still be a huge amount of some ISPs traffic (eg, see this paper, http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/imc102-maier.pdf ) but it is almost ALL binary transfers.

So its not a shock that Cox is getting rid of its Usenet servers, whats only shocking is that it took them so long.

Re:Usenet is dead except for piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

If NNTP is a significant part of Cox's traffic, then it would be stupid to discontinue the service, because then each user (minus those who stop using it altogether) will cause a copy of the traffic to become external, where it puts Cox in a worse position for peering agreements. The store-and-forward nature of Usenet is a major relief on cross-network bandwidth, as long as users stick to network-local servers.

Re:Usenet is dead except for piracy...

[jfengel]

That's a good thought, but it's true only if:

a. Somebody is actually using all of those bits. If most of it is write-only (i.e. people put it out there but few read it), it can be a net win despite losing the store-and-forward.

b. People continue to download those files. Some will switch to BitTorrent (which may be easier on them, and has some of the same store-and-forward advantages of Usenet); others will stop entirely.

I think they're mostly banking on (a) not being true. I suspect that a lot of warez users have ALREADY switched to ButTorrent (which they can throttle, another advantage for them). But they still have to download the complete contents of the newsgroups.

Re:Usenet is dead except for piracy...

[Imagix]

EG, NNTP may still be a huge amount of some ISPs traffic (eg, see this paper, http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/imc102-maier.pdf [icir.org] ) but it is almost ALL binary transfers.

Huge compared to the amount of spam email transiting their network?

Oh, Great.

[Slashdot Parent]

Oh, great. There goes my sex life.

Re:Oh, Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on Slashdot would that comment in this context be marked "Insightful"...

Re:Oh, Great.

[slick7]

They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock

I know a guy like that and yes he is.

Re:Oh, Great.

[Kjella]

Yes absolutely, there goes the last source of porn on the Internet. It's so dry, it's like trying to find sand in Sahara. I even heard they suggested a .xxx TLD, but had to drop it because no providers would come. I guess it's back to the Sport's Illustrated Swimsuit edition for you. Or playing that clip with Janet's tit over and over again. Won't ever be anything like it again, no sir.

Re:Oh, Great.

[eggoeater]

Many years ago I finally got broadband via cable (it wasn't COX.)
The Usenet service they included was sub-contracted from another company, and to keep things simple, all customers used the same id & pass to access the Usenet servers.
I don't remember what the ID was, but the pass was what I consider to be the most ultimate inside joke ever:
The pass was: abpe4me

Re:Oh, Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on Slashdot would that comment in this context be marked "Insightful"...

Only on Slashdot would that comment in this context be marked "Insightful"...

Re:Oh, Great.

[Bing Tsher E]

The best anecdote that line brings to my mind is about someone who brings his son to a brothel for his coming-of-age, and the son ends up giving head to the bouncer.

Re:Oh, Great.

[Slashdot Parent]

Are you suggesting that there is a torrent of porn on the Internet? Could you give me a bit of a clue where to find it?

Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Does anybody who doesn't use IE for a newsreader expect their ISP to provide decent feeds? Anybody I know who's still there is using GigaNews or one of the other premium services.

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[ChristTrekker]

I've been using Netscape and then Thunderbird for news since the mid-90s. What Cox provided has been fine for the past several years. Most other people have been drifting to web forums, so I've (reluctantly) followed. But I think NNTP is a lot simpler and can do the job just as well. Time was that Usenet wasn't a premium service, it was considered pretty basic, like email.

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[Anonymous Coward]

NNTP's weakness is searching for old threads, i.e. to save asking the same ol' question over and over in a given group. I moved away from groups a while ago, very few people were using them for communication, which is a shame. Anyone remember TIN?

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[dougmc]

Of course. Though I now use trn and slrn ... I like trn better, but it's not maintained and it gives me some grief that slrn doesn't ...

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[value_added]

To add some context, in the dial-up days, my local ISP (literally a mom and pop outfit), happily provided a full newsfeed (30-60 day retention) through one of the major providers at the time. No busy numbers, no speed issues, no download caps, 24-hour support, and a complimentary news feed, all for $15.00/month. Hell, they'd even suggest from time to time that I come into their office to download my ISOs so I wouldn't have to tie up my line.

When I switched to ATT DSL, the improved speeds were nice, but everything else I'd taken for granted went out the window. Usenet? Only their Level 2 support knew what the word meant, and the techs on the other end of the phone quickly admitted the service sucked.

I don't know whether there's a business case for an ISP to provide a usenet feed, but I do know that I've been paying $15/month for it ever since.

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[RoboRay]

ISPs still provide email?

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[Nimey]

My ISP provides a decent (if sometimes slow) feed, but I only subscribe to six or so newsfroups, and only two of them have regular traffic.

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[cpghost]

Anyone remember TIN?

Using (r)tin right now. It works okay, but on newsgroups with over 1,000,000 articles, it consumes a lot of RAM. Should really look at the code to improve and streamline this someday...

Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but

[Just Some Guy]

Anybody I know who's still there is using GigaNews or one of the other premium services.

I talked my ISP into giving me a /29 netblock in exchange for hosting their newsfeed. I set up a copy of Leafnode-2 in a FreeBSD jail and pointed it at some public servers. Very few other customers use it and they subscribe to text groups, so the traffic overhead is negligible for me.

browser is not the best tool for every job

[ChristTrekker]

News readers are a lot more lightweight than web browsers, can deal with the format intelligently. That's what I'll miss when Cox (my ISP) drops Usenet. How big are browsers now, to make use of the all the funky Ajax features, that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea I love my 386 as much as any other retro nerd, but damn man it sits next to a 2.8ghz multicore with more ram than my 386 has hard disk space

spend the 100$ to get a machine made within the last 5 years

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[houstonbofh]

Yea I love my 386 as much as any other retro nerd, but damn man it sits next to a 2.8ghz multicore with more ram than my 386 has hard disk space

spend the 100$ to get a machine made within the last 5 years

And yet the 386 with a good newsreader is faster than a 8 gig 64 bit i7 mambo nuclear system with bad ajax. Where is the progress again? And why do I want to pay for that?

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[maxume]

You can just use gmane.

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[socz]

If I did, then it wouldn't be GHETTO now would it?

:>

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[microbee]

So, the GUI is too slow for you, but I hear the computer says that it still runs faster than you can read.

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[Urkki]

Yea I love my 386 as much as any other retro nerd, but damn man it sits next to a 2.8ghz multicore with more ram than my 386 has hard disk space

spend the 100$ to get a machine made within the last 5 years

And yet the 386 with a good newsreader is faster than a 8 gig 64 bit i7 mambo nuclear system with bad ajax. Where is the progress again? And why do I want to pay for that?

Download a 2+ megapixel jpg image from a newsgroup and view it with that 386. Then do same with the i7. You'll see the progress.

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[betterunixthanunix]

Try browsing some threads on Usenet using your 386, then try browsing threads on some Javascript driven web based discussion system, and see which is faster ;).

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[ArundelCastle]

... that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?

Disagree. The ASCII boobies are much better now with variable width fonts.

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[ToxicBanjo]

Umm... how about running that good newsreader on the i7?

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[JWSmythe]

    That shouldn't have been hard to get more memory now than drive space then. :) My 486/33 came with a 20Mb hard drive. I upgraded it to 40Mb a little while later and I was the coolest kid on the block. :) I'm not sure you could find memory for a new machine. Well, in looking, you can get a 16Mb DDR2 SODIMM, but why would you want to? :)

    My home machine is 3.2Ghz Phenom II X4 with 6Gb RAM and 2Tb storage. Things have come a long way. :) I remember building out my first dual processor machine at one job, and that cost us a fortune. Oh my gosh, what would we possibly do with the mighty power of a dual Pentium Pro 200. :) That was just after I left another employer, and we were discussing the possibility of building a 1TB array with something like 140 9Gb drives (the biggest we could get our hands on at the time). They actually had a business purpose for it (hosting company), but it remained theoretical since it was pretty damned near impossible. What? 3 4 channel SCSI cards, and drives chained across multiple racks just to accomplish it?

    It was back in those days when it became obvious that we could spend huge money on huge hardware, or split up our services logically and stay with commodity equipment, and be able to stay with bleeding edge equipment with our important things and roll upgrades through the datacenters without impacting the customers.

    That was a fun trip down memory lane. :) I wouldn't want the 40Mb drive nor 486 for anything more than a doorstop though. Well, I do have some sitting in the garage in the "I should throw this away" pile. :)

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[binkzz]

News readers are a lot more lightweight than web browsers, can deal with the format intelligently.

Until Outlook came along and people started posting in (broken) HTML.

That's what I'll miss when Cox (my ISP) drops Usenet. How big are browsers now, to make use of the all the funky Ajax features, that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?

But.. you won't have smileys and avatars and pretty ads!

Re:browser is not the best tool for every job

[Urkki]

Try browsing some threads on Usenet using your 386, then try browsing threads on some Javascript driven web based discussion system, and see which is faster ;).

Especially try browsing some threads with web links containing stuff the discussion is about...

Also, people want access from more than one computer, which pretty much mandates either web based service or an SSH connection to a server.

And if you're actually thinking about using 386 as a text terminal connecting to a server, then it'll even struggle with SSH authentication (logging in will take a while) and even with encryption (noticeable lag).

Also, at least I consider ability to scroll quickly back and forth through long texts essential, even with discussion forums. A 386 can't really do that very well either.

They should get rid of email too

[blitzkrieg3]

Exactly! I'm reminded of this post by email researcher Meng Weng Wong, where he talks about DSL and providing good email service:

DSL providers should just say to their customers, we'll just drop your price by $X a month if you decline POP --- that way we save on machines, sysadmins, and software licensing fees, and we get to say we're 20% cheaper than the competition ... and you'll just go off and use Hotmail, which is what you were going to do anyway!

Maybe they'd use gmail instead of hotmail today, but the same principal applies.

Re:They should get rid of email too

[houstonbofh]

If the price was better, I would buy just a nekid connection with NO additional services. I can roll my own mail, web site, news... Just cut my price! What? You want to cut service, raise the price and shove some personal data-mining junk at me? Uh... Pass...

Re:They should get rid of email too

[sexybomber]

I would buy just a nekid connection with NO additional services. I can roll my own mail, web site, news...

So, basically, a pipe tied to a static IP address? Sounds good to me.

Re:They should get rid of email too

[Nimey]

Yup. I don't use any of my ISP's email or Web-based services.

In fact, the only ISP-tied service I use regularly... is their Usenet server. For articles, not for downloading porn or warez.

Re:They should get rid of email too

[Dionysus]

Many ISPs in Norway only offer the pipes. No email, web site, news or anything. And the service is much better (faster) than what I had when I lived in the Bay Area (AT&T)

Allow me to translate.

[Toze]

"We believe the group of customers that use this service is small enough to not be able to start a revolt, and large enough that we'll see some profit from charging extra. We would do this to the 'using Google' service if we thought we could get away with it. Please ignore how badly this conflicts with our claims that Net Neutrality would destroy the internet, and that we're a self-policing market who wouldn't dare charge people more for certain types or destinations of traffic."

Re:Allow me to translate.

[rdunnell]

I don't see how this translates to a conflict with net neutrality.

They aren't saying you can't use Usenet, that they are going to block it somehow or that you have to use their Usenet servers at a premium price. They're just saying they aren't going to host it and offer it as part of their service package.

Regardless of whether this is a nice thing to do or not, it doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality.

Re:Allow me to translate.

[bob5972]

I don't think Cox makes any money off of "charging extra". They just save on the cost of running the stuff. The monthly fee offer is to buy it from another company.

Re:Allow me to translate.

[webdog314]

Actually, it might not relate to net neutrality now, but it could. Cox is dropping a service because they say it's unused by 99% of their users. However, one could argue that offering the binary groups alone could amount to a fairly large amount of their bulk data traffic. They already block port 80 outbound so that you can't host without a 'business' level plan. If they're doing this to free up their already congested network, what's next, FTP?

Re:Allow me to translate.

[east coast]

FTP doesn't use up any network resources unless someone is using it.

Re:Allow me to translate.

[MidnightBrewer]

It seems a bit fuzzy, doesn't it? If they're saying they're not going to host the servers themselves, then they're absolutely within their rights. If they say that they're not going to allow people to access Usenet no matter where it's hosted, then they're breaking net neutrality.

Re:Who Cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you've got Google groups, but they're privately owned and moderated by Google.

Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules. It may not seem important now, but free anonymous and uncensored posts can be very important sometimes...

Usenet? That still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet has been heading the way of the dinosaurs for quite a few years. By today's standards, it's difficult to use (requires more than a web browser), has a somewhat cumbersome hierarchy and, especially in the case of alt.*, bloated with SPAM.

The resources required for an ISP to proved a full Usenet feed to its subscribers are enormous and provide very little (read: none) return for the ISP.

Some might balk at having to pay "extra" for Usenet access (mainly people that refuse to acknowledge that this is 2010, there are better alternatives, and providing access and storage for the behemoth that is Usenet costs a metric ass-ton of cash), I for one don't. At least with pay services, you get decent retention time and at least some assurance you are getting a full feed if that is what you are after.

And at the end of the day, the majority of people using the Internet today have no idea what Usenet is, or could give 2 shits about it.

"dark allies"

[nurb432]

To you perhaps it is, but others its not.

Also, while i agree there are things such as Google groups that are similar, its still not Usenet, and if you weren't a snot nosed kid, you would understand the difference. ( hint, one is distributed, another is a single point of failure/control, for starters. )

And ya, Usenet isn't what it used to be due to the dumbing down of the net due to the influx of idiots "oooh, click, its pretty", but it still has a place, especially as governments try to crack down on information freedoms.

Re:"dark allies"

[houstonbofh]

To you perhaps it is, but others its not.

Also, while i agree there are things such as Google groups that are similar, its still not Usenet, and if you weren't a snot nosed kid, you would understand the difference. ( hint, one is distributed, another is a single point of failure/control, for starters. )

And ya, Usenet isn't what it used to be due to the dumbing down of the net due to the influx of idiots "oooh, click, its pretty", but it still has a place, especially as governments try to crack down on information freedoms.

And as the "Ohhh, click, its pretty" croud go away. That is the best part of the web. A vacuum for usenet.

Re:"dark allies"

[brunes69]

Google Groups *is* Usenet. They are just another Usenet peer. And their interface and searchability makes usenet more useable than any standalone client I have ever used.

Re:"dark allies"

[Nimey]

Also Usenet readers almost uniformly have a better interface.

Re:"dark allies"

[binkzz]

Finding information on GG is much easier than normal Usenet access, but I found posting was far more a pain up the royal.

Re:"dark allies"

[Hognoxious]

Google Groups *is* Usenet. They are just another Usenet peer.

Huh?

And their interface and searchability makes usenet more useable than any standalone client I have ever used.

I dread to think what you've used before if you think google groups has a good interface.

But where will COX users get copyrighted content?

[diatonic]

Usenet has pretty much digressed into an unregulated binary file distribution network. People who want it for discussion will use a web based news reader. People who use it do download files in a non p2p way will subscribe though cox or somebody else.

Oh look...

[RLU486983]

something new to throttle!

Move over Netcraft

[Linker3000]

Cox confirms it - usenet is dying

Re:Who Cares

[houstonbofh]

Sure, you've got Google groups, but they're privately owned and moderated by Google.

Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules. It may not seem important now, but free anonymous and uncensored posts can be very important sometimes...

I won't seem important until no one has it. Unregulated and anonymous communications are one thing every bad guy wants to stop.

I definitely expect my ISP to provide a news feed

[Chirs]

I use thunderbird for news, and I absolutely consider a news feed as part of the services an ISP should provide.

That said, mine just funnels the requests to a dedicated usenet provider.

Usenet

[jamesyouwish]

What.is.Usenet?

Re:Usenet

[diatonic]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=usenet

Re:Usenet

[jamesyouwish]

What is google I am still using altavista or maybe hotbot.

Re:Usenet

[sa1lnr]

He/she might have got it if the OP hadn't used caps.

Re:Usenet

[Macrat]

What.is.Usenet?

One of those strange old things that grandpa talks about like AOL and 2400 baud rate.

Re:Usenet? That still around?

[houstonbofh]

Usenet has been heading the way of the dinosaurs for quite a few years. By today's standards, it's difficult to use (requires more than a web browser), has a somewhat cumbersome hierarchy and, especially in the case of alt.*, bloated with SPAM.

You can say the same thing about World of Warcraft. So? It is still important to many, and a substantial reduction in service.

The resources required for an ISP to proved a full Usenet feed to its subscribers are enormous and provide very little (read: none) return for the ISP.

A reduction in bandwidth? That was the original purpose after all. You only have to make that posting pass your transit once. It doesn't work so well now, since everyone reposts to get over drops and short retention times. Ooops...

Some might balk at having to pay "extra" for Usenet access (mainly people that refuse to acknowledge that this is 2010, there are better alternatives, and providing access and storage for the behemoth that is Usenet costs a metric ass-ton of cash), I for one don't. At least with pay services, you get decent retention time and at least some assurance you are getting a full feed if that is what you are after.

True. Giga news is better. So farm it out (It is only a few people by their admission) or reduce the fees. What? You just want to cut service and give me nothing back? I wonder why people are upset?

And at the end of the day, the majority of people using the Internet today have no idea what Usenet is, or could give 2 shits about it.

And the majority of people could care less about NASIOC, or Slashdot, or 4chan, or lolcatz, or porn... OK, not the last one. :) So what marginal cost is next? Bittorrent? No, that was the last one. (And I am a Linux dev, so I actually have a legal use for it)

Use an alternate newsfeed

[sconeu]

www.eternal-september.org

No more Usenet cabal?!? End of an era!

[tlambert]

No more Usenet cabal?!? End of an era!

Now where are we going to go for our cancel control messages?!?

-- Terry

If they REALLY wanted a ban that improved service

[tomhudson]

They could get rid of that OTHER back alley of seamy, scummy crap known as craigslist.

Upvote

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a feeling the "who cares about usenet" geeks will change their tune when ACTA arrives and ISP's are shutting down their beloved torrent sites.

Re:Who Cares

[DeadlyBattleRobot]

Google Groups is horrible. They totally ruined DejaNews. They couldn't and can't monetize it so they just fuck with it -- but they will still copyright it to within an inch of it's life. They had no respect for the value of usenet. It was the #1 source for programming information during the 90's and I still miss it. We are living in Orwellian times, and "He who controls the present, controls the past". I would vote you up a million times.

USENET is more than just a server in a rack

[poptones]

Perhaps one can serve usenet in a rack, but that's so very not likely. Daily usenet traffic is measured in the hundreds of gigabytes and maintaining a local cache of that traffic means hundreds of gigabytes of traffic even if NO ONE ACCESSES IT. Whether you have one subscriber or 1000 using that local cache of traffic, the very act of maintaining a local cache means more inbound /0 traffic, more overhead in the form of support costs and maintenance costs, and dealing with an ever spiraling demand for more space.

Anyone who thinks usenet is dead is seriously uninformed. Easynews has gajillions of subscribers and they provide access to binaries groups directly via the browser - no need to learn t use nzbs or nntp clients unless you really want to. Easynews, Giganews and even Astraweb provide access to usenet in a way no other local ISP likely has for a decade now. I understand Cox has had very good usenet service but that just makes the point ever more: it costs real money to provide this service! Cox also has the problem of serving as an illicit gateway - a good bit of the illegal stuff posted to usenet has come through rooted windows machines sitting on the Cox network. By eliminating their pool of nntp resources they shift that security problem off onto Giganews, an ISP that focuses directly on providing this service.

Re:USENET is more than just a server in a rack

[stinerman]

It's a catch-22.

See you're moving hundreds of gigs of traffic per day regardless of how many people use it. To look at that the other way around, think of of many times a user crosses a peer point to download that movie or warez app or whatever and then realize you probably have it sitting on your hard drive already. If only they used USENET, that'd put a huge dent in your bandwidth bills.

Your average Joe has no idea how to use USENET or even that it exists and you can't really go around advertising that people fire up their favorite newsreader and download those same files. It's faster than bittorrent! Blazing speeds! That'll get you in real hot water.

Prices

[bmo]

The $15/month is _not_ what you'll be paying.

The real price is $30/month. It's a crazy price. It's Giganews' "Diamond" plan that has no quota and has vpn. This is the one you want if you have a peg leg, hook prosthetic, eye patch, single gold hoop earring, and a parrot on your shoulder. If you buy this, you have more money than sense.

If you use usenet as originally intended, i.e. text only, the Giganews' price is $3/month. But then there are free nntp servers that carry only text groups anyway.

Highwinds (Cox's usenet) has always sucked anyway. It was always slow and cantankerous.

For those of you saying "hurr, use google groups": shut up. The interface is made of dead babies and week old roadkill. Decades old slrn is better.

--
BMO

Re:Prices

[Nimey]

slrn FTW.

What anyone with sense would do is subscribe to news.individual.net for only 10 euros a year. I guarantee you'll get a better feed than Cox, provided you're not one of those binaries wankers.

Re:Prices

[Monsterdog]

IMHO Cox's Usenet sucked before they outsourced it to Highwinds too.

Re:Prices

[ChristTrekker]

But then there are free nntp servers that carry only text groups anyway.

If you're going to say such things, at least post some URLs...

Re:Prices

[bmo]

That's not my job.

That's Google's job.

Besides, if I mentioned one specific one here, it would be unfairly burdening their machines.

--
BMO

As a Cox customer let me say

[Junior J. Junior III]

This sucks Cox.

Re:As a Cox customer let me say

[zippthorne]

The latest ad campaign started with a commercial where, after a short buildup, a door opens and thousands of tiny white men pour forth..

In more recent ads those tiny white men are shown having gotten into everything, including overrunning a woman's apartment....

How has no one noticed this?

Easynews

[mellowdan024]

it works damn good

You know....

[jayhawk88]

...for a community that loves to bash companies about "buggy whips" and "adapt or die", we sure do love to hold onto our outdated, largely useless tech ourselves, don't we?

Translation of the previous sentence for the benefit of Moderators: "Please mod this comment down to the 13th level of Hell"

Re:You know....

[Joe Tie.]

It's something I've been bemused and a little nervous about for a long time. Slashdot seems to have one of the older userbases of the sites I visit. And I've been a little freaked out seeing how age affects geeks. I'd always assumed we were pretty much immune to it. But I'm seeing the same clinging to old techniques and ideas in the geek community here that I do in any other social group.

Re:You know....

[Spad]

But has Usenet really been superseeded by something much better?

Forums require you to maintain multiple accounts across multiple interfaces and are often hard to find in the first place if your subject de jour is obscure enough.
Social networks barely deserve comment; I have better things to do than spend all my time rejecting endless requests from people I barely know.
Email isn't really practical for large-scale discussion with multiple participants.

Re:But where will COX users get copyrighted conten

[bmo]

"People who want it for discussion will use a web based news reader. "

No. Never. You can pry my curses based news reader from my cold dead fingers.

Web based news readers suck. Google Groups is the worst offender.

--
BMO

What's Usenet?

[greymond]

I partially kid, but seriously, as someone who reads /. and other tech-ish webnews pages as well as plays too many video games and even some that involve dice...I've never used Usenet or even had a desire too and neither have any of my IT friends. Sure, if you ask them what it is they'll tell you, they'll even rattle off some services that have replaced them, but when you ask them "Have you ever used Usenet?" they'd tell you know.

Granted, me and my friends are not the majority of /. readers, but given that this is a niche community to begin with I fail to see why anyone would really want to hold on to the past when there are new better tools to find information and hell, even better ways to pirate shit these days...speaking of Piracy I remember in high school when IRC was the best way to download shit, then it was using IRC to get a Text file and using an FTP app, then it was napster, then it was limewire, then those died and now it's bittorrent and thepiratebay.org - in a couple years something will replace that, lets build a bridge and get the fuck over it...

Re:What's Usenet?

[DedTV]

The reason people hold on to the past is because, from an end user standpoint, Usenet is in many ways vastly superior to P2P for pirates or anyone who shares files.

It's more efficient for end users as well. You can upload a file once, and it's available to be dowloaded, at very high speed (assuming you have a decent Usenet provider) to everyone who wants it almost immediately.
It also has the benefit of longevity. Most premium Usenet provider now have 300-600 day retention. But many torrents lose most of their seeds within the first couple of months. If you're looking for a file that was posted a year ago, chances are there's few, if any seeders left and you either can't get the file or if you can, it's rarely going to be with any great amount of speed.
It's far less of a risk to the end user. I've never known anyone to get a DMCA notice from anything they've uploaded or downloaded via Usenet. And Usenet providers don't host many files, they host articles. And it's a pain for a copyright holder to have to compile a list of the thousands of articles that make up the file they want to request removed. Especially if it's a file that's been crossposted to a dozen different groups. For awhile Copyright holders were just requesting that a handful of articles be removed so the files would end up incomplete and corrupt but par2 files make that a lot less effective.

There's some downsides of course, but Usenet is still arguably a better method for file sharing than P2P.

However, as someone who both uses Usenet and has Cox, I don't care about Cox dropping Usenet. Their service has always been horrendously slow, with poor retention, poor completion, and horrendously unreliable. And it's not even something they've advertised as a service, at least nowhere I've seen, for many years. Unless you went digging through FAQs to find out if they had it you'd never know it was offered.

Lots of Free or Cheap Usenet

[Smuttley]

For those not interested in Binaries (porn, warez, movies) then there are still plenty of free or cheap Usenet suppliers.

A quick search of google will reveal a number.

If you don't trust a free server then for 5 dollars you can get 10gig access to usenet at NewsDemon. It lasts a year. 10 Gig not enough for a years worth of text based reading then for about 20 dollars you can get 100gig.

Re:Lots of Free or Cheap Usenet

[Archon-X]

Free usenet: http://groups.google.com/

They who what?

[blair1q]

Cox had a news server?

I've been paying them for broadband forever, and I never knew that.

Which is why I've also been paying Easynews for NNTP forever...

Fuck Cox.

Re:They who what?

[hduff]

They had a lame-ass news server that didn't carry a lot of the binary groups or alt. groups and had crappy retention of the others.

Verizon doesn't even offer NNTP.

The first rule of Usenet is...

[pandrijeczko]

...that we don't talk about Usenet.

Yet another Cox shafting.

[stargazer1sd]

I'm on Cox, and did not take the news happily. Basically, they're removing a service I DO use, and replacing it with services I don't need. Their so-called special offer is so lame and laughable, it borders on fraud. The one thing I can do is go back to our city government, which grants Cox their franchise, and convince them to open it for bidding when the current agreement expires.

The responses I got from their "customer (dis)service department" show that they care very little about their customers. They just want our money.Time to go look at alternate vendors.

Re:Yet another Cox shafting.

[webheaded]

Yeah, have them open up bidding and watch Cox get replaced by Comcast. Seriously. In my area, they're the only other cable competitor (they're in Tucon, I'm near Phoenix). You think Cox is so bad...take a look at all the other crooked fuckers out there. Cox is still 100x better than Time Warner or Comcast. They haven't been actively trying to fuck me like those 2 have.

Re:Yet another Cox shafting.

[prockcore]

Sounds like you just love griping. Cox has the highest customer satisfaction rating among cable providers.

There are free newsgroups on the internet, go use one of those instead. They're not blocking NNTP traffic, they're just no longer running their own server.

Competition

[Mister_Stoopid]

If you don't like it, just take your business to one of the many alternate ISP choices that are no doubt available in your area! Oh, wait...

Re:Those cocks!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

exactly. Nothing to see here. Nothing to talk about...

Hope cox gives everyone a $15 price cut on their monthly bill.

First rule of *CENSORED*, Do not talk about *CENSORED* :)

It's not very good

[tobiah]

Cox usenet carries a small subset of channels, that are all tame enough to pass the iPhone App store test. If you want meaningful usenet access you'll have to pay for it.

Other Servers?

[pgn674]

There is something about ISP Usenet servers that I don't think I understand correctly.

It seems that Cox, an ISP, is going to be shutting down their Usenet server soon. What this server has done until now is communicate with other Usenet servers on the internet to synchronize and update posts. Cox subscribers were allowed to connect to the Cox Usenet server to read and write posts.

Now, for whatever reason, Cox wishes to take down its server. So, why can't people who like to use Usenet connect to some other ISP's Usenet server? If other ISPs don't like non-subscribers connecting to their Usenet servers, then why aren't there a few free Usenet servers out there on the internet? There are plenty of other free services, like Google Groups, Flickr, Facebook, Ubuntu Forums, etc. Is there something about the Usenet NNTP port 119 protocol that makes it not work as well as HTTP port 80 based free services?

I've read up some on Usenet, though I've never gotten around to even finding out if my ISP or my university has a Usenet server, but I've never figured out why there are no Usenet servers available for the general public. And if there are, then why are the Cox people complaining? Is there anything bad about switching to a free general public Usenet server?

Re:Other Servers?

[Archon-X]

There are free servers out there, but the majority of them are text only.
Google provides one of the largest [Ranked #10 overall (source, top1000.org)] free services - text only, however.

Here's why:
1. Bandwidth is not free. Storage is not free.
2. Usenet necessitates having a huge amount of both to provide even a sub-standard to average service.

Some numbers: there is an average of ~5.4TB of post data peered daily [source: altopica.com]
The industry leader, GigaNews.com provides 622 days of binary retention - that means they have AT LEAST 3.2Petabytes of local storage, and the same in the AMS/IX farm.
They also provide most large ISPs with outsourced usenet, and their clients as well - so they're easily pushing 50 - 100TB of bandwidth a day [source: 2:30AM maths]

And that's pretty much why.

just get rid of the binaries forums

[wintermute000]

problem solved without upsetting legit users?

RE: Win Win

[Archon-X]

This can only be win-win.

1. Your bill is reduced by $15.
2. Giganews has 622+ days of binary retention - the best in the industry. If you're not satisfied with the plan that the $15 provides:
3. Usenet Compare find another plan. Unlimited plans start from $8 depending on provider.
4. Spend the extra $7 on a loved one.

hehe

[Jenming]

cocks

Re:Usenet? That still around?

[s73v3r]

Perhaps. However, an ISP does have the right to change their terms of service and service offerings, like any other provider of a service. If you don't like the change, you find an alternative.

Why should they have this right? Why should any provider have this right?

Institutions

[AlpineR]

Agreed on the 3rd party email. I can't believe that people get themselves tied up with an ISP or, worse, their workplace for their personal email account. But I'd still be reluctant to establish myself with any commercial provider for my main email account. Google isn't evil today, but they might be in a few years.

I use my alma mater for my permanent address. They've been around for almost two centuries and their mission statement includes "communicating, preserving and applying knowledge" rather than "turn a profit by any means necessary", so I trust them to be around and act in my interest for the extent of my life. Right now I pay them $10 a month for my email and web space, but they'll forward emails for free if I ever want to go the cheap route.

Re:Institutions

[jc42]

I use my alma mater for my permanent address.

It's interesting that the academic world has understood the value of a stable, permanent email address, while the commercial world doesn't believe it's anything valuable.

I've also changed ISPs every few years, though often it was actually the same ISP but the name changed due to a buyout or merger or for marketing reasons. Notifying all my contacts of the name change each time was a royal PITA. We also had a change of phone area code here some years back, which had a partial result of a significant number of customers shutting down their land line and switching to cell-phone-only mode.

Meanwhile, I got a university email address back in the 1980s, and it still works fine. They actually changed the official FQDN about a decade ago, but they made sure that the old one still worked (by forwarding to the your new address). It still works, though most people now have email to the old address classified as spam, since the marketing folks are the only ones who still use it after 10 years ;-).

The usual ideologies would have us believe that it would be the commercial world that would give their customers what they want, and would provide stable email addresses. In fact, they have pretty much universally not done this. Meanwhile, the impractical "ivory tower" people in academia saw the value immediately, and have provided it, usually for free, to anyone ever associated with the institution. This really goes against what the ideologues all "know" about both the commercial and academic worlds.

Maybe we should revise our ideologies a bit, so that they can explain why in this case, it's the academic world that gives (literally, at no charge) the customers what they want, while the commercial world continues to refuse to do something so easy and so useful, even when people are willing to pay for it. I don't know how to explain this anomalous result, though. Maybe some economist or sociologist can explain it?

(There's also the further irony that one very commercial corporation, google, has taken the academic approach and provided free email with a stable address to anyone who fills out their form. But I guess they're not what anyone would call a typical corporation. ;-)

Re:Institutions

[isorox]

(There's also the further irony that one very commercial corporation, google, has taken the academic approach and provided free email with a stable address to anyone who fills out their form. But I guess they're not what anyone would call a typical corporation. ;-)

Yahoo and hotmail also offer it, and have for much longer.

In the UK, at least my old uni, my email address was taken off me after graduation :(

Re:Institutions

[jc42]

Yahoo and hotmail also offer [stable email addresses], and have for much longer.

Well, maybe. I've had a number of yahoo accounts. All but the most recent have eventually died, i.e., became unusable because I could no longer login for unknown reasons. Email to their support people were ignored, possibly because I had to send them from an "outside" address, not the yahoo address. So in my experience, yahoo has never supplied a stable address. This may have changed, though, since my most recent yahoo address has been stable for a couple of years now. Those old addresses apparently still exist, because I've tried to recreate them (to get the shorter name), and I've been told I can't because that login already exists.

Hotmail is weirder. I signed up for an address there early on, to see what their approach was like. It disappeared after a few months due to low traffic. I hadn't succeeded in getting any of my friends to use it more than once or twice. A few years later, I signed up again. After a few months, the same thing happened. Maybe I should have notified some spammers of the address? Anyway, I haven't bothered with them since.

In the UK, at least my old uni, my email address was taken off me after graduation :(

That's odd. Most schools figured out quickly that free email accounts are a good way to keep in touch with alumni, and make it easy to hit them up for donations. I've always figured that's why they do it. They typically also let you enter a forwarding address, and all mail will be sent there. That minimizes their need for server space, and provides a useful service: If your ISP email address changes, you can simple enter your new address at your school's site, and it works. This first time your ISP changes your address, you learn to use your school address, and you're encouraged to keep using it and keep in touch with the school.

The admins at your "old uni" apparently aren't smart enough to figure this out. ;-)

Actually, a funny thing with this theory is that my "school" address is at mit.edu, and I don't remember ever getting any pleas for money from them. The only email I've ever received from the school has been announcements of events from sources that I've explicitly signed up for. They seem to have missed the "marketing" potential of email entirely. I know that they not only supply permanent mit.edu addresses to all alumni, but also encourage departments to supply permanent addresses (and often login accounts) to everyone ever associated with the department, and many departments do this.

Giganews bastards

[wiredlogic]

I had a Giganews account once. I tried to cancel it but they kept charging me. It finally ended when my card was compromised and I was issued another number. I got an email from them that month complaining that their charge against my old card was rejected. It's unfortunate that this is the only easy solution for dealing with these bastards.

Get over it. Text groups are ridiculously cheap.

[bcrowell]

For those of us who use only text, paying for usenet is incredibly cheap. When my ISP quit offering usenet, I paid some piddling amount of money to astraweb.com and got 25 Gb worth of usenet access. Two years later, I've only used some miniscule fraction of that 25 Gb. Actually, I'm happier now than I was before. Back when my ISP was still supposed to be providing usenet access, it was unreliable, and when I would call their tech support, I would invariably get somebody who didn't know what usenet was. I got one guy who kept saying that I would have to call the Usenet Company and take it up with them.

Speaking as a Cox Subscriber...

[Alari]

Speaking as a Cox subscriber, I can say that Cox is a poor-quality ISP overall, and this move, while disappointing, does not surprise me.

Re:Speaking as a Cox Subscriber...

[oh-dark-thirty]

As another Cox subscriber, I can corroborate that statement. I tried their "free" Usenet a while back and realized it was worth less than that. I've used a couple of paid services since then and the difference was night and day. While it's certainly a case of dropping a feature that was essentially being paid for in the past I think we can safely assume that long term, we'll be getting nothing in return from them for removing it.

It is getting to be like the airlines

[NicknamesAreStupid]

They just "nickel and dime you to death." Next thing, they will change you for every time you get up from your TV or PC to go to the bathroom. Unlike the airlines, they almost have a local monopoly. Why don't they just raise their rates and be done with it?

Re: It's still one of the best forum systems.

[Animats]

Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules.

Yes. It's one of the few things on the Internet that really is still "peer to peer".

There are still useful forums for Python, MySQL, the C and C++ standards committees, and such. It's useful, for example, that Oracle doesn't control "comp.databases.mysql".

It's also much easier to deal with a large number of Usenet groups than a large number of random forums systems.

My Take

[webheaded]

I'm a Cox customer in AZ. I have to say honestly...nothing of value has been lost here. Anyone that seriously uses Usenet does not use the Usenet that their ISP provides. It is atrocious. Completion is awful, retention is laughably small, and it's quite frankly not worth using.

I've been with them for quite a long time. I have no idea why the guy a few posts up thinks they suck...except that maybe their help desk people are idiots. I've pretty well come to expect that and after working at my own job for a while and talking to other ISPs to help people out, I've concluded that they are ALL fucking morons. A pretty vast number of people in call centers are mindless idiots who don't know what they're doing and are just following the steps. Not a script per se, or even a flow chart, they're just doing what people have said worked and have no idea why. That is why when something unexpected comes up...mind fucking blown.

At any rate, I am not surprised about this at all. No one uses their ISP's usenet service anymore. They're awful. My current provider has over a year of binary retention. Cox has like...less than a month. This service is USELESS because they haven't invested enough time and effort into it because they have better things to do. Hell, they've bumped our bandwidth caps up for free several times over the years I've had them and I don't expect them to lower the price of their service for dropping a completely useless service. Not useless in that no one uses it...useless in that it was piss poor to begin with. They just had it there because it's always been there.

In the 90's usenet was great, now sucks

[Jeff1946]

I used to go to several useful groups for advice on things like home repair, puzzles, folk music. The folks from the dark side of the web took it over. I gave up on it like many other folks. I still miss the good groups. Too bad.

Giganews has the best newsgroup access

[slashgibb]

This is actually a very good thing - I've had an encrypted Giganews account for awhile and love it. I went with them when road runner got rid of theres. Giganews just came out with an internet encryption service that comes with unlimited accounts that tunnels all of your internet traffic using VPN. Giganews doesnt just have the best newsgroups service with the longest retention, but theyre also huge advocates for net freedom in general. I don't have cox cable, but Giganews will give better newsgroup access anyway over the free cox one.

Eh, whatever.

[seebs]

I've been buying Usenet from a provider for ages (megabitz.net). It's better than my experience with ISP-provided news was anyway.

Cox situation...

[Monsterdog]

Actually, it costs Cox to have Usenet on tap, because their Usenet implementation has been outsourced to Highwinds for years. It's moderately annoying to lose it, especially as the overall price won't drop, but what's been lost here is actually no great shakes -- there's low caps on both connections (4) and speed, and the retention is 30 days if you're lucky. No SSL either, which has become pretty standard. Yes, it means paying for an alternative...although it doesn't have to be Giganews. Astraweb works very well, and is fairly low cost on their unlimited plans, and if Astraweb is too costly and you don't care about posting access, there's Cheaper, which has plans starting at $4 a month the last I looked.

Ah.

[vegiVamp]

Am I the only one who read the title wondering what Alan Cox has to do with Usenet ?

Cox has unilaterally changed terms of service

[alispguru]

So, if you have any long-term commitment to them, you can now break it with no penalty.

Good for you!

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Slashdotters don't usually publicly admit their sex lives depend on Cox.

Re:Good for you!

[Slashdot Parent]

Slashdotters don't usually publicly admit their sex lives depend on Cox.

My sex life does not, in the strictest sense, depend on Cox.

FiOS is also available in my area.

Competition is good

[TrekkieGod]

In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection.

Competition isn't harmful, that's just a case of bad planning, which specifically created a lack of competition. Power lines / fiber / water pipes / etc all flow through public land. That means the people should own those (controlled by the government, and the government should build the infrastructure). The government, however, should not supply what flows through that medium. They should give access to multiple power companies to supply electricity to the grid, water companies to supply water, ISPs to supply the connections at the endpoints. The money to build / maintain those structures could come from a tax on the bill for each one of those utilities. This is perfectly fair, as only the people using it will pay for it. In addition, you get the advantage of lower barrier to entry on that market, and don't have to give anyone monopoly rights to give them an incentive to build the infrastructure.

In the end, we end up paying for the infrastructure anyway, since the government tends to give these companies a lot of money to help them build the infrastructure, along with the monopoly rights. Might as well own what we paid for.