Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service

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."

Provided!

I gather this is about some kind of service which was provided, huh?

Mainstream?

While it's sad to see universal USENET access go, it's been out of the mainstream for about a decade.

Looks like

september is finaly over...

Re:Looks like

To anyone who doesn't get op's statement: Eternal September [wikipedia.org]

And yes, it's funny.

Bastion?

Bastion may be too strong a word for a service that most current internet users never used and don't understand. At the same time usenet plays a significant role in the history and development of the internet and it's sad when familiar, original stuff is deprecated or deleted.

Just cut off binaries

Just block any and all binaries (including HTML, thank you). That will bring down the amount of traffic by so much that it is not even relevant anymore. Also the amount of hardware that is needed is so much less.
The only thing you need to do is add a spam filter and you can have it running on a single machine. Retention of 30 days should be enough.

A sad day

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

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 The original intent of Usenet has been replaced by the online forum.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.

Usenet = Useful

I still use usenet to ask programming questions. . I have loved to follow discussions on comp.lang.c and comp.std.c. I have learned a lot just looking at the archives. I had recently come across comp.lang.python and am excited about

I really think usenet still has a place on the web, a very useful place.

And are they going to lower their price?

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

what's next

soon people will tell me I can't use Gopher anymore.

First Ammendment rights

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?

Yes. I like it much better then forums for support.

I hardly ever see any spam. Mainly because it is filtered out.

Re:So?

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?

Filtered out by the providers. I only filter out trolls.
I get perhaps 1 or 2 spam messages per day and that probably because I fetch news every 15 minutes, so the spam filters were not able to pick it up yet and delete it.

slrn is still the way to go for me. Never ever had an issue with the way it thread.

Re:So?

"I read USENET for the great articles"

s/USENET/PlayBoy/

Me for one - I'm not going to miss it. Comcast limited you to a 1G ( I think they raised it to 2G in the last year) and I'm usually warming up about that point. Switched over to maximumusenet.com and haven't looked back. So now I can read 50G of articles for their well thought out commentary and in-depth analysis. Helped me complete my mame rom set, all the drm free mp3's and no sneaky mediasentry to worry about!

Thanks for nothing Comcast.

Re:So?

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.

Re:So?

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.

Re:So?

Does anybody still actually use usenet for anything other than the binary groups? I haven't touched it in a decade, mainly because the spam got so bad.

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?

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?

The main reason that the discussions are of a higher level is that accessing them needs more effort.
e.g. a person has to first know it exists, then needs to configure (perhaps even download) a newsreader and know what goes where.

This means that people who have absolutely no knowledge of the medium will seldom get to Usenet. It is a minority who uses it and those are also the people who have some internet experience.

Seldom have I seen people posting that did not know what it was. That is until some 'forums' started to host Usenet and made the access easy.

Does any serious IT geek *not* use usenet?

I mean come on , who wants to waste time searching out some website to post a question or find a discussion when you just need access to a news server and the lot is available immediately.

Anyone who doesn't use it just because they think its old fashioned and uncool because it doesn't have the "ooh shiny" factor is a blinkered idiot.

Re:So?

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:Much ado about nothing

Actually Comcast's usenet service was provided by Giganews [giganews.com], albeit with a 2GB/mo cap. So it wasn't just text groups, they had all the binary groups with excellent retention.

Is it clueless day?

"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