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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.
Those were good times. Thanks guys.
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.
> 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.
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.
The Admin and the Engineer
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?
and lets face it, where there's porn, there's no shortage of enthusiasts.
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.
... And nothing of any importance was lost.
(fond memories remain intact)
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.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.
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.
First rule of usenet is we dont talk about usenet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the upside, Freenet contains a distributed Usenet server, which has so far been kept spam-free by the use of trust lists.
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!
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.
TLDR...
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.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
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.
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.
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.
Are you there?
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.
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
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.
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:
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?
* Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool *
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.