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."
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Occasionally, you'll find a computer club filled with x-hippies exchanging correspondence solely over usenet; I think they do it for the privacy that comes with ghost towns. Even they have their binary groups, though; mainly fonts and different versions of Maelstrom.
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
I rather miss using USENET, although it has become less useful over the last few years due to the spam and flood of binary files (which are useful by themselves...). The conversations in a newsgroup is much higher caliber than you find in forums, mainly due to the fact that most people would actually THINK before writing, knowing that someone isn't going to read it 5 seconds later. It is more like the BBS forums of yesteryear, which of course, were born of USENET itself and often a part of.
I wouldn't be shocked if a few years down the line, there comes a reason for people to start using USENET more often, seeking better quality conversation. The primary problem now is that a web browser isn't a very good platform to read USENET posts, what we need is a better app or an overhaul of the system to make it more useable. Agent and other apps are ok, but mainly for binaries. USENET was basically the first use for the internet and hasn't changed any since then.
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Filtered by what? Your newsreader, or your provider?
I have to admit a certain laziness, in that I didn't like most of the newsreaders I tried (they didn't thread properly) and I never went back and tried newer ones later.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Much of the spam's gone away since Usenet became a backwater. This accelerated after Google removed the "Groups" link from their front page.
As well, Gmane [gmane.org] gateways mailing lists to newsgroups, allowing both reading and posting with a nice interface, without the need to download every message.
Re:So? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, 400 posts a day on sci.electronics.design. I subscribe to 35 text only newsgroups, even the OS/2 ones are still active. ;)
Usenet = Useful (Score:5, Interesting)
I really think usenet still has a place on the web, a very useful place.
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who apparently skipped the Usenet generation - I'm actually not surprised and, to be honest, not that bothered. There are other, more important, things which should be phased out (plaintext FTP, plaintext SMTP, plaintext POP3) etc. I've never used Usenet in any significant amount and only ever found it full of more spam than an advertised hotmail account. The etiquette is all other the place (top-posters, multi-group postings etc.) with little to no control for the end user. The bandwidth required is substantial for even a basic set of related groups. And in the end, web-forums are more targetted, more controlled, better moderated, less spamified and more responsible for their content - even if that just means no 7-Zip-RAR'ed-uuencoded binaries.
The amount of hardware needed to run any effective binary-included news server is nowhere near practical. To be honest, if my ISP had the option, I'd opt-out of Usenet access entirely. If there were even a tiny cash incentive it would help but I know that my ISP has occasional trouble with Usenet and I'd gladly not have the facility available at all. I don't even know the news server address, I don't think I've ever typed it. My ISP are generally regarded as very techinical and open with their technical problems and only occasionally do I hear any users crying foul because the NNTP server has gone down.
Usenet had its time when the Internet was majority-good. If you want Usenet, travel back in time to then or buy access to it from somewhere with the hardware to provide all the filtering, storage, bandwidth required to provide that service. The rest of us will carry on ignoring it and/or hitting only the occasional link on Google Groups by accident.
Anybody want out of their comcast contract? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fee Reduction? (Score:1, Interesting)
Comcast included access to 2 gigabytes of Usenet each month as part of its basic package for high speed Internet service. Now that Usenet will be dropped, the customer should expect to see a reduction in the fee for this basic service. But will he be given this discount? I would highly doubt it and Comcast will certainly be maintaining this portion of their revenue without actually earning it.
The average customer won't even notice the outrage but I am strongly considering switching to DSL because of this action.
Re:what's next (Score:3, Interesting)
But then you'll lose these [tekeeze.com]!
Say it ain't so...
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the problem. It's too easy. Periodically spammers flood newsgroups -- eg thousands of messages promoting sportshoes, fake Rolexes, etc, etc, -- all posted from Google accounts. Many seem to be based in China, but who knows. The really awful thing is that Google makes no attempt to prevent spam being posted from its servers. If you go to the trouble of reporting spam, maybe a day later the account will be closed. Big deal, they can open a new one in a minute. The spam has already been sent out and again, Google makes no attempt to even filter it out from its own servers. In self-defence, many serious news hosts just block all articles posted from Google.
Since Google obviously does have anti-spam technology, as used in GMail, many suspect it is deliberately poisoning Usenet to encourage users to switch to "Google Groups", their own forums. I don't really think there is a conspiracy, but they obviously do not give a flying fuck for Usenet as a whole.
Use it for searching, not posting. There are many cheap and some free news hosts, limited to text news groups, which you can use.