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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.
99.99% of usenet traffic is pirated movies/music. You sound like a retard.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
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.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>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.
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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.
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BMO