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