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Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June
Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it. From the note that subscribers received: "Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Declining newsgroup usage in recent years has highlighted the need to focus our resources on other priorities, such as increasing our Internet speeds and providing new services, including Cox Media Store and Share. We understand that our newsgroup subscribers may want to continue accessing Usenet. Therefore, we have worked with leading newsgroup service provider Giganews to offer special pricing for Cox subscribers."
Gripes Existential Wombat: "$15++ a month for something Cox provided as a part of the service? Of course they will be reducing everyone's monthly tariff by the value of the service they no longer provide. Yeah, right."
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like,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.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Oh, great. There goes my sex life.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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?
Constitutionally Correct
"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."
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
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...
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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...
Cox confirms it - usenet is dying
AT&ROFLMAO
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.
What.is.Usenet?
www.eternal-september.org
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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.
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
This sucks Cox.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
it works damn good
...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"
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.
Find free books.
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. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
I've been buying Usenet from a provider for ages (megabitz.net). It's better than my experience with ISP-provided news was anyway.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.
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.