Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service 327
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has discontinued its provided usenet service, once provided to all its high speed customers. First with the cap put on its customers several years ago on amount of traffic provided as part of the customer high-speed package, as of September 16, the service is no longer provided.
Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream."
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Mainstream? (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's sad to see universal USENET access go, it's been out of the mainstream for about a decade.
Bastion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a while, Google Groups used to be a good way to search usenet. Since they allowed anyone to create a group on Google Groups, it is now completely riddled with spam and next to useless.
That said, I wish more web forums would provide a nntp front-end (gmane is a great example - although it is oriented towards mailing lists). It is far easier to follow discussions when you use the same interface throughout. If a feature is missing, you can always code it yourself. With web forums, you are limited to the server software.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a sad day when ISPs toss out usenet. Usenet was and still is to a lesser degree what many of of got hooked on. A free, generally not moderated and everyone had access to it. Now, we digress into 1000's of web sites, /. included to exchange ideas. While /. is large enough with a wide audience and is good, most web based boards are horrid, operated by a ego driven owner and never even get my book marks.
My ISP, Shaw just outsourced usenet to someone who can't keep it running. I guess we too are gut off. And no, the google interface does not cut it.
Fond memories (Score:5, Insightful)
I have found memories of Usenet from the days before http. Back then there were around 2000 groups, and most of the participants were from academia. It (and IRC) was the first real place I can remember interacting with a global community, and it was quite enjoyable. Of course the self-control and self-regulation that kept the original Usenet usable went out the window as the public at large came online. The original intent of Usenet has been replaced by the online forum. So instead of a central repository of information, all properly categorized and viewable within a consistent client application, we now have the web-based forum. The information is spread far and wide across the internet. The interfaces vary vastly depending on the software and its configuration and theme. The information is spread out across redundant and competing sites. Information can suddenly be lost as a site goes down. Information can be deleted at a whim depending on who is running the site.
I certainly miss what Usenet once was.
BS - whaty about Google Groups? (Score:2, Insightful)
if thats not mainstream I don't know what is. Just because you perhaps don't use it...
And are they going to lower their price? (Score:4, Insightful)
They've just removed a service from their lineup. A service I used to use all the time when I was on Comcast is now gone.
It boggles my mind. I was with Comcast back in the @Home days. Back then we had unlimited Usenet, and up to 4 email addresses. Service was 4 Mbits/768Kbits.
So, then @Home folds, and Comcast takes over the service directly and we go to:
1 email address
No Usenet
1.5 Mbits/128Kbps
for the same price.
Now, admittedly, it's gotten better since then. They upped the speed, increased the email addresses and gave you 2 GB on Giganews.
But now they're going down the path of taking service away. THere's no more Usenet, there's a 250 GB Bandwidth cap (which is plenty of bandwidth, I know...).
For what they offer for Internet, you should be paying $19.99, and not $55.00.
Things like this are what makes FIOS so attractive to geeks.
Andy
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it clueless day? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The non-binary groups have mostly been worthless for a long time now"
Oh really? Which ones? I regularly post on 3 non binary groups and read 2 others and theres plenty of traffic. Perhaps you should try usenet one day instead of blowing smoke out your backside.
"Those who can't live without comp.lang.perl or whatever can pay to get it,"
Oh how magnanimus of you. Perhaps you'd like to pay extra to a 3rd party for using the web after you've already paid your ISP for net access too since you're clearly some kid who thinks the web=the internet
isn't this kind of like... (Score:2, Insightful)
this is just comcast's continuation of cutting corners wherever they can and making the users pay for it.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USENET is practically the only place on earth everyone can share anonymous (if desired), unmoderated, uncensored, de-centralized discussion on any topic. You can share ideas and ask questions on USENET you can't easily ask anywhere else.
It's the only thing of its kind in all of history, and I hope it sticks around.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. I like it much better then forums for support.
For programmers, Usenet is can be more valuable for expert help than any forum I've encountered. This seems to be because a majority of people who still using Usenet (ignoring most of the posting via Google Groups) carry lots of collective experience in their fields. The barrier to entry is sufficiently high, scary as that may be, that a lot less bad information gets distributed. And if a bad answer is given, a dozen other experts will correct it within minutes.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google groups started to suck when they changed the interface from DejaNews to the one from Google. From then on it went down to so much that I never use it anymore. Not even to search for solutions.
Also, please no forums and NNTP mix up. NNTP is not a web forum and a webforum is not NNTP.
Each and every webforum that has an NNTP interface sucks for either one or the other.
There are plenty of free usenet servers for text groups (and free IPv6 for binaries) that there is no need to use a webinterface. And if you boss does not want you to use Usenet, then do without it. His loss, not yours if he doesn't give you the tools to work with.
Usenet does not need you to answer in 2 minutes. So if you only have a connection during the weekend, that is OK.
I agree. Google's pretty good at acquiring technologies from other companies (Google Maps, Earth, etc) and making the interface better or at least not hurting it, but the moment they made changes to Dejanews they began removing functionality and usability. Dejanews was the great free web-based nntp reader, and making available all the messages since usenet's inception didn't make up for making searches or browsing within a group much less effective.
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Re:Usenet = Useful (Score:3, Insightful)
It does have it's uses, but like anything risque in society people will try to control and/or ban it for all the wrong reasons.
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Insightful)
The bandwidth requirement is quite low for a subscriber: everything is plain text, you download only the articles you want and only once per article (not 0.5MB of HTML like you do here every time you look at a page, plus the stupid avatars on most forums). I don't see how a web forum discussing (say) Atari gaming is any more targetted than comp.gaming.atari (or whatever). OK, you can have subforums, but the groups I used to use had worked that out themselves -- you put '[F]' in the subject if you were discussing some kind of fan meet-up, and '[R]' if something was on-topic, or '[I]' if it was off-topic (irrelevant), there were others. There wasn't much spam compared to the number of posts, and in any case it was simple to set the newsreader to hide any posts without a '[X]' in the subject.
It was great when I had metered dial up to download all the new posts (a couple of minutes), disconnect, read and reply at my leisure, then connect to upload my posts.
I looked again recently, and the groups that still have users aren't full of spam -- at least, not compared to the number of on-topic posts for every day. There are a lot of dead groups with one or two posts ("is anyone still here?") and 100 spams though.
Tinfoil hat time (Score:3, Insightful)
This is probably the very reason they're shutting it down. I doubt there's any good argument for doing so from a cost-saving perspective.
This is one more way citizens...err...terrorists can freely communicate.
First Ammendment rights (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that Usenet is the medium which has the greatest claim to rights under the First Ammendment.
All of the weblogs like Slashdot and such may be prettier, easier to use, and *might* have a higher signal-to-noise (Usenet is even worse than Slashdot, though it doesn't seem possible.) ratio, but they all have an owning party who accepts responsibility for their contents. Usenet is unowned, merely hosted, and therefore comes closest to free speech, in the political sense of the word.
Re:So? (Score:0, Insightful)
"So now I can read 50G of articles..."
You must have some serious speed reading skills.
Honestly, binaries were the end of USENET. I work for one of the major service providers, who buckled under the NY AG's demand. Many may disagree, but when your company is threatened with a major attorney general's negative PR compaign claiming your company supports child pornography and doesn't filter binary groups, you do what they say. Yes, you could provide technical and logical points to debate that individual, but is the general public really going to understand and therefore side with your company. Unfortunately, for most, the answer is no.
Anyway, for most service providers, dropping most binary groups means freeing up significant hardware and bandwidth they have to pay for. I think we freed up three-quarters of our systems and our bandwidth usage dropped 90%.
Re:Main your stream, dude (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, the guy who says "Usenet is still relevant" got modded down to "troll", as a way of saying "I don't agree" I think. If another disagreeing guy who really doesn't understand what "Troll" means mods him down -1 one more time, he his "0", the AC level which means his opinion will be effectively censored as most people browses at "1+".
The abuse on his post alone proves why Usenet must live on.
The non binary groups doesn't have that much traffic as they are only serving to Usenet's original purpose: Free speech in text without control.