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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

...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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

[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!

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.

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.

Kibo?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Are you 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.