Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server

DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

Comments

A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Eternal Vigilance]

Those were good times. Thanks guys.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[__aaclcg7560]

Usenet was my first introduction to online porn. *sniff*

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sniff?

Didn't realise that Usenet pron was THAT advanced!

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not missing anything. It smells like fish.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[twisteddk]

Agreed. I love(d) the days of the newsgroup.

But in all fairness, back then the internet was totally free. And everyone pretty much put up servers for altruistic, informational, educational or other similar non profit purposes. Today with the current economic climate and focus on spending policies, everyone is cutting down. And there just really isn't a viable business model for usenet that I can think of (not that I'm a doctorate in economy, but still).
So I guess Usenet now just goes the way of Gopher and becomes once again a prduct of love and devotion, rather than business. I kinda like usenet that way, so I dont really mind.

Does that make me a geek now ? ;)

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[toby]

back then the internet was totally free

It was? Funny, I remember my ISP wanted to be paid...

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[JeffSpudrinski]

Agreed. Good times.

*Jeff bows his head in reverence*

-JJS

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[twisteddk]

And exactly what services did your ISP provide ? I doubt they happen to have their own dedicated newsserver, and if they did, kudos to them. Most ISPs back then would provide you with a shared homepage server, a mail service, and IP access to the internet. If you were lucky.

The INTERNET was free, some places however you might have to pay for access to it. You still do today. The difference being today, hardly a single page, server or service goes up without someone profiting from it. Even good old /. has banners and adds.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[lul_wat]

My first internet fap was to a photoshop of a nude Captain Janeway. Felt good man.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

"back then" predates you even having an ISP. USENET was around a long time before the internet was made available to commercial interests (including ISPs selling access to the internet itself).

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Maestro4k]

Those were good times. Thanks guys.

I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews, they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.

And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

I accessed Usenet through a local BBS, and the guy charged nothing for it.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

Usenet would be dirt-cheap to operate if, for example, Duke chose to stop carrying the binaries groups. (Like Google Groups today.) Then they'd just be handling the Text messages in groups like rec.arts.tv which requires very little bandwidth.

This is yet another example of throwing-out the whole Baby, when all you really need to do it remove the bathwater (binaries). There's no reason to completely stop carrying Usenet.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

Err what sort of crappy ISP where you with "I doubt they happen to have their own dedicated newsserver...", I don't know what rock you where living under then but at least in North America(eg Canada and the US) if your ISP didn't have a news server you where getting your dial up from one of those ad supported places and even most of them had news. No real ISP does not come with news, of course I used to be able to check my email with pine and had shell access, of course that was 4 or 5 years ago, never mind that was before web 2.0 err time, Oceania has always been the enemy .

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Registered Coward v2]

back then the internet was totally free

It was? Funny, I remember my ISP wanted to be paid...

Some places had free access - Georgia had Peachnet for example that was accessible via dialup.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

This is why AT&T and Verizon dropped Usenet at the very mention of child pornography by Eliot Spitzer. Eliot was grandstanding and everyone new it. It was the best excuse to drop the expense of Usenet altogether. They could have simply dropped the binaries. Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet. I predict that within 2 years, ISPs carrying Usenet will be ancient history.

It is the small number of users involved in copyright infringement that use up the largest amount of bandwidth by at least several orders of magnitude. Disk space, electricity, hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth are not free. Binaries are big bandwidth, and the ISPs do not charge any different whether you participate in text only or you have a peg leg, hoop earring, greatcoat, tri-corner hat, and a parrot on your shoulder. Giganews, on the other hand, charges between $3 and $30 a month depending on usage, which is why they're not exactly complaining about load. And even $3/month for text-only more than makes up for Giganews' costs - there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free.

So I blame the pirates. Your abuse of a medium not suited for large binary files has led to providers determining that it's not worth the bother. For them, I have only two words: Fuck you.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right but usenet is serving a much smaller niche of people on the internet than it did a decade ago. Most major ISPs have either dropped or have plans to drop the binary groups as a free part of the connectivity deal (like email). The cost of maintaining the flow while providing useable retention times and performance is prohibitive as a free service.

The non binaries are cheap to keep but there is less and less interest in the non-binaries every month. It is now possible to drop those groups without much of a squeek from the user base. And as one marketing (ferengi) type told me, the customers who complain are not part of the subscriber domain which generates added revenue. ie: You can ignore them without punishing the bottom line.

People who want the pirated software and music/movies can go to paid services or use torrent. People who just want to chat with others about common interests can go to a variety of social media services that provide many more features (er... including loss of privacy). ....what am I saying? They ARE going to other services. 95% of our customers have no clue what usenet or "news" is. Even the academic types, who were big users in the past, don't know what usenet is. Hell, even the comp sci and comp eng types don't use it or don't know what it is anymore.

In 2000, about 20% of our customers were on our usenet servers regularly. In 2004 it was down to 11% and we dropped the binaries because we were spending over $1M per year on hardware and had 1.5 FTE (er... people) dedicated to it. Plus our legal department was worried about intellectual property issues.

Now less than 1% of our subs use our non-binary service.

Usenet as we knew it is dead and has been for a few years now. Nothing to see here; move along.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Lumpy]

I ran a very small dialup service in 1992-1996 and we ran a usenet server. I also allowed users to run perl scripting for their websites and gave them a shell login.

It's crazy that today you cant find an ISP that gives you 1/4 of the services I used to give users. I bailed when 56K modems became popular as my cost as an ISP went through the roof..

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[pi865]

I was just about to get into this "Usenet" I see mentioned here and there.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[elrous0]

Especially sad because Usenet is the first and last place you can go on the internet for truly uncensored discussion--with no moderators, with no company or organization in charge. Of course, this led to a lot of flamewars, spam, and people calling each other "fag." But it also meant that everyone always had at least one place to go where they didn't have to walk on eggshells and worry about offending the honchos in charge.

Call me silly, but I think that Usenet is something we NEED. It's the one true free speech zone on an increasingly corporatized/moderated/censored internet.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Kjella]

But what exactly was the main point of Usenet? Well, that it was distributed and clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious. Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site, so who really cares if your local ISP cuts it as long as "there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free" according to you?

The whole concept of usenet is out of date, you can argue back and forth about the nntp protocol versus the http protocol but today it is far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that. It guarantees that everybody sees all messages (not everything would propagate well), you can have captchas to prevent spam, moderators (without premoderation like usenet), search (without downloading everything) and so on. If people don't like a server, move the community to a different one.

Sure, it would be neat if you could standardize on a discussion protocol and use the tool of your choice but I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper than doing it by committee. There's honestly not that many different discussion board servers in common use.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[maxume]

Apparently you are unawares of the commercial usenet providers, they make money by providing customers access to usenet.

Go figure.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Xest]

I don't think you can really blame the pirates, because there's not enough decent performance free usenet servers out there that actually do offer binaries.

Everyone I know personally that uses usenet to download files has an account with the likes of Giganews, certainly I don't know anyone whose managed to find a decent free usenet server that holds all binaries and provides decent download speeds.

I don't even think I've had an ISP in the UK for years now that's had binary newsgroup access, only text. I think it was about 2003 since I was last with an ISP that provided binary newsgroup access.

Really, I think as is often the case with these sorts of things, the only real blame lies with the corporate greed machine that tries to seek out every single penny of profit it can, regardless of the goodwill it costs the company.

I'm not sure what you mean about Usenet not being suited to large binary file transfer though, that doesn't make a lot of sense, because, well, it is, hence why people use it for that. It's generally far more efficient for the job than the likes of P2P in fact.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

And the world wide web was never meant to display images...

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[h0dg3s]

Eurasia has always been the enemy.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

>>>clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious.

That is still true today. It's still cheaper for an ISP to store all the Usenet messages locally, and have users access that store, then to setup long distance connections. The concept is not obsolete.

Another advantage of Usenet is that it served a global community, so that everyone was seeing the same identical posts, whereas web forums only serve a few hundred people and they are fractured. With usenet I can visit just one group (example: rec.games) and see all the posts at once, but with web forums I have to read across about 10 different gaming forums to catch up. It's less convenient.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

I think you missed the point. You blame the pirates, but I blame the ISPs for being too stupid to keep the text-only forums alive. That's what I would have done if I were the Admin, rather than turnoff the news: server completely.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Chris Tucker]

Yep. About US$9.00 a month to NewsGuy in my case.

WELL worth that modest expense for access to practically all the USENET groups and alt. hierarchy.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Hatta]

Don't blame the pirates. Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP. Kill USENET and those pirates go back to P2P where every download goes across the public internet at least once per user.

No, it wasn't pirates. It was spam. Binaries and discussion coexisted very well on USENET for many years. It was the spam that killed the discussion, and drove most people away. If people could still use USENET instead of web forums, no ISP would be killing USENET.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

>But what exactly was the main point of Usenet?

A store and forward messaging system. The Internet's BBS.

>Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site

Not when those articles consist of rips from BluRay disks encoded as 7-bit ASCII.

>The whole concept of usenet is out of date,

Just because it's misused doesn't mean it's out of date. It was just never meant to carry binary data. This is evident because every binary attachment has to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII. If you don't understand this then I don't know what to say.

>far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that.

What? And what happens when that one server goes down, or the owner can no longer pay for the bandwidth costs because everyone worldwide is contacting that one server? Eh? 'Splain this to me. How many websites do you know of that go back to the beginning of the Web besides CERN?

>I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper

You're kidding, right? Every web page owner that relies on ads to keep his machines up and the bills paid is raging at you right now.

>Argument against having standards

LOL U TROLE ME.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISPs I used in the late 90s all had NNTP servers. I remember them well, all the porn a teenage nerd could handle.

  I even wrote a Perl-TK program to grab the images from various binaries groups.

Then the ISP got all annoyed because I was on a single dialup session for like a week straight. Good times, good times.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

>I don't even think I've had an ISP in the UK for years now that's had binary newsgroup access, only text. I think it was about 2003 since I was last with an ISP that provided binary newsgroup access.

That's the difference.

Here, in the US, ISPs had carried all of Usenet. Even the binaries. What is happening now is that the binary groups have become so large they dwarf the text groups and the bulk of the cost is for those.

So rather than simply dump just the binary groups, ISPs in the US are dumping all of Usenet.

By the way, when the number of binary-carrying Usenet servers declines to just a handful of companies, expect Giganews et alia to be sued into oblivion by the media companies never to appear again. Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to copyright infringement. Look at what happened to Newzbin. Even though Newzbin never actually infringed, the mere act of advertising as a gateway to copyright infringement brought dark clouds of lawyers and it went down in flames.

The pirates are in the process of killing their own gold-laying goose.

The pirates are killing usenet.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

Fag.

Slashdot, the new Usenet.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

USENET was always better than the web-based forums littering the Internet today. Sadly, pretty pictures and print-and-click-mindset seem to win out over clean, simple, text-based information/knowledge transfer systems. Even SlashDot would benefit from being a newsgroup on USENET instead of the continuing horrors of a user interface inflicted upon readers over the years. Moderation would be greatly simplified.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[oldspewey]

But what exactly was the main point of Usenet?

I'll give you one big point: the ability to search for specific text strings (e.g. if I am researching some kind of driver weirdness or system behaviour) and get all matches across every single group that has a match on that search term ... and then to be able to view the entire discussion in a consistent, threaded format.

Google has recently been doing a better job of finding search results across all the many, many, many esoteric discussion boards out there, but it's still far from optimal.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[zevans]

It's crazy that today you cant find an ISP that gives you 1/4 of the services I used to give users.

Effect...

I bailed when 56K modems became popular as my cost as an ISP went through the roof..

...cause?

(ObGetOffMyLawn moment: trn / Usenet a hell of a lot more efficient and consistent than reading fifty different websites with fifty different ideas on what makes a good interface.)

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Agreed. Keep usenet alive! ...so we can all say what we want, without being banned by a lame moderator.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[mindstrm]

The fraction of ISP customers who actually want NNTP access to local usenet servers is insignificant now - the cost of maintaing the hardware for your few customers that want it outweighs any commercial advantage of hosting it.

Usenet is becoming centralized and will no longer be usenet in the relatively near future.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

>No, it wasn't pirates. It was spam.

You're not thinking from a cost management perspective.

All the text spam in the world does not amount to the bandwidth of a single popular binary group. Text spam is low bandwidth. The cost of maintaining binary support is huge. I could snarf all of the text groups on Giganews' lowest cost plan and probably have room left over. The price for their top tier is 10x that.

Simply going by Giganews' pricing, and assuming it's proportional to the cost of maintenance, maintaining binaries is 10x more expensive than text only.

As for controlling spam, there are plenty of groups out there that can control spam through moderation. And even in the unmoderated text groups I frequent, spam isn't an issue. Do you know where I find the most spam? In the binaries, because the ground is more fertile there, and the toothless masses only want their forbidden pictures of Traci Lords and pirated content and will click on ANYTHING.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[misexistentialist]

Wasn't it Andrew Cuomo that forced ISPs to drop usenet? While Cuomo probably had politics and piracy in mind more than little naked children (or maybe not...), ISPs are mainly dropping usenet because of its unpopularity and of course the ever pressing need for maximum profit. A monthly bandwidth cap on usenet would have readily allowed them to continue serving customers like yourself, but ISPs don't give a shit.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Sloppy]

Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP

You can do the same thing by installing Squid. And that's what really blows my mind: that ISPs aren't supplying caching proxies. If they won't supply a cache for the most popular protocol (http), then it's not a surprise that they won't supply Usenet either.

Disk space is so disgustingly cheap, and for these kinds of jobs you don't even have to bother backing them up. Disk or whole array failed? Oh well, a cache miss. It makes me think that their upstream link must be nearly free, so their "users are using too much of our bandwidth" complaints are bullshit.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

That is still true today. It's still cheaper for an ISP to store all the Usenet messages locally, and have users access that store,

Which assumes "users" actually exist. Given the wasteland of dead groups, I would guess the average Usenet post on a local node is read by 0 to 1 persons at most. Which means it makes no sense to replicate it.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

Reading your comment, I can't remember if it was Spitzer or Cuomo, but I do remember it was one of them, so I'll take your word for it.

Either way it was the NY State AG that did it.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

My first internet access was free through a local college, I wasn't even a student there at the time. They didn't begin to charge me until the world "noticed" the internet about 5 years later. At one time, knowing how to hold a geeky conversation with a professor was a more reliable way to get connected than money, there weren't even commercial ISPs in the area =]

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[IntlHarvester]

It wasn't just the spam, Usenet survived the spam onslaught of the 1990s. What put the final dagger in Usenet was the unstoppable kooks and trolls which infest the place. Seriously, the quality of discussion there just sucks, its flaming and stalking 24x7. Usenet killed Usenet.

Both spam and trolling are symptomatic of central problem of Usenet -- most people just do not want to participate in unmoderated forums. If someone had come up with a moderation option for Usenet that actually worked maybe it had a chance at survival.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

You can do the same thing by installing Squid. And that's what really blows my mind: that ISPs aren't supplying caching proxies. If they won't supply a cache for the most popular protocol (http), then it's not a surprise that they won't supply Usenet either.

Nobody ever claimed that business types were smart.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Hatta]

Binaries on USENET are more efficient for the ISP than binaries on P2P, so that's not an issue.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a full text usenet feed to my house last year. It worked out to about 6.5KB/s continuously.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Xest]

"Here, in the US, ISPs had carried all of Usenet. Even the binaries. What is happening now is that the binary groups have become so large they dwarf the text groups and the bulk of the cost is for those."

But again, the UK ISPs ditched them with the same excuse years ago, when usenet was far less used for piracy because BitTorrent was at it's peak. It's a business decision based on increasing profits by dropping an unpopular service, it's really just as simple as that. No one signs up to an ISP because it does or doesn't offer usenet anymore, they haven't for years, most people don't even know what it is. It's cheaper for the ISP to just to ditch it.

"By the way, when the number of binary-carrying Usenet servers declines to just a handful of companies, expect Giganews et alia to be sued into oblivion by the media companies never to appear again."

Except usenet is already fairly well protected by legal precedent. Newzbin wasn't a Usenet provider, but was an indexer, it performed a similar role to The Pirate Bay. Besides, your assertion that Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to infringement is outright false, it does nothing of the sort, in fact, on the contrary, it states quite clearly on it's site in multiple places that copyright infringement is a breach of terms of use of their service. Usenet can fairly easily be hosted in countries with less hostile IP laws too- whilst places like Sweden were willing to stretch to attacking the likes of The Pirate Bay, it's almost a certainty that a Swedish court wouldn't rule to close down a usenet provider.

I know you're enjoying continuing your rhetoric about how pirates are to blame, but let's face it, the reality is you're just pissed off at finally losing a service that was being provided to you via subsidy from the majority of other subscribers to your ISP. Certainly your subscription alone wouldn't have covered the cost of running the usenet servers. If you don't want to pay your fair share, then tough shit, either pay up, or complain to your ISP for not being willing to use income from other users to subsidise usenet servers for you and the handful of others that use it on your ISP.

Blaming pirates though who are almost in their entirety using paid for newsgroup services instead simply because you don't want to pay for a service yourself is just comical. You really can't see the hypocrisy in that?

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[wiredlogic]

You describe all that and fail to realize that the massive distribution of binaries is precisely what has contributed to Usenet's death along with the spam. It may be hard to believe but at one time it really was used nearly exclusively for forum style discussion. Then the f'in AOLers came.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Lachryma]

(ObGetOffMyLawn moment: trn / Usenet a hell of a lot more efficient and consistent than reading fifty different websites with fifty different ideas on what makes a good interface.)

Where's my NNTP interface to web forums, people?

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[pclminion]

Don't blame the pirates. Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP. Kill USENET and those pirates go back to P2P where every download goes across the public internet at least once per user.

"Your honor, I did not facilitate massive copyright infringement, I just provided network access... Well, I guess in a sense you could say I acted as a cache... Well yes, technically every pirated file was stored on a hard disk located in my building and downloaded from there... No, I'm not responsible for it, it was just a network optimization..."

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

the reality is you're just pissed off at finally losing a service that was being provided to you via subsidy from the majority of other subscribers to your ISP.

I think you have it wrong, mate, being a text group user means I've been subsidizing the binary leechers.

Certainly your subscription alone wouldn't have covered the cost of running the usenet servers.

Since when is the cost of my use of text Usenet even approaching the cost of the pirates?

If you don't want to pay your fair share

My fair share? MY FAIR SHARE?

Take your attitude and shove it squarely up your arse.

then tough shit

And fuck you.

Say hello to your new status. Plonk.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[arth1]

Binaries on USENET are more efficient for the ISP than binaries on P2P, so that's not an issue.

Only presuming that at least two people download each binary.
When a single person or no-one downloads the binary, usenet uses more bandwidth.
And guess what -- most binaries are not downloaded by multiple users on every ISP. Most of them are not downloaded at all, except for from places like Giganews, making them a total loss of bandwidth.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Kjella]

Sigh, I was not suggesting we should pull BluRays over one server. Don't carry the binary groups, nuke anything base64/uue/yEnc encoded or anything else that catches on. What you're left with of plain text as in real plain text should be very easy to host anywhere, particularly if you split it by group. And you can have redundancy, just not the random anarchy. All the comments on this story has lead me to believe this is just one of those parts where Slashdot is nuts. If you wanted to create a discussion-only server it'd be easy as snap but go blame the pirates. You're worse than the MAFIAA on this one...

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Maestro4k]

Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to copyright infringement.

Giganews has never advertised themselves as a gateway to copyright infringement. Their advertising has always focused on their retention (which has almost always been higher than any competing provider), their completion (ditto), and other features (like encryption being available). Their DMCA policy is easy as hell to find, linked off the site from the footer. They not only honor DMCA takedowns for stuff posted by their own users, they will remove stuff posted by users at other providers from their servers. Giganews has also been around long enough that it will be difficult to claim their retention is solely to benefit binary groups. Back when they started binaries weren't anywhere near as big as they are now.

Now some other providers have, and still do, advertise themselves as ways to get copyrighted music/movies/software for cheap, and some day they're going to be royally screwed. But Giganews has always been more of a premium service, even among all the other paid Usenet providers, even back when all paid providers were premium services because most ISPs provided their own servers. Their pricing is also in line with that, you can get Usenet access much cheaper than Giganews, but you'll have to settle for less retention, lower completion, and so on.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Reziac]

Exactly, to the point that people who enjoyed the camraderie of Usenet finally said to hell with it, and went off to Yahoo Groups or webforums or other places with more controllable access -- solely because of the kooks and trolls and sockpuppets and sporging and all the other crap that eventually made it impossible to have a rational discussion on Usenet. :(

Attempts at moderating, no matter how gently phrased, invariably became "You're not the boss of me!" flamewars, which only made matters worse.

There are still spasms of sanity in isolated parts of Usenet, but once you get below a critical mass of regular posters, people lose interest and wander away, no matter how dedicated they used to be. And now that there are so many options elsewhere, even the sane users are diluted down below that critical mass.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

>Sigh, I was not suggesting we should pull BluRays over one server

And neither was I. I was talking about your idea of having a central server for all groups. Even if it's just for text groups, suppose the provider goes from good management to bad management and it goes tits up? Gone. This has happened time and again with web forums. Indeed, it goes against what you said about having redundancy in the latter part of your post.

>Don't carry the binary groups, nuke anything base64/uue/yEnc encoded or anything else that catches on.

I'm all for this.

>What you're left with of plain text as in real plain text should be very easy to host anywhere, particularly if you split it by group. And you can have redundancy,

You've just described Usenet.

Thanks for playing.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[BigSes]

Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet.

Atlantic Broadband dropped them at the end of April, might as well add to the list.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[UnknownSoldier]

> USENET was always better than the web-based forums littering the Internet today.

You must be new here...

I _like_ the meta-information on threads that /. provides:

1) "tags" of Informative, Funny, Insightful, etc, and
2) the "Score" applied to threads.

> Even SlashDot would benefit from being a newsgroup on USENET instead of the continuing horrors of a user interface inflicted upon readers over the years.

Agreed. Just provide a fast & lite interface that works, instead of more bloated crap that loads slower and slower.

I really wish I could read /. in Thunderbird as threaded mode, and be able to see the Meta-Information.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Kjella]

You've just described Usenet.

Except the "anarchy" thing. It's like reading slashdot permalocked at -1, forget killfilters because people make tons of random identities. There is even less than that because there are no IP filters. Last I checked it was pretty much all overrun by SPAM. The only newsgroups I find useful are the "private" groups like qt-interest:

"Go to the info page for more information about the list, and to browse the archives. Additionally, the list is gatewayed to trolltech.qt-interest, a newsgroup on nntp.trolltech.com. This gateway is open for everyone, but requires registration for posting (this is to avoid spamming of the newsgroups and mailing lists). To register for posting access, go here."

It's a news server... but it's not a network, it's not a part of usenet. They control everything and nuke any destructive elements.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Knara]

While true, my first Internet access was actually a public access telnet prompt I found listed in a local computer paper's BBS list. Used it for years before I had the money to pony up for a real ISP (and a second phone line :D ).

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[bmo]

>It's a news server... but it's not a network, it's not a part of usenet. They control everything and nuke any destructive elements.

It's called moderated groups. And you can have those on Usenet if you want.

Don't like unmoderated groups? Don't read them. Stick with Big 8 and stay out of the alt groups. How hard is that? The chaos groups and moderated groups have lived side-by-side ever since the creation of the alt* hierarchy.

And to say there's no such thing as an ip filter, what do you think the "nntp-posting-host" line is there for? Eh?

A lot of this has been hammered out over the years. Stop going to alt* if you don't like chaos.

--
BMO

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Chowderbags]

You know, you could just browse Slashdot at -1.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[thetoadwarrior]

Yes, newsgroups were awesome. I still try to use them to this day but it is mainly spam. I understand why people want to shut their servers down. I feel part of the problem is ISPs never advertise newsgroups and really it was only up to those who knew about them beforehand to use them.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[shiftless]

The difference being today, hardly a single page, server or service goes up without someone profiting from it. Even good old /. has banners and adds.

I know, right? I ran a web forum from 2004 to recently. It wasn't huge, 1,000 or so members, but it was a sizeable and active community. I paid $20 a month to run this service and another $7/year for the domain. I never put a single advertisement of any kind on my site as there was no need. I ran Simple Machines Forum and later phpBB and both were completely free. Nowadays "the big lie" is that it costs a lot to run websites. It doesn't, yet every small-time webmaster on Earth will argue they "need" those ads to afford to run the site, and that they "need" that VBulletin license, and this and that. I guess it's because 90% of webmasters are college kids who think $20 is a lot of money.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[CronoCloud]

There are moderated USENET newsgroups, rec.games.mecha is one I know of.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[CronoCloud]

My ISP's USENET server used to be hosted by AT&T (who also provided the backbone since we used to have 12.foo.foo.foo addresses), they now outsource USENET to Giganews.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Pictish Prince]

Next to free for me. I just paid for a yearly account on the Well and a small monthly amount (I don't recall exactly how much, but it was pretty cheap) for PC Pursuit.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Pictish Prince]

I could do that, too on something known as "vpnet" in Chicago ca. 1991. It was only certain newsgroups, though.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Pictish Prince]

ROTFL

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[mattack2]

Uhh, you can still check your email with pine.. but alpine is better (essentially pine 5.0) since it supports Unicode (spam won't screw up your terminal screen for one).

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss the feeling of a global forum also. But maybe it didn't scale so well beyond a certain audience size in terms of access to the conversation...

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[inKubus]

Do you think it would be possible to run a news server on Amazon EC2 with their cheap storage? Of course it's possible.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet killed Usenet.

I always thought it was the September that never ended.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when those articles consist of rips from BluRay disks encoded as 7-bit ASCII.

Newsflash self-righteous douchebag: The assumption that USENET can only carry 7-bits has been pretty much obsolete for many years now.

This is evident because every binary attachment has to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII. If you don't understand this then I don't know what to say.

Read a little about how yEnc works.

Yeah, yeah, yEnc may suck for you because you prefer uuencode, or base64, but:
If you don't realize yEnc is widely used, then I don't know what to say.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[dgallard]

Kjella (173770) wrote:

> The whole concept of usenet is out of date, you can argue
> back and forth about the nntp protocol versus the http
> protocol but today it is far more practical to have one
> group on one server and ...

Where to start...

If you think HTTP can replace NNTP you may as well also
think that HTTP can replace SMTP. I guess some people may
think that, if we can believe Facebook messages will have
any kind of longevity. Gawd.

Newsgroups provide an IETF standard format for providing
time-stamp, author, subject, and referenced predecessor associated
with a posted message body and, nicely, the ability to CC or BCC the
work to email addresses. In addition, NNTP provides the ability
to *remove* a posted article, something that even email has failed
to provide. Finally, owing to how it is implemented, USENET provides
archiving in a way that no single (HTTP) Web site could ever hope
to provide. The day Facebook dies will be the day all messages
in the history of Facebook die with it.

No, NNTP is not "out of date". It is, in fact, the least understood
sleeper protocol on the Internet and it is a shame that it has been
co-opted by "Forums", blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Not that Twitter
and Facebook do not have virtues, they do. Just community forums
is not one of them, compared with the venerable USENET.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

Cost? It used to be done with machines like the Atari 800 (1 MHz) and Commodore Amiga (7 MHz) running BBS software. That's like 1% demand on a modern CPU - the cost to host text-only groups like rec.arts.tv or rec.arts.startrek.current would be minimal. Heck Google Groups does it for free.

There's really no justifiable excuse for Duke or ISPs to eliminate usenet for their local users.

...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Zarhan]

Best web forums are somewhere on par with late 1980's news readers. I mean, even *threading* is something that you really don't see at too many places. Not to mention the fact that you have to create a separate account for every forum. And each forum looks just a tad different.

One thing I like about Gmane mailing lists is that you can access them via your newsreader at nntps://snews.gmane.org/.

At my old company they had a discussion board in their intranet that was ran in same fashion as Gmane - simple web Interface and also access via newsreader. It got replaced with a "fancy" Phpbb forum at some point....and that was called progress.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[sakdoctor]

Google killed news groups for me. This might sound a bit of a stretch, but I really loved dejanews, and all the time google group search was orange, and on the main menu, it was an excellent search tool for usenet.

Then one day it turned into a shitty blue forum that nobody uses.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Yvanhoe]

This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[LingNoi]

I think what killed news groups was the pirates. All those smug people talking about how the just pay monthly to download directly rather then torrent ruined it for everyone.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Eternal Vigilance]

This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.

Oh, how painfully, painfully true.

I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[couchslug]

Spam and pron had a hand in changing the signal-to-noise ratio,

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Zoxed]

> I think what killed news groups was the pirates.

I used to follow various cycling and some tech, related news groups, and what killed them was the rise in trolls/bigmouths.
Slowly people migrated away to web-based forums, often where a moderator removed some of the worst offending users.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

Slashdot too, unfortunately, is a forum based on short-lived commenting.

In Usenet, I can come back from vacation, post a reply, and all the readers of the group will see my reply. Heck, I can even reply to five year old posts. And there's no redacting the group after the fact. I don't have to trust the forum owner, not even the news server owner. Because it's distributed.

There's no doubt in my mind what kills Usenet: warez flooders.
The 1% of the bandwidth taken up by actual discussions isn't why ISPs can't afford to support it anymore. The bandwidth taken up by the scavengers, as well as the potential lawsuits they bring, is.

I really wish someone got around to solve the binary problem once and for all, so Usenet again could be for discussions. By all means, it needs upgrades, like native Unicode support and better anonymisation without requiring the readers to jump through hoops, but as a push-between-nodes, pull-from-client distribution method, it's unique in both propagation potential, discussion longevity and low client latency.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[GreatBunzinni]

No, that isn't a stretch. Google bought out dejanews to kill it off. Nowadays google groups doesn't work at all, with them not even bothering with spam (i.e., they don't do anything about the countless complaints regarding Google spammers and spam in google groups) along with them burying any search result that involves Usenet from their groups search. This has become so bad that Google's top search hits on programming topics frequently consists of sites that shamelessly mirror Usenet content to try to pass it off as their own forums, while it completely ignores any hit from the very same newsgroup.

Then there's Google's inability to find even popular newsgroups such as comp.lang.c++ when you even when you explicitly search for the group

If that wasn't enough, Google's newsgroup archive has since been eroding, which is a major blow to one of Usenet's most valuable use, humanity's best and most successfull attempt at an expert system.

So it isn't a stretch to claim that Google is the one responsible for killing newsgroups. The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[GreatBunzinni]

That is a completely absurd thing to say. Please take the time to compare how many sites dedicated to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works exist and compare it with Usenet's traffic. Then please explain why "the pirates" (whatever that is) haven't killed HTTP although they have a bigger presence in the WWW than in Usenet. Obvously you will not be able to explain that, simply due to the fact that you are trying to pass off a red herring and, in the process, vilify "the pirates", whatever that is.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.

Oh, how painfully, painfully true.

I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.

Anonymous Coward likes this.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. Not only has the communication become parodically terse, but it has also become imperative to answer as quickly as possible. If you actually re-read what you wrote, take time to correct errors, and perhaps add a new point or two, i.e. spend some time on improving your post, it won't be seen by many if any.

And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline. Slashdot has also done some things to try to stem it, like the grading of both articles and posts, but it's an afterthought that doesn't solve the problem, but created karma whores instead.
The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Professor_UNIX]

Binaries groups should definitely be deleted off of any legitimate Usenet server. There's no reason for people to be downloading binaries off Usenet when there are web and FTP sites that are the proper places to be putting binary files. It still wouldn't solve the other major problem which is spam. The signal to noise ratio on discussion groups because of the spammers and trolls is just ridiculously low.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[LingNoi]

HTTP is ubiquitous. Usenet is a few servers. One of which was shutdown because of the reasons I stated.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

Moderators often censor views. The guy saying "Linux is better" in the 1990s may have been unpopular with the majority still using Windows 95 or Mac OS 7, but at least on Usenet he could not be censored. On the forums he can be.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP migrated to 2.0, now no one can tell the difference between trolls and users, ISP's and the state, porn and content, communication and blather.

HTTP is dead or had you not noticed

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

False, false, false.

- I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s. True google added some new user-created groups, but that's a GOOD thing. It's expansion with new features.

- I don't see any evidence of archive erosion. I can still find my ancient high school post from 1988, 89, and so on.

- Google search results DO link to Usenet groups. Goto the front page and type something like "politics" in the second user-input box, and you get a list of all the groups related to politics (alt.politics, myc.politics, tx.politics, etc). OR you can click the "browse usenet" button and dig into the Usenet hierarchy directly.

- And here's the search results for comp.lang.c++ - apparently there are SEVERAL of these, including foreign languages and a moderated group: http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?lnk=nhpsfg&q=comp.lang.c%2B%2B&qt_s=Search+for+a+group

I think the real problem here is not Google but PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair).
Almost all your complaints boil-down to not knowing how to use the googlegroups software.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[NJRoadfan]

There was actually a forum revolt over at AudiWorld when they switched from Kawf (older threaded view forum software and open source) to vBulletin. The problem was quick one line subject posts don't translate very well on vB/phpBB style forums. That and I guess a lot of Usenet junkies frequented Audiworld (most now post at a spin off site called quattroworld... which uses Kawf).

Internet Brands (who owns Audiworld and vB) managed to hack in a threaded view on vB and use it at Audiworld. It works, but is awkward to use because most new users of the site just use the (default) subject view, so threads are impossible to follow.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[identity0]

Slashdot's moderation system does encourage posting in a story faster rather than waiting to compose a reply, yes. It also makes it better to reply to a post with high moderation rather than starting your own thread. It's unfortunate, I wish there was a better way of combining mod point systems with time-based systems instead of the either/or sorting we have today.

It's a system that has been flawed since the 90's, so it's unlikely to go away.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

>>>I think what killed news groups was the pirates

And that could very easily be fixed by Usenet Sysops, by simply refusing to carry the binaries - revert usenet to what it was originally - a text only interface.

So. How much would it cost to setup an old-fashioned BBS (or website) to carry rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.startrek, and so on? That's how I accessed the Usenet in the old days, via slow Trailblazer modems (~18 kbit/s) that transferred the data in the late night hours. I can certainly do it again.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=usenet%3Dcomp.lang.c%2B%2B

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/topics?lnk
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.leda/topics?lnk
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/topics?lnk

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Kjella]

Newzbin was never a usenet server, it was a usenet indexer and usenet client. And by that I don't mean anything like Google, but through a mix of automatic and hand indexed content made .nzb files which were sort of like torrents for usenet, a small file that let you pull all the parts of a huge file from binary groups. An overwhelming part of those binaries were copyright infringement, people who used it for discussion had no need of newzbin. They were rougly as subtle about what the site was about as The Pirate Bay...

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Undead NDR]

I really wish someone got around to solve the binary problem once and for all, so Usenet again could be for discussions. By all means, it needs upgrades, like native Unicode support

Usenet is encoding-agnostic: Unicode support depends solely on your client.

and better anonymisation

Pick a server that encrypts your IP. Even some of the free ones will do this (e.g.: news.albasani.net, news.aioe.org).

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Opportunist]

Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.

The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.

If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Opportunist]

Then vote with your feet. That's the difference between the internet and real dictatorships.

Oh, I got ahead. I always get to hear "the internet is an anarchic place". It's not. It's a collection of minuscle dictatorships. Every server its own little dictatorship. Of course, usually governed by the laws of the country it is placed in, but also subject to the whims of its owner. If you want to create a board where the discussion of fuzzy purple things is banned because you have a pathological hate of fuzzy purple things, you can just do that. People who like fuzzy purple things will have only one choice: Not to go to your board.

But that's not really the big problem. There's other boards. And, unlike real life, if you don't like the dictatorships offered to you, roll your own! You cannot really stage a revolt (there's not really a neat way to overthrow an "internet dictator", even if you did manage to break through his defenses and crown yourself the new root, he can simply act like the average schoolyard crybaby, grab his ball, or rather, server, and go home), but you can simply grab a new server and go for it.

Of course, if you act like the average armchair dictator, you will be pretty lonely in your little dictatorship. Only if you offer people a reason to come to your fiefdom, they will opt to do that. People are generally lazy, and if you offer them what they want to have, they will come to you instead of founding their own little dictatorship.

So censor if you must. If I don't like it, well, bye.

The obvious drawback of such a system is that it will invariably lead to groupthink. You will eventually end up on a server that shares your views, which will be reinforced by the others that come to this server, while people with opposing views are probably being expelled or "gently nudged" to consider leaving the server the better idea.

And yes, that even applies here at /. Groupthink is a big problem, let's be honest here. And while I generally share the group opinion (duh, I'm still here), on some topics it's hard to not fall for the fallacy of "hey, everyone agrees, I'm modded 5+ insightful, so I gotta be right".

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[thomst]

Not only has the communication become parodically terse, but it has also become imperative to answer as quickly as possible. If you actually re-read what you wrote, take time to correct errors, and perhaps add a new point or two, i.e. spend some time on improving your post, it won't be seen by many if any.

Whoa ... for a second there, I thought you were talking about /.'s article submission policy! (It's just like newspapers, folks: getting it first is WAY more important than getting it right!)

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[ifrag]

revert usenet to what it was originally - a text only interface

Yeah! That'll stop it obviously, especially since it is text only anyway.

I suppose the scope of your comment extends all the way to identifying and filtering out the encoded chunks.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Opportunist]

Bluntly? Because it doesn't hurt business. Quite the opposite.

Usenet is (and always was) a niche product. A discussion media for geeks, students and other, fairly small groups. It was never a tool of the average Joe Randomuser, i.e. the dream customer of every ISP. Why dream? Because he doesn't care for stability or throughput, because he doesn't need a steady stream of data and is happy with burst availability of his pipe. Because he uses it for mail and http traffic. Sure, he might download a thing or two in a blue moon, but generally he's looking at webpages and sending mails. This is without any possible doubt the dream of any ISP. He creates fairly low traffic and is generally not very picky about the quality of his pipe.

Usenet users are generally more computer savvy and, let's be frank here, a fair lot of usenet groups are used to trade content. Considering the noise-to-signal ratio of usenet encoding, it's a horror, but let's not go there for now (but, as a sidenote, why the heck do people always choose the WORST possible way to transfer blobs? usenet or mail, is there any POSSIBLY worse way considering the overhead necessary for encoding?). But such users also demand a lot more from their pipes. They need stability, because they do want to use telnet or ssh connections (or other things that require a stable, uninterrupted connection), they do use a fair lot of bandwidth and usually also put a lot of constant traffic on the line (I don't know exactly why that's a big deal for ISPs, but appearantly it is).

So if I could get rid of such users by cutting off the usenet server, would I do it?

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[lennier1]

Valid if you ignore the moderated groups.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Yvanhoe]

Slashdot does not aim at replacing usenet. It is a news website for Christ's sake ! There should be slashcode-like foras with a "show recent updates to the discussion I participate in" feature. Slashdot does marvelously well for its intended goal. The real oddity is why no one reuses the slashcode features...

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[GreatBunzinni]

You sadly don't know what you are talking about and you don't even try to disprove anything that I've said. For example, you replied to my comment regarding how Google is a disgrace at filtering spam with an idiotic statement that:

I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s.

Either you failed to read what I've written or you tried to pull a red herring to divert the attention from Google's appallingly bad track record at tackling both spam and spammers to this absurd comment regarding user interfaces. My point was about Google's terrible anti-spam and anti-spammer track record, not UI design. So, where exactly did you get the idea this was about UI?

Then your next statement is this silly thing:

Google search results DO link to Usenet groups.

Once again you've failed to understand what has been said. No one said that Google stopped presenting usenet results. What has been said was that Google groups search is so bad that it even places on their top hits (i.e., what Google considers the best match) hits from websites that do nothing more than mirror usenet to try to pass off discussions from newsgroups as their own forums. As a quick and dirty demonstration, I've browsed comp.lang.c and then searched Google groups for "How to use maloc with strcut", a discussion which has been started quite recently and whose subject is somewhat unique. So, after searching for the subject through Google groups, you will notice that the first two hits are from websites mirroring comp.lang.c. Granted, in this test (which was quick and dirty) a link to Google's site on comp.lang.c appears in 3rd place but this, unfortunately, isn't the norm. It is, quite unfortunately, an isolated incident. For example, if you search for "malloc array" on google groups then all your hits will be from sites that either mirror usenet or provide rudimentary forums, with the first usenet hits appearing on the 3rd page and being from groups such as mailing.freebsd.stable and comp.unix.questions, the last one being a hit from 1991. In fact, the first hit that pops up from Google's usenet archive that comes from a C-related newsgroup comes in the form of this post from comp.lang.c.moderated that appears at the bottom of the 5th search results page and is from 2003.

So, care to explain where exactly do you not see a burying of usenet's search results and an erosion of the usenet's archive?

You may play the role of one of Google's tireless PR drones by either slapping red herrings around in the attempt to conceal Google's problems such as the abysmal spam problem and it's usenet results' burying in it's Google groups search. You may even try to go into personal attacks such as claiming that Google's problems amount to nothing more than user dumbness. Yet, that doesn't stop people from looking stuff for themselves and, as a consequence, realize that your accusations are either baseless or patently false.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think the pr0n is noise and not signal?

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Bing Tsher E]

It's a teeter-totter. If the people came back to usenet, the spammers would, too.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

Binaries groups are clearly not text (hence the binaries.* name). Sure they use the 128 character set to transfer their data, but it is STILL data, not readable by a human being. f I were an Admin at an ISP I would stop offering those groups rather than turnoff the news: server completely.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[0100010001010011]

How hard would it be to write a "Usenet""Online Forum" thingy? "EVERYONE" uses webmail however some of us still prefer thunderbird or other real mail clients.

Take.. http://forum.xbmc.org/ for example.
You'd still need to register on the web and login to usenet with your password. All of the separate forum groups would be a separate group (does usenet support spaces, if not change them to an underscore).

It would require a separate server process, but for large dedicated forums it shouldn't be too hard.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

>>>you don't even try to disprove anything that I've said.

???. What? Was I typing in invisible ink? :-| I listed 4 points plus direct links to disprove what you falsely claimed. Let me repeat them, but this time using visible ink:

- DejaNews and Googlegroups - still the same interface
- I can still find ancient posts from the 80s
- Goto the front page and type something like "politics" - http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?lnk=nhpsfg&q=politics&qt_s=Search+for+a+group
- And comp.lang.c++ - http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?lnk=nhpsfg&q=comp.lang.c%2B%2B&qt_s=Search+for+a+group

I think I've proved you wrong.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

P.S.

And point 5 - Here you can browse the entire Usenet directly to find precisely what you desire, just the way it's done on a dedicated NetNews program: http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=gtype%3D0

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[commodore64_love]

>>>You may play the role of one of Google's tireless PR drones

How do you know when someone's lost the argument? When they resort to insults. It means they've run out of rational or logical points, so they are lashing out in a primitive fashion. - (I don't work for google. Never have. I don't even use their email or browser, so neither am I a biased fanboy or "PR drone")

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[mindstrm]

And then keep policing every other group to ensure no binaries are posted there....
Then you'd look at what percentage of your customers are actually using the server -vs- the cost of running and maintaining it - and you'd probably come to the conclusion that there was no business sense in keeping it running.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[DerekLyons]

And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline. Slashdot has also done some things to try to stem it, like the grading of both articles and posts, but it's an afterthought that doesn't solve the problem, but created karma whores instead.
The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

 
Not that the moderators need to even bother, 90% of the time, after the article drops below the fold, the users aren't posting comments anyhow.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Sloppy]

The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.

Dejanews was just one brief window in Usenet's history. Usenet was around for a long time before Dejanews, and plenty of people used Usenet but not Dejanews even when Dejanews was around. I'm not putting down Dejanews -- they were really cool and I used them too -- but that's just one particular service provider and Usenet sure as hell didn't need them.

You can't blame Usenet's declining popularity on Google. The worst you can say about Google is that they essentially ignore Usenet and are neutral instead of helpful; they're sure as hell not doing any harm.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Skuld-Chan]

What killed newsgroups for me was spam. I know they probably have a handle on it now, but back in the late 90's the signal to spam ratio was like 90%.

One of the few times in my life too when spam really started to piss me off - so much so I never went back. People must have bought this garbage they were pushing too - when some rec.arts group shot up to 10,000+ messages a *day* (from 20 or 30 - yes it really was that bad).

Its kind of sad too - unified message boards are now a thing of the past. Same with community BBS's (there was a time - I know its hard to believe, that you knew who in your community was doing what with computers, or radio or model airplanes because of the local bbs's).

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Cajun Hell]

Unfortunately, I have to agree. Not only has the communication become parodically terse, but it has also become imperative to answer as quickly as possible. If you actually re-read what you wrote, take time to correct errors, and perhaps add a new point or two, i.e. spend some time on improving your post, it won't be seen by many if any.

And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline. Slashdot has also done some things to try to stem it, like the grading of both articles and posts, but it's an afterthought that doesn't solve the problem, but created karma whores instead. The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

Me too!!1

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[emurphy42]

GreatBunzinni's original problem with finding comp.lang.c++ occurred because he didn't escape the +'s as %2B in the URL, and by convention Google treats unescaped +'s as equivalent to spaces.

His complaints about searching for the "How to use maloc with strcut" thread (dated May 13, 2010) are legitimate. Here are some specific results, the last of which provides an effective workaround if that's all you care about:

• Going to groups.google.com and searching "How to use maloc with strcut" only finds some Usenet-mirroring web sites.
• Going to groups.google.com and searching (comp.lang.c "How to use maloc with strcut") also only finds some Usenet-mirroring web sites.
• Going to groups.google.com and searching (group:comp.lang.c "How to use maloc with strcut") finds nothing.
• Going to groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c and searching for "How to use maloc with strcut" also finds nothing.
• Going to google.com and searching for "How to use maloc with strcut" finds the Google Groups entry, but puts it about halfway down the first page, as GreatBunzinni pointed out.
• Going to google.com and searching for (site:groups.google.com "How to use maloc with strcut") does the Right Thing.

I also tried appending "subject:" or "subj:", as well as searching for a distinctive phrase within the body ("Why i get warrning" [sic]) instead of the phrase from the subject, none of which seemed to improve things - I didn't test every single combination, though, and anyway we've already found an effective workaround at this point.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[emurphy42]

Oh, and if you're just looking for a traditional Usenet server, you can still read and post to text newsgroups for free - I switched to these guys back when RoadRunner dropped Usenet, for instance.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

Usenet is encoding-agnostic: Unicode support depends solely on your client.

NNTP is very character-set dependent. RFC977-compliant servers only talk US-ASCII, while RFC3977-compliant servers talk UTF-8. All other character sets have to be encoded, which is what your client does for you.
Other character sets can not be used in group names, server names or other arguments to raw NNTP commands.

Unfortunately, about half the Usenet servers "out there" do not talk Unicode yet, which is why switching over isn't taking place yet, and most systems keep running ASCII natively out of compatibility reasons.
It's the transition period that's painful; you can't do things you could do in the old days, like grepping a spool, because most everything is encoded due to the assumption that recipients or waypoints might be ASCII-only.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Adrian Lopez]

And point 5 - Here you can browse the entire Usenet directly to find precisely what you desire, just the way it's done on a dedicated NetNews program: http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=gtype%3D0

Did you even try searching USENET through the link you provided? When I try it I get a bunch of results pointing to third-party websites and very few pointing to USENET posts.

Google is nearly useless these days if you want to search USENET specifically.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Adrian Lopez]

I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s.

You must have a really poor memory, then. Google Groups has changed significantly since it first acquired Deja's USENET archive. USENET groups used to be featured a lot more prominently on Google, whereas now you have to wade through a bunch of groups and sites you don't care about when all you want is to search USENET specifically. It's obvious Google wants to make USENET a lot less visible than it used to be, and for that reason I find Google Groups is no longer useful to me.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Reziac]

I'm not sure it's so much "burying usenet" as it is about prioritizing their search for websites. So a crappy mirror on a WEBsite will get listed far above the real thing.

Tho I do think the Googleborg has gotten way out of hand, as demonstrated by recent changes that clearly do not give a shit about what users want (you know, the ones who made Google's marketshare so large in the first place), and are mainly geared toward sucking profit out of corporate partners.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Adrian Lopez]

And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline.

Slashdot's D2 system is particularly infuriating. I like to have an idea of the structure of a discussion thread without having to click a bunch of times for articles to be loaded. I find D2 makes it a lot more difficult to browse deeply into particular threads, which is why in my preferences I have Slashdot set to use the old discussion system.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

Slashdot does not aim at replacing usenet.

I never said it did.
However, many of the features (and peculiarities) that are now common on most one-to-many fora started right here, and it has been influential precisely because it's the world's second largest geek forum (after Usenet).

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me thinking strcut was some unique new function I hadn't heard of. Apparently, the subject is "unique" because he mispelled struct.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[GreatBunzinni]

I'm not sure it's so much "burying usenet" as it is about prioritizing their search for websites. So a crappy mirror on a WEBsite will get listed far above the real thing.

I see what you mean and you have a point. Nonetheless, these results are generated from a Google Groups search, which is supposed to be a search engine which is fine-tuned to comb through usenet newsgroups (i.e., Deja's successor) along with other groups such as Google's and other web forums. With this in mind, it's still appalling that Google's search completely and recurrently ignores Usenet in favor of mediocre mirror sites.

Tho I do think the Googleborg has gotten way out of hand, as demonstrated by recent changes that clearly do not give a shit about what users want (you know, the ones who made Google's marketshare so large in the first place), and are mainly geared toward sucking profit out of corporate partners.

What bothers me is that they can pretty much still generate profits if they produce decent search results. Moreover, if they produced Usenet hits then the user would never stray outside Google's site, which means that Google would keep all the ad revenue for themselves by not having to pay the mirror site's operators for the adsense hits.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Google bought out dejanews to kill it off

Dejanews was going out of business after multiple changes of strategy and Google rescued the archives from destruction.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some folks seem to have no damn patience whatsoever... Saw a guy today on a forum for a free software package had posted an obscure question - by the time thirty minutes had elapsed from his initial posting he had posted four additional times wondering why his answer was not yet present.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Reziac]

True -- what the heck is it with corporations, at first they're perfectly profitable doing what they do best, and everything is copasetic; then they reach a certain threshold of size and growth, and suddenly they borgify like this. :(

Google is becoming the Microsoft of the internet. :/

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

If one knows the group exists there is no need to search for it, just go directly to it: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c.

Next, the search box after the initial search results are displayed has an option button for All Groups and Google Groups--change the option button to Google Groups and redo the search, the search will be limited to Usenet plus Google's own groups.

Search quality and spammers, each is another separate issue, but one can still directly access a newsgroup and one can still limit their search to mostly just Usenet.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Anonymous Coward]

that is very true. the silent movie discussion group was completely destroyed by spammers and trolls. SILENT MOVIES fer crissake!! now THERE's a
subject to attract hate filled vitriol!! we now have a very nice forum with few death threats except when someone says they think that GREED 1923 is not the bees knees. i forgot BIRTH OF A NATION. actually that one still gets quite a few goin' off the rails.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[jimicus]

I seriously doubt they do have a handle on spam. The whole point of NNTP is to allow messages to be stored and forwarded more-or-less indiscriminately. There is a "cancel post" mechanism but it is frequently not supported by servers because it's very easy to abuse by cancelling any post you please.

Moderated newsgroups were never as bad but they fall into one of two camps:

1. Administrator-moderated. Now you need an moderator to approve every message before it goes out (whereas most web-based boards, the moderator can remove a post long after it was posted).
2. Self-moderated. But 90% of Usenet clients didn't exactly make it easy to wave the appropriate poultry.

combinations

[Threni]

> Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?

Maybe, though, Usenet is an idea whose time has been and gone. There are other ways of sharing information now, which don't suffer the same intractable problems of spam etc.

Re:combinations

[wwwald]

And those ways are? And in what way are they superior?

Re:combinations

[gzipped_tar]

It means Google is a step closer to its goal of world domination.

Re:combinations

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?

I don't understand. I would say that, if anything, Goggle contributed killing Usenet in the long run. I remember that when Dejanews was around, I always managed to find things. When they moved everything to Google, after a while, it started missing things. It may be also due to the fact that a lot of the discussions already moved to forums, but I remember searching for specific terms about posts I did in the past and not being able to find them (unless playing around also with dates and other things).

Re:combinations

[Anonymous Coward]

You're using one of them right now.

Re:combinations

[wwwald]

Slashdot is hardly a replacement for Usenet. Can I get answers for 3 tech questions per day over here?

Even if it was, in what way would it be superior to Usenet?

Re:combinations

[Hognoxious]

The problem with Google groups is that it doesn't seem to understand where usenet ends and the web starts. Such as when I'm searching for a usenet post and it takes me to Wikipedia or some AOL forum crap.

Re:combinations

[Majestix]

Agreed. What are those ways?

Usenet's strength lies in its simplicity, much like Craigslist.

Though i will admit to having enjoyed the alt.binaries at one point. Just became
too much hassle.

Re:combinations

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, not a problem. Your answers are:

1) RTFM noob
2) To get the driver to work you have to modify the kernel flags and recompile it
3) For best performance, load the binary blob driver

You're welcome!

Re:combinations

[Colonel Korn]

> Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?

Maybe, though, Usenet is an idea whose time has been and gone. There are other ways of sharing information now, which don't suffer the same intractable problems of spam etc.

Google simply bought Deja News, you know, which was giving us web access to newsgroups 15 years ago. Its search engine was actually a lot more powerful than that of Google Groups, too, giving you complete control over the ranking of your results.

Re:combinations

[Bing Tsher E]

listservs are really good. You obviously can't be anonymous, and you have to subscribe. Or read the archives which means you probably can't respond or directly contact any of the participants. But they're still very useful for specific-topic type discussions.

I subscribe to a few. gEDA-user, netbsd-vax, and the softrock list at the moment.

hopefully, a typical slashdot exaggeration

[catmistake]

Notable, because Duke was first, and sad, if a sign of things to come. But it's a global server peer network. Duke can't turn it off.

Re:hopefully, a typical slashdot exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

Follow the money. If it becomes too expensive and no sufficient gain comes from it, they'll shut it down. I'm not saying because it's Duke (don't really know the institution), but that's how institutions tend to act.

Re:hopefully, a typical slashdot exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on! It becomes expensive if they want to provide access to the terabytes of redundant spam in binaries newsgroup.

Re:hopefully, a typical slashdot exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

...a sign of things to come...

!

It's a sign! Do you not see it?

The servers, Duke nuke's 'em! Forever!

That's how it starts

[Thanshin]

First they closer Limewire

First they closed the usenets.

When they came for my router, it was to replace it with a FTTH.

And it was good. ...

Wait... I think I fracked up that one. What were we talking about?

Re:That's how it starts

[Anonymous Coward]

me too!!

Wait... I think I fracked up that one. What were we talking about?

Worry about the data

[Max Romantschuk]

While it's sad that this great part of Internet history is fading into obsolescence, I'm more worried that the proper care is made to archive the data for future generations. As long as we can still access the text of the discussions I think it's an acceptable and inevitable side effect of progress...

Re:Worry about the data

[Thanshin]

I'm more worried that the proper care is made to archive the data for future generations.

I wonder how unlikely it would be to lose all history of the internet culture in a giant magnetic wave that deleted all hard drives.

It'd be the modern burning of the Library of Alexandria.

Re:Worry about the data

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be the modern burning of the Library of Alexandria.

Who cares? Humanity as a whole is too dumb to learn from history anyway. Even with all those documents still here, we repeat the same crap over and over again.

You could destroy every historic record older than a few decades and nothing would change. Humans for the most part are short-sighted idiots.

Re:Worry about the data

[jibjibjib]

Inside the hard drive case itself are the magnets that move the read/write head. They're probably stronger than almost every other magnet you've played with. They sit a few centimetres from the disk all the time and it still works.

Everything outside the case is further away from the disk and shielded by the case.

The point is, for an external magnetic field to suddenly erase all the world's hard drives it would have to be extremely strong. Like, strong enough to make your paperclips jump off your desk and impale you, or something.

Besides, there's a lot of stuff on flash memory and CDs and even paper. If all the world's hard drives were somehow erased, we'd lose a lot of specific data, but we wouldn't have lost all internet culture. A single intact disc of Wikipedia or some other useful resource could tell a future archaeologist more about our culture than we know about any previous culture.

Re:Worry about the data

[Hognoxious]

They sit a few centimetres from the disk all the time and it still works.

How far? With most discs made in the last decade that's be outside the case.

Re:Worry about the data

[jibjibjib]

They're inside the case somewhere beside the disks (not above or below them).

Re:Worry about the data

[ciggieposeur]

I'm more worried that the proper care is made to archive the data for future generations.

I'm actually concerned that someone will begin cross-referencing Usenet, Facebook, blogs, Fidonet, BBS archives, web forums, etc., and create a posting history of everything tied to a particular person's name. Where googling a 50-year-old brings up a flamewar from a local BBS in 1985, versions of their resume spanning 20 years filling in all the holes they didn't want the next hiring manager to see, and a couple of at-the-time-anonymous alt.romance posts that now expose intimate details of their dating lives.

Re:Worry about the data

[Max Romantschuk]

I decided long ago to self-censor myself to the degree I'm comfortable with other people finding out. That being said, I'm pretty open about stuff. An employer who dismisses me based on online tracks probably isn't what I'm looking for anyway.

It's pretty pointless for me to try to hide stuff whenever I post with my real name. It's unique in the world as far as I know, and Googling (just checked) turns up about 6K results at the moment. I guess I've just decided to live with limited privacy. What I want truly private I just keep off the net. :)

Enthusiasts will keep Usenet going

[AMindLost]

and lets face it, where there's porn, there's no shortage of enthusiasts.

Re:Enthusiasts will keep Usenet going

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that as "euthanists."

Only way I can put it...

[Aeternitas827]

"So fell Lord Perth...and the countryside did shake with that thunder."

This nothing to do with low usage

[Viol8]

Anyone who still uses usenet regularly like me knows they're just as alive as ever so the slow closing down of usenet has nothing to do with declining usage, but in my slightly paranoid opinion I suspect it has everything to do with it not being self funding. Ads simply don't work on usenet (probably because of its text based nature) unlike with web sites and no revenue = no reason to keep the service going.

When it does eventually die I'll miss it since as yet I haven't seen an alternative that works nearly so well and has so many different topics under one roof so to speak.

Re:This nothing to do with low usage

[dintech]

Yes exactly. If it's the end of usenet, Giganews doesn't know about it.

Re:This nothing to do with low usage

[MoeDumb]

Giganews isn't breaking its formerly inviolable pricing structure because Usenet's dying but because of all the competition. Competition means there's a healthy, thriving Usenet community. I don't think Duke's demise is indicative of anything much really. Long live the U!

Obsolete

[kieran]

... And nothing of any importance was lost.

(fond memories remain intact)

Re:Obsolete

[terremoto]

... And nothing of any importance was lost.

Really? Just have a look at some of these posts.

Re:Obsolete

[MichaelSmith]

... And nothing of any importance was lost.

Really? Just have a look at some of these posts.

OMG all the articles linked from there return 502.

Re:Obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying, but all I can get are Server Errors....

Re:Obsolete

[Hognoxious]

You maniacs! You slashdottised the usenets! Damn you! Gad damn you all to hell!

Re:Obsolete

[MichaelSmith]

Henry Spencer will not be happy.

Re:Obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean 502 server error, yes importance, I'm unplugging my modem now

Google wrecked Usenet

[clickclickdrone]

Google Groups was great when it just included old Usenet posts but when they folded in any other forums they could find, the signal to noise ratio dropped hugely. Yes, if you can cite a specific usenet group in the search, you can get good results but you can't issue a search just for usenet groups only. I can't remember the last time I got anything useful from Google groups. Heck, I can't remember the last time a search even showed any usenet group entries.

Re:Google wrecked Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how Google Groups are overwhelmed with people trying to get a response from Google. Google could learn about caring about people from slave labor camps.

Re:Google wrecked Usenet

[Phoe6]

This is quite true. I wonder why Google wanted to meddle with usenet. But I think, they still are in position that, if they want to rewamp it for good, they can do it. After they will get money through advertisements which will be aplenty in usenet.

Re:Google wrecked Usenet

[Undead NDR]

you can't issue a search just for usenet groups only.

Actually, you can: by restricting the query to a whole hieararchy. Just add, e.g., group:comp.* to your search.

Lately, though, I've found the results to be incomplete (by searching for my own posts).

Re:Google wrecked Usenet

[Bing Tsher E]

Advertisements were anathema on usenet. Usenet culture was and is diametrically opposed to advertising. It's an oil/water thing.

Hmm. Maybe that's why Google killed it. They're nothing but slick advertisers when you get right down to it.

Re:Google wrecked Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

"but you can't issue a search just for usenet groups only."

From Google Search select Google Groups, click on "Advanced Groups Search", scroll down to "Group" and enter a USENET group name , e.g., rec.arts, It also accepts wildcards, e.g. rec.*

It's Still Open For Now

[mrpacmanjel]

Anyone (feeling brave enough) can host their own Usenet server - open protocols and that malarky is still possible.

As a massively connected "network" of information and easily understood protocol writing software to parse it is straightforward.

Maybe political pressure is being exerted to shut the Usenet servers down. Media companies are aware of it's existence and will encourage it's extinction ("good luck with that").

Modern BBS-type systems are fine but are self-contained and do not encourage sharing of information (more accurately "replication") of nodes and data.

I don't think Usenet will ever go away - people are still using gopher today and some modern browsers still support it!

As long as the underpinnings of the Internet are open and free then anyone can create there own "protocol" and transmit data.
This is a fundemental right of the Internet.

Can you imagine if all this was created by a commercial entity - we just would not have the freedom we have now.

As long as some geeks run and admin their servers - there will always be an open and free way of transmitting data.

Believe me our "governments" and corporate "sponsors" are trying to remove those freedoms.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[mykos]

I agree with this. Freedom of speech is one of the most important things we have, and usenet is a great venue for that. A good example of a decentralized communications network.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[outsider007]

99.99% of usenet traffic is pirated movies/music. You sound like a retard.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[Anonymous Coward]

A small, plain text reply is maybe a bit less heavy-weight than a binary dump of the latest blu-ray movie you can find...
I'd even say that a ratio of 0.01% is indeed a LOT.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone (feeling brave enough) can host their own Usenet server - open protocols and that malarky is still possible.

Sadly, there isn't much info on how to set up your own usenet server, so that you are able to create new Usenet newsgroups. Without that info it is much simpler to simply go to google groups and create your own forum.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[noidentity]

Your post would be more readable if you used fewer paragraphs. As it is, almost every sentence has its own.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[xtracto]

here is a good place to start :)

Funny that they mention such high requirements:

A serious Usenet server system, carrying all of the standard 8 Usenet
| hierarchies, a large hunk of alt.* and various regionals, is typically
| going to need a Sparc 20/HP 9000/7xx series or better, with 64Mb or
| more RAM, and at least 8Gb of disk

I guess nowadays it is possible to have a usenet run as a "virtual machine"

In fact, someone should make a VMWare appliance (or whatever is called for VirtualBox or QEmu with a Linux usenet installed ready to use!

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[xtracto]

here [faqs.org] is a good place to start :)

Funny that they mention such high requirements:

A serious Usenet server system, carrying all of the standard 8 Usenet
| hierarchies, a large hunk of alt.* and various regionals, is typically
| going to need a Sparc 20/HP 9000/7xx series or better, with 64Mb or
| more RAM, and at least 8Gb of disk

I guess nowadays it is possible to have a usenet run as a "virtual machine"

In fact, someone should make a VMWare appliance (or whatever is called for VirtualBox or QEmu with a Linux usenet installed ready to use!

It seems my keyboard (or rather my brain) does not parse the word SERVER... there! I said it.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[Svartalf]

Heh... Try again.

Setting up a (small) Usenet server is as simple as grabbing something like Leafnode on a server and point it to your upstream peer.

Creating new newsgroups...well, there's an art to it. But there IS a HOWTO:

How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup

In short...this was just from googling a smidge. There's quite a bit more info than just these two links.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[Svartalf]

Arrgh... Blew the link. Let's try that again, shall we?

How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup

Ahhhem

[Anonymous Coward]

First rule of usenet is we dont talk about usenet.

Not NewSbin, but NewZbin

[wye43]

You gave me a scare with that one, I thought Newsbin was taked down. Newsbin is my favorite, I'm using it all the time.

Forums ruined Newsgroups.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people left using them are pirates and perverts.

Pros and cons

[notrandomly]

There are pros and cons to newsgroups. I personally have found myself drifting away from newsgroups because of all the cons.

For example, there's no moderation. Crazy people all over the place. You would have to start maintaining kill filters and all that.

Web forums can be accessed from anywhere. Newsgroups, well, you could using certain web interfaces. But they were usually sub-par.

Newsgroup readers are usually very complex. I personally ended up relatively comfortable using one, but it's much easier to just dive in and use a web forum.

I really like the threading and all that in newsreaders, but in the end, I found that web forums were much more convenient and useful for me, especially because there was someone around to kick out spammers and abusers.

Re:Pros and cons

[Viol8]

"Crazy people all over the place."

Can't say I noticed. You get a few rude types but if you can't deal with a bit of rudeness then you have bigger problems than where to go for online discussions. If it really bothers you there are plenty of moderated groups but in general usenet isn't for children , never has been and never will be and I personally wouldn't want some dumbed down , sanitised , disneyland version of usenet to keep delicate little wallflowers happy.

Re:Pros and cons

[notrandomly]

You don't need to desire a Disneyland to appreciate spammers, flooders and other abusers being removed from the site.

Re:Pros and cons

[Hatta]

Web forums can be accessed from anywhere. Newsgroups, well, you could using certain web interfaces.

That's what SSH and slrn are for.

Newsgroup readers are usually very complex.

They are also highly capable. Web forums are lacking in features.

In the end though, you're right. While technically superior, it's the social factors (moderation, spam) that killed USENET.

Re:Pros and cons

[Tacvek]

Please Don't confuse USENET with the general concept of newsgroups. USENET consists of the network of syndicated newsgroups. It is nice, and decentralized, but it does have its cons. Some groups still seem to be doing OK, but it does have its issues.

But it is also possible to have centralized newsgroups. These are groups carried by just one server (or a group of servers controlled by the same party), much like mailing lists or web forums are carried by a single server or group of servers. With just a single server, proper moderation is possible simply by configuring the server as desired. Since the content is not syndicated one does not have the problem of other servers not being configured the same.
One gets proper threaded conversation, and unlike mailing lists, there is at least some amount of history presented, so one does not need to search for the web archives which are inferior anyway.

Those sort of advantages are the reason why I use GMANE to read mailing lists.

Yeah, and the Model T isn't hot anymore.

[MrCrassic]

Kind of sucks Usenet's going the way of the dodo, but evolution isn't always a forgiving process. I found lots of useful and hard to find information on newsgroups, but I've found the same level of information on forums as well. In my opinion, forums are way better: moderation, software-agnostic, etc.

Re:Yeah, and the Model T isn't hot anymore.

[RoboRay]

Moderation is a double-edged sword, and in what ways are Usenet servers not software agnostic?

Re:Yeah, and the Model T isn't hot anymore.

[swordgeek]

If you think that forums are way better than usenet, then you misunderstand usenet.

1) Usenet is software-agnostic--there are dozens of news readers encompassing every OS available. Web forums require a web browser.
2) Usenet is centralized. ALL groups come through one interface (of your choosing). Forums have different interfaces with different rules, and you have to register for each one individually.
3) Usenet is DE-centralized. Data is distributed worldwide, with no central authority or repository. Forums are owned and operated by a person or group who can block people, drive their own agenda, or shut down the service with no backup. A forum can also crash and burn.
4) Usenet _can_ be moderated. Moderated groups have been around since 1984 (!).

Forums are newer. Usenet is better. Sadly, newer almost always wins over better--especially when people don't understand the options.

Fight for control of information

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a silent war on usenet. The piracy-argument is just a cover. The real issue is about editorial control. Usenet remains as one of very few information channels which can not be censored by any single entity, and with decentralised storage as one of its main features. Free speech advocates should really get on top of this.

Re:Fight for control of information

[Mr. Slippery]

Maybe what we need is some sort of USENET to BitTorrent gateway.

USENET is the original P2P system; it's that decentralized nature that makes it resistant to censorship. But the peers are NNTP servers, not end users. BT is the new P2P system, and shows that same "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" robustness, but doesn't have discussion built into it. But it has the advantage that the peers are the end users, so there's no admin between you and what you want. BT can run over Tor or I2P for anonymity.

I don't know enough about BT do say if this is practical, but can we think of USENET posts as files to be shared by BT? Basically someone "subscribing" to, say, alt.slack, would be on the lookout for files named something like "alt.slack-<message-id>", and their client would automatically download them. (Or better: "alt.slack-<message-id>-<poster-email>", and you can build killfile-like filtering in at this level, and not even bother to download Ludwig Plutonium's latest posts -- or seek them out, if that's you're thing.) Throw in a couple of gateways to mirror current NNTP traffic onto BT; then over time, it would probably all migrate on to BT.

Re:Fight for control of information

[nlayer]

I agree too. However, I'm pretty sure that any desire to actually kill Usenet will not be some conspiracy to stifle freedom. The death of Usenet will be by slowly eroding away at its user base for one reason only: They are not able to host banner ads in your Usenet client. With ISPs dropping Usenet, the number of eyeballs is rapidly decreasing.

I'm a veteran of the wild-west days of the internet. I have a high Slashdot id because I avoided web forums like the plague. Then the day came when my ISP was bought out by AT&T. Now there's no ISP anywhere around that offers an NNTP server. I miss those days, but they've succeeded in getting my eyes into the internet that is supported by ad revenue. Gone are the days when the internet consisted of universities, altruist geeks, and decent private ISPs.

I still troll around in Usenet via web interfaces from time to time, but the mystique of those days are gone. Hell, these days I'm afraid of being on some kind of watch list just for hitting a binary group.

Now, we've got Facebook and twitter. I'm not even old enough to use the lawn joke, but seriously getting close.

Re:Fight for control of information

[swordgeek]

Ah yes, the good ol' days. I'm still living there. :-)

The list of groups I actually read has dwindled down to less than a dozen, and there are only a few which have much active discussion. (rec.bicycles.tech is a huge one, curiously.) As you say, usenet doesn't generate revenue, because it doesn't get people reading ads. Also, a full usenet feed is expensive to maintain - when we (an ISP) shut down our usenet servers (we still offer the service, outsourced), we cleared up three or four racks of gear. That's a lot of equipment, a lot of maintenance, a lot of power, and a lot of cooling; not to mention the real estate itself. Time was, usenet service was considered a mandatory part of being an ISP, along with email and a dial-up option. However, when users no longer demand a non-profitable service, no ISP is going to spend money to offer that service. Hardly anyone cares about usenet anymore, and nobody is going to cancel their account with an ISP because they don't offer it.

Facebook is the best replacement we have for usenet. God have mercy on us.

Re:Fight for control of information

[Dex1331]

I have to agree, the war is not just against Usenet but against the 1st Amendment itself. TPTB continue to consolidate their control over content and communication and if they get their way the internet will be entirely controlled by them and the internet, the last vestige of free expression left in the world, will be entirely controlled by the dictatorial political structure because the internet and free speech are a direct threat to their retention of power. It may be a death by a thousand cuts at the moment but these moves to decommission Usenet are worth a few of those cuts for sure.

Re:Fight for control of information

[Anonymous Coward]

horse ptooey.

The issue is cost vs benefit. A small minority of internet subscribers use it. Binaries cost $$$$ to host and maintain. Maintaining reliable peering is difficult. From an ISP point of view it is just a headache inducing cost item with little return.

Re:Fight for control of information BALDERDASH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Balderdash!

But I agree with what you wrote. Just wanted to finally write Balderdash!

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke nuked their server....

Re:So...

[xtracto]

And now it is gone Forever!

Re:So...

[silverglade00]

...forever!

killing shared internet standards

[h00manist]

We really are going to need some kind of federated shared login. The net is fragmenting into lots of smaller feuds like face***k and forums, all separate logins, formats, no more shared standards. that died when "netiquette" died, killed by lots of "gimme" spammers, trolls, warez, porn, etc. Anarchism and an etiquette of behavior were the rules, and they worked until too many came at once with a greedy free-for-all ignorance. No login was necessary for lots of things.

Re:killing shared internet standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, unified login exists. OpenID. http://openid.net

Good questions.

[toby]

It's amazing how few people see that Usenet has not in any way been superseded.

I've got to go download some porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya know, every time I hear a story like this I feel compelled to get on there and grab some free porn before my ISP decides to do away with news server too.

Not about Duke Nukem

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Damnit, I though this news item would be about Duke Nukem.

On the upside...

[metacell]

On the upside, Freenet contains a distributed Usenet server, which has so far been kept spam-free by the use of trust lists.

Re:On the upside...

[ThePlague]

While freenet is a great idea, it doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. According to http://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/chat/2010-April/000009.html there's only about 20k users.

Re:On the upside...

[Anonymous Coward]

>which has so far been kept spam-free by no-one wanting to use a tediously slow system frequented by pedos
Fixed that for you.

Re:On the upside...

[metacell]

I think the developers are, so far, focused on the technical aspects and making it as secure as possible, not so much on usability.

Re:On the upside...

[metacell]

Not correct. Freenet used to have a board system called "Frost", where most of the pedos hanged out, and it had more spam than "real" messages.

Frost has since been depreciated in favour of FMS (Freenet Message System), which is completely spam-free due to the trust list system. A system which also allows you to filter out the pedos.

Is Google winding down Usenet support too?

[Teckla]

Does anyone know if Google is starting to wind down Usenet support too?

I only ask because sometime early last week, I stopped getting digest emails to the Usenet groups I'm subscribed to via Google Groups. It happened without warning: no reports of dropping support for digest emails or Usenet, no reports of problems they are working on, etc. It seems quite a few people are having this problem as well...

Any information would be appreciated!

Re:Is Google winding down Usenet support too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is just not maintained. There have been tons of bugs reported (for example the search being almost completely broken) and they have not been fixed.

Death of USENET predicted!

[jgreco]

Death of USENET predicted! Film at 11.

This has been predicted so many times all throughout the years, it's hard to take it seriously.

Re:Death of USENET predicted!

[crackspackle]

This has been predicted so many times all throughout the years, it's hard to take it seriously.

All the *aa cartels need now is one favorable court decision to say that usenet providers are at least partially responsible for carrying well known offending usenet groups for things to come to a stop, like alt.binaries.hdtv,x264. If usenet providers are forced to drop groups like this, the real pirates may well switch to others but then the average Joe Pirate who makes up the bulk of Giganews customer base has to go find it. Not easy to do with a million plus spam laden groups and indexing sites like newzbin being sued out of existence. All the cartels need to do is play whack-a-mole for a while. Joe pirate will eventually drop his news service and Giganews business plan goes to hell.

With Giganews et. all out of the way, isp usenet servers gone and many university usenet servers offline, there won't be much left. Perhaps usenet will be reborn the way it was intended at that point, but then given no lack of spam and difficulty of access, who will care ?

Re:Death of USENET predicted!

[DerekLyons]

This has been predicted so many times all throughout the years, it's hard to take it seriously.

Unless you actually use Usenet and have noted the precipitous drop in traffic over the last few years. Usenet may not be legally dead, but it's much closer than it was and decaying almost daily.

Re:Death of USENET predicted!

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://www.templetons.com/brad/nethist.html

And that site only documents the number of imminent death of Usenet predictions up to April 1995.

Duke?

[ZorbaTHut]

It's time to kick ass and browse Usenet, and we're all out of Usenet!

TLDR

[illumnatLA]

TLDR...

The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

Agreed. Or the moderators only read (at best) the first couple of sentences of a post and rate based on that rather than the content of the whole comment. The attention span seems to have gotten so short that anything more than 140 characters is indigestible.

Given the current state of mods lately, this post will be tagged 'Troll' or 'Flamebait' based solely on the first line of this comment rather than reading the point I was trying to make.

Good old Duke is back

[macbuzz01]

It's been a while since we had a Duke Nukem story on the front pa...Oh...that Duke...and they just shut it down and didn't nuke it...? Nevermind.

Too much of Usenet is full of SPAM and garbage

[jonwil]

Try and read aus.tv, aus.politics, aus.general or a number of other aus.* groups and you will see that far to many of the posts are garbage or SPAM vs legitimate postings.

Cost-benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a small ISP, and we shut down our news servers about a year ago after 12 years of operation. It just wasn't economically viable to maintain the software, hardware, power, cooling, and network bandwidth required for a service used by less than 0.1% of our customers.

Spelling Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

new should be knew.

--
BMO

Re:Spelling Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

I gnu you would say that.

Google Wave

[SkepticOwl]

For all the (deserved) talk of sadness about Usenet's passing, isn't Google Wave a viable alternative? No "complicated" client to install, and it gets around the linking and distribution (i.e. caching) issues. I guess it's the categorisation that is lacking, although I can see that being solved with the help of good indexers (Google again?) and a sprinkle of microformats or somesuch.

Re:Google Wave

[swordgeek]

I've looked briefly at it, and it seems to be a 'throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks' mess. Totally incoherent, not to mention centrally-controlled by a corporation.

Re:Google Wave

[Mr. Slippery]

For all the (deserved) talk of sadness about Usenet's passing, isn't Google Wave a viable alternative?

No. USENET is a P2P technology with no central control. Google Wave is controlled by Google.

Re:Google Wave

[SkepticOwl]

That might be practically true at the moment, but as far as it has been "sold", Wave is supposed to be an open (whatever that means these days), distributed platform: http://sites.google.com/a/waveprotocol.org/wave-protocol/wave-community-principles

Save the trollsphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet dying might be one of the biggest nightmare before us. All of a sudden, sheer masses of trolls will lose their habitat, causing enourmous migrations into the rest of the internet, disturbing the biological equilibriums and perhaps causing mass extinctions of endagered species like the helpful geek.

So, save the usenet!

bye guys

[sammy baby]

Wow. Bittersweet.

Friends from alt.games.quake2, Sigil (and Mrs. Sigil) say hi. Best of luck to y'all.

Kibo?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Are you there?

Re:Kibo?

[Anonymous Coward]

only xibo remains.

Re:Kibo?

[Nimey]

beable beable beable

It's a shame...

[plazman30]

The concept of Usenet is awesome. Think about taking every single web forums out there and sticking them all into a client om your desk, and having a single sign in for everything, and you'll understand why Usenet is still superior to web based forums in many ways. You go to ONE PLACE to find the info you want on hobbies, politics, news, etc.

In the 90s, the Usenet FAQs were the best collection of knowledge on the Internet.

Sadly, due to it's open nature, Usenet was also the first to get SPAM. I would love to see someone develop a newer version of Usenet with better security.

Re:It's a shame...

[yahwotqa]

This might offend many geeks, but I've recently found that with introduction of public waves, Google Wave can kind-of be used like the old usenet. You just need to search for "whatever you are looking for with:public" and you will find a few waves with quite lively ongoing discussion.

Of course, there is still space for lot of improvement there, but from the few discussions I have participated in, it has a similar vibe. Now all we need is for Goog to finish the protocol API, so 3rd party wave implementations can be written and the content can be federated over many nodes over the net.

Re:It's a shame...

[ciggieposeur]

I would love to see someone develop a newer version of Usenet with better security.

Practically speaking, Reddit is turning into the new Usenet for me. A Reddit group = Usenet group, trn = Akregator, and each topic creates its own threaded reading (minus subject lines) on the Reddit web page. Orange inbox notifies me when I have something to reply to.

Downside is the whole thing falls apart when the server(s) go down unlike Usenet. But the interface isn't far off from Usenet at all.

Re:It's a shame...

[plazman30]

Good point. I love reddit. And they let you make any subreddit you want. Interesting.... Plus it has porn. So, in many ways it is just like subreddit.

Where do we download the Usenets?

[PurplePhase]

If Duke is shutting their server down, can we download the current status - like a Wikipedia ZIP?

Or is it all on the wayback machine somewhere?

Thanks,

8-PP

Re:Where do we download the Usenets?

[swordgeek]

We outsourced our NNTP service recently, and shut down our in-house servers. We had about 60TB of data on them.

Not quite download-sized, yet.

MOD PARENT UP

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Great idea!

There's this thing called "Google groups"...

[Joce640k]

But I guess that doesn't count - no binaries.

Seriously though, who needs binary groups with all the free pron and torrents out there?

With apologies to Paster Niemoller...

[Tackhead]

First they closer Limewire
First they closed the usenets.
When they came for my router, it was to replace it with a FTTH.
And it was good. ...
Wait... I think I fracked up that one. What were we talking about?

First they shut down TPB, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Limewire, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Newzbin, but I didn't care because I could still download the headers and summarize them with a shell script.
Then they shut down USENET, and when I finally got fiber to the home, there was nothing left to download.

Complete rubbish

[Joce640k]

Pretty soon Google will be the only thing keeping Usenet alive.

PS: Did your old-fashioned Usenet servers ever have *old* postings? What use is a discussion forum which only keeps 90 days worth of discussion?

"shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin"

[John Hasler]

Alt.binaries is not Usenet. Usenet is text. Alt.binaries is crap.

Usenet 2.0?

[liteyear]

To me, Usenet was the quintessential Internet protocol for revealing the power of collective thought. It never failed to amaze me what could happen if you grouped the passionate and learned practitioners of every common and exotic discipline known to man, and exposed a simple, textual communication interface. In one swoop you could be following a lively discussion on the new Giant downhill mountain bike, while your question on Fourier expansion edge cases spawns a bunch of responses.

But one cannot deny that Usenet, like email, has fallen prey to challenges that were simply not on the radar in their genesis. The only difference is that the ubiquity and return on investment ratios for email supply a dirty life line to an already dead technology.

What then, I earnestly ask, could replace Usenet? What's right and wrong with Usenet and what's right and wrong with phpbb et al? It seems to me that these features are essential:

• One protocol. Not a thousand different forums with no hierarchy and no common interface.
• Web access and client access. Web is critical for widespread adoption and access when the client is not available. Client access is critical for high volume users.
• Options for moderation. If a group wants it, it can.
• Distributed storage. There's too much traffic to expect every host to be a universal gateway. Perhaps storage could be hierarchal.
• User registration required to post. Spam and bots are easier to manage that way.
• Text first. Similar to the Twitter philosophy - it's the text that matters but multimedia solutions are easily integrated.

As well as the significant technical issues, there are major governance issues in developing Usenet 2.0. But I am genuinely curious - what do you think the successor to Usenet should be, and where do you think it will come from?

Re:Usenet 2.0?

[ciggieposeur]

If Reddit provided leafnode-like caching for distributed storage and an open protocol to read/write comments to support non-web clients, it would do everything you ask for.

I blame....

[ndixon]

... Canter & Siegel.

Do your share, Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, you promised:

An NNTP gateway[...]ll happen someday, but not tomorrow.

Any updates?

See, advertisements are not an issue since you would be your own moderator. You could block other people's spam while nothing would prevent you from including all kinds of MIME/HTML advertisements in the discussion threads.

Enough free alternatives are available

[McDutchie]

Just use one of the freely available text-only Usenet servers, like news.eternal-september.org, or choose to support a cheap one, like the excellent individual.net which costs just 10 euros (15 US dollars) per year.

Usenet is consolidating. It's not dying. Services like these continue to provide a spam-free, binary-free, high-quality Usenet feed.

Anyone can run their own usenet server

[Colin Smith]

Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet. I predict that within 2 years, ISPs carrying Usenet will be ancient history.

But what's needed is a way of bolting on a reputation system. Some sort of collaborative filtering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

As a former news server admin...

[Gerald]

...all I have to say is "Great! Can all of the SMTP servers start fading away too?"

how we used to respond

[cellocgw]

Submitting a response to this /. thread will cause your message to be sent around the world, costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Are you sure you really want to do this?

Oops, I forgot the anti-first-line-eater filler.

Groupthink

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because groupthink is only a good thing when there is NOT a group of people trying to manipulate the groupthink. See, groupthink is a natural penomenon that people only generally notice or get upset about when it isn't allowed to form itself. It is merely people coming to an understanding. However, if it is instead forced upon the group, it will be noticed, and that is what has been happening on /. lately.

Re:Groupthink

[Opportunist]

Groupthink is never a positive phenomenon. Yes, superficially it looks like a group "agreeing" somehow that they form a consensus on a certain topic, but in fact it is always a game of manipulation. In every group, there is leaders and followers. You will always have the ones that can and do argue their case, those that cannot argue well against it and those that simply follow the "winner", without much consideration why they follow them, or whether the goals of that group are actually in their interest.

The point is that groupthink not only happens in online boards but also in real life. And here it is a much bigger problem. It's easy to hype people into hysteria. And you don't even have to invoke a Godwin to see why this can be very dangrous if you happen to be of a group that is somehow labeled the boogieman.

Regarding Newsgroups...

[vudufixit]

Duke Nuked 'em... Forever.

I wonder if there's any RIAA pressure?

[Anonymous Coward]

As you say, there's not much financial incentive to run it. And there's only so much demand among people who still know what it is.

So I wonder if the **AA are quietly pressuring folks to shut down big usenet servers, until they atrophy it to the point of uselessness? I mean, after all, once there are few legitimate users, they can just paint it as a pirate tool and squeeze out anyone left running servers...

Re:It's Still Open For Now (MOD Parent funny)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, way to late for any moderation, but you realize how outdated that FAQ entry is? Go to usenetserver.com or giganews.com and look where they describe their network and equipment to understand what it really takes (if you want the binary groups as well, granted)... but even the text group only requirements are much greater than what you posted there, if you want decent retention.

Usenet, dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting take on this topic if you can bear with the length and density. . .

http://interstellarappeal.blogspot.com/2010/05/internet.html