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Spam Causes Microsoft To Kill Newsgroups
eldavojohn writes "Some 2,000 public and 2,200 private newsgroups devoted to and managed by Microsoft support are going to be phased out in favor of forums because of newsgroup spam. The Register calls it 'killing newsgroups' but Microsoft eloquently calls it 'the evolution of communities.' Always managing to spin it in a positive light! Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable."
"Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable."
Like that will actually do anything. Spamming is just as much of a problem on forums as it is on newsgroups, maybe not as bad since they use captcha. Even then, captcha has been defeated time and time again. This is just a ploy to force people to register with them.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
To be fair your argument doesn't hold water if you regularly visit official Microsoft sites or even have a Hotmail account. If you do you already have a Live Passport (I think thats what its called) that should work. Microsoft is big enough that it is actually a convenience to have a single login to all of their services and resources.
I'll even go so far as to say that the big *nix distros should get together and support OpenID universally across all their sites for a similar effect.
is all the godawful amounts of east european kiddie porn spam in the alt.binaries area
you would have thought law enforcement would notice and would have shut down nntp on that fact alone. but i guess nntp still inhabits that technical area of the web beyond the average user, so i guess the media and the soccer moms with their awareness of facebook, twitter, and nothing else, they're just unaware there's this horribly huge amount of freely accessible anonymous kiddie porn spamming going on. freely accessible, i guess, if you know how to download a newsgroup reader and enter the name of your internet provider's nntp server in a dialog box. which i guess is all the "technical hurdles" you need to make nntp completely obscure to most people, certainly public awareness, even law enforcement
don't click on ANY images in the alt.binaries area unless you want to unwittingly download child pornography onto your computer. its in completely unrelated groups, and it is purposefully mislabeled as something else
baffling and frightening problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Read directly from the source:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx#ECB
There are a myriad of reasons, and "spam" isn't even the top reason.
So, what exactly are they trying to achieve?
They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?
Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.
Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.
THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!
For FREE information via Email, send request to
cs...@indirect.com
---------
I also remember the day AOL flipped the switch on usenet access. Ugh.
Hahaha, troll!?!
Someone obviously resents being called a brainless fucker. Was it the 30k on credit cards that told you that, or my post pointing out that you owe more from buying shiny-shiny than you earn per annum?
Maybe you work for some corporation whose business is "web apps", and you don't like it being pointed out on slashdot (where some people genuinely understand Free/libre software) that web2.0 is an even shittier deal than boxed corpware 1.0, so you are hoping to censor?
Maybe you have just bought a long string of PCs, paid the MS tax multiple times, and don't want to think you've been ripped off?
No matter what, if you have a gripe with what I posted, reply and take my argument apart instead.