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The End of Gmane? (ingebrigtsen.no)
If any of you use mailing list archive Gmane, you would want to start looking at its alternative. Gmane developer Lars Ingebrigtsen announced Thursday that he is thinking about ending the decade-old email-to-news gateway. But first, for those unaware about Gmane, here's is what it does: It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.Ingebrigtsen said Gmane machines are under numerous DDoS attacks -- coupled with some other issues -- that have made him wonder whether it is worth the time and effort to keep Gmane ticking. He writes: I'm thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don't want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess... The nice thing about a mailing list archive (with NNTP and HTTP interfaces) is that it enables software maintainers to say (whenever somebody suggests using Spiffy Collaboration Tool of the Month instead of yucky mailing lists) is "well, just read the stuff on Gmane, then". I feel like I'm letting down a generation here.As Gmane's future remains uncertain, Ingebrigtsen recommends people to have a look at Mail Archive.
Gmane over, man! Gmane over!
Considering Gmane has been for the most part a one-man effort on his free time, what Lars achieved is truly impressive.
I am a newsreader user, and I will certainly miss Gmane. If you will miss it too, show your support to Lars!
Anyone DDOSing is a complete worthless asshole.
Anyone doing this to Gmane is the worlds biggest asshole.
So shut it down, the current generation of little shits dont deserve the cool stuff we had when the internet was started.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're missing the bigger picture -- whether Usenet itself is dead or not, the fact that we're replacing open protocols with closed, proprietary web interfaces controlled by a single entity is a huge regression. Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.
NNTP and SMTP may be old protocols but the problems they solve haven't gone away, only changed somewhat. People still talk about stuff in public. People still exchange private messages with each other. None of that is obsolete. That doesn't mean old protocols can't change or new ones can't be invented, but if you don't understand why and how the old stuff worked, all you're doing is jerking yourself off with a shiny Javascript widget. We don't need any more of that, thanks.
Does it bother anyone else that a single moderator can decide that a post is without merit and greatly decrease its visibility?
Newsgroups are dead. I've been using the internet since the early 1990s and I've never used and newsgroup once. I don't know anyone who does. Maybe they once had value a long time ago, but they're obsolete. As for email, I rarely use email to contact anyone outside of work. Even businesses don't like providing email support any longer, instead moving to chat-based support. I don't email friends much. I text them or send them messages on social media. I've always thought email forwards were obnoxious, but now people just share stuff on social media and don't forward stuff. I still get a lot of spam, but I don't use email much. And I don't know a lot of people who use email much for stuff that's not formal. Email is dying, though it's not obsolete yet.
If you disagree, fine. But reply instead of using moderation as a -1 disagree. That's an abuse.
Try logging in instead of posting as an AC if you want more respect. The Slashdot moderation scheme explicitly discourages moderators from explaining their mods since their mod go away if they post anywhere else the thread. So if someone disagrees with you, they'll either downmod you (if they have modpoints) or tell you why they disagree, but they can't do both.
You're missing the bigger picture -- whether Usenet itself is dead or not, the fact that we're replacing open protocols with closed, proprietary web interfaces controlled by a single entity is a huge regression. Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.
Well the nice things about web forums is that they can set their own terms for registration, moderation, user behavior and so on and if people don't like it they can move to a different one. Newsgroups kinda worked so long as bandwidth was a scarce resource and you wouldn't just waste it needlessly. You had moderated groups but that was very rudimentary and not very popular, but the rest was just open season for spam and trolls and bots. Without changing signup captchas to keep mass signups at bay most forums would be nothing but trash. Same thing about email, once the spammers got hold of it you'd see an endless number of trash emails.
Unfortunately applying the same rules uniformly more or less means you have to have one entity controlling it all, it's no good if I have a strict policy and you allow every rabble in. Same thing with who gets moderator privileges or moderator points, any form of assignment or formula needs someone controlling it. I suppose you could have a somewhat decentralized organization like IRC networks, where some servers belong to the same network and some don't all while running the same protocol, but still. To be honest, I don't think the market wants more protocols since most everything now runs over HTTP, almost totally regardless of what it is. At best maybe you could make some kind of HTTP "API" so you could use different messaging software but I doubt it. Most sites actually like being in control of layout and such.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Second or third biggest fingerprinting technique on the internet. And a huge thorn for Tor users, since recaptcha or cloudflare itself could be fingerprinting you across sites. (wayback.archive.org is a really easy way to get around that for static content while also archiving it for future generations!)
> Don't follow security news much do you?
I do. There's BEAST (2011, SSL3/TLS1.0 only), CRIME (2012, TLS1.0->1.2), BREACH (2013, TLS1.0->1.2), and POODLE (mid 2014, SSL 3.0). In late 2014, it was discovered that a few faulty TLS implementations were also vulnerable to POODLE. They have since been fixed. BEAST mitigations have been in place for *ages*. CRIME and BREACH only work when TLS compression is enabled, so the fix for that is fairly trivial.
Are there any significant recent ones that I missed? (Implementation bugs like Heartbleed don't count. One doesn't point to a screwed up implementation of a protocol and say "That protocol is insecure.", one says "That implementation is fucked up.". A protocol *can* be too complicated to reliably implement correctly... but the wide array of correct TLS implementations strongly suggests that the OpenSSL guys just fucked up.)
Or are you talking about the politics of the infrastructure that was set up to distribute and validate X.509 certificates for use with TLS? If you're talking about *that*, then know that the TLS spec leaves unspecified how X.509 certs are issued and managed. That is to say that Certificate Authorities and the management of the same have nothing to do with the security of the TLS protocol, but might be a concern for a particular site that *uses* TLS. You can -after all- use TLS with no loss of security guarantees without ever speaking to a CA.
I do lots of Linux development. Often I'll find kernel patch that's not in the mainline kernel yet, or was just recently added, that has some issues with it. With gmane I can browse the original discussion threads about the patch, import them into evolution, and then reply to one of the messages. And get the proper in-reply-to headers on my email, cc the proper groups and people, etc. I don't have the original thread in my inbox because I'm not subscribed to 200 different lists that I save all the messages from. But gmane is.
None of the other list archives (which aren't as good as gmane anyway) allow you do this.
It sounds like Lars (owner/creator) is burned out by the ordeal but a handoff of GMANE might be possible. No matter what, I hope Lars is rewarded for all the effort he put into GMANE - it's a fantastic tool.
You haven't been using the internet since the early 1990s. You used a small subset of it, namely the web with a splash of email, probably through the AOL portal you got off the first CD-ROM they posted through your door. If that was enough for you, fine, but don't declare anything is of no use if you never used it or have no idea of what you're talking about.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
There isn't any replacement coming for email in the workplace at least. Email is vendor-neutral and hence is available on all connected devices, technically has no limit on the text that can be typed or data sent as attachments in it, can be locally archived and restored and has other significant advantages over social media that I can't think of at the moment. And heck, anybody can set up his or her private mail server and ensure confidentiality of all email communications. I don't see email dying in any form.
You don't have to visit any web forums to read them. Nearly every site has an RSS feed, and those which don't can be scraped and converted into RSS with something like Feed43.com.
I would HATE using my smart phone to read the news if it wasn't for RSS. /.'s mobile site is the single worst piece of crap I've ever seen. But with RSS I'm fortunately able to read any and every site out there, in a uniform "eBook"-like format.
You can read my RSS tips here:
http://evilviper.pipedot.org/j...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant