The Rise and Fall of Usenet (zdnet.com) 130
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear. Some might say it's well past time. As Google declared, "Over the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet groups has declined significantly because users have moved to more modern technologies and formats such as social media and web-based forums. Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam." True, these days, Usenet's content is almost entirely spam, but in its day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more.
In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups. Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. [...] In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks. These messages would be stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these messages. Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and the other social networks that support ActivityPub. As the saying goes, everything old is new again.
[...] Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner could -- and did -- set its own rules. Mind you, there was some organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp, misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to decide which one they'd support. Over the years, Usenet began to decline as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars. "If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet -- things could change, miracles can happen -- you'll need to get an account from a Usenet provider," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "I favor Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine; and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers."
"You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about downloading files, check out SABnzbd."
In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups. Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. [...] In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks. These messages would be stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these messages. Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and the other social networks that support ActivityPub. As the saying goes, everything old is new again.
[...] Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner could -- and did -- set its own rules. Mind you, there was some organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp, misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to decide which one they'd support. Over the years, Usenet began to decline as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars. "If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet -- things could change, miracles can happen -- you'll need to get an account from a Usenet provider," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "I favor Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine; and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers."
"You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about downloading files, check out SABnzbd."
The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:2)
in its day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more
That's not quite true: a lot of Useness wasn't utter shit. Also, it wasn't centralized, it was fast, had local clients and didn't really on piles upon piles of Java and Javascript garbage code running on ultra-fast processors to perform basic functions.
But for the sake of fairness, shite though they, Twitter and Reddit don't carry kiddie porn. Usenet did. Silver lining I guess...
Re:The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:4, Insightful)
what spoiled it was indiscriminate access. the protocol and the "social contract" presumed bona fide, it wasn't hardened for 21st century psychopaths.
then again a lot happened in parallel. this was when web 2.0 emerged. also, there is no real point in comparing usenet to nowadays social networks because there is no overlap in audiences. usenet was indeed worldwide magic, but wasn't a mass phenomenon, actually its struggle started with popularity (e.g. eternal september).
Re:The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:5, Informative)
what spoiled it was indiscriminate access.
Usenet turned into a dumpster fire in September 1993, when everyone with an aol.com email address was given access.
Eternal September [wikipedia.org]
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> Usenet turned into a dumpster fire in September 1993, when everyone with an aol.com email address was given access
Yeah, that's what later people who didn't use it say and it's a nice story so everyone repeats it.
I used it well into the 2000s, as long as you were in the technical groups it remained excellent and it took 15 years before anything similar replaced it.
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I used to enjoy alt.pave.the.earth and alt.chrome.the.moon until they encrypted it all, due to spam abuse
Of course, the reason that usenet is still around is the petabytes under alt.binaries
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It was '93, and it was just AOL.
alt.best.of.internet, a group for reposting posts that the authors didn't realize were hysterically stupid was filled with "I can post anything anywhere".
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Usenet was CB for the Internet - anybody could join in. And once they did that, it was of course ruined.
Curating is the only way to keep the s/n ratio tolerable, and switching to something more central like web sites hosting their own content for members and with the ability to boot bad actors was inevitable. I suspect that's why BBSes had a brief renaissance before their globally-accessible but limited local offerings were replaced by globally-accessible global offerings.
Hindsight is 20/20, social media
Re:The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:4, Insightful)
"I suspect that's why BBSes had a brief renaissance"
Message boards ARE web-based BBS and half the internet, including reddit and Slashdot are nothing but message boards. Renaissance, yes, brief? Not so much.
Re:The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:5, Insightful)
When the BBS was king, they were local boards run on personal computers and you'd usually dial directly into them via a local call, with some limited messaging hopping from local call zone to local call zone.
Modern social media doesn't have such major geographical restrictions on it. I'm unlikely to ever run into a Slashdotter at my local computer shop, we can be distributed all over the world instead of all over a city. I think that's a significant difference.
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"When the BBS was king, they were local boards run on personal computers and you'd usually dial directly into them via a local call... I think that's a significant difference."
Fair enough.
"I'm unlikely to ever run into a Slashdotter at my local computer shop"
I think is probably because you'd be hard pressed to find local computer shops anymore. Which is actually sad imho. As a kid I learned a lot scrounging used crap and hanging at local computer shops/ISPs.
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I think is probably because you'd be hard pressed to find local computer shops anymore. Which is actually sad imho. As a kid I learned a lot scrounging used crap and hanging at local computer shops/ISPs.
My small town of 11.000 people in the UK which is in rural county has a computer shop. The next town, population 36,000 with a high elderly population has at least two I can think of. In fact there's not a town in the county I can think of that doesn't.
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So based on your post and another specifically mentioning the UK I guess they still exist there. Interesting. Most of these shops died here in the US as the bulk of the population switched from serviceable/buildable desktop systems to laptops and mobile devices and the nail in the coffin was the addition of service centers at the largest retailers.
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You're lucky. I live in Silicon Valley (population almost 4 million) and we used to have several Fry's Electronics stores, a Microcenter, and a bunch of surplus stores like Weird Stuff Warehouse and Halted. Those are all gone now and the only thing left is a couple of Central Computer stores.
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I'm unlikely to ever run into a Slashdotter at my local computer shop, we can be distributed all over the world instead of all over a city.
That's because Slashdot is a shadow of its former self... in its glory days that used to be a plausible scenario, everybody in my LUG (yes, there used to be LUGs) was on Slashdot.
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I bought a /. T-Shirt back in the heyday. "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." I would occasionally run into people that recognized it for what it was. A little later I worked at a major hosting company, and even though /. had already declined significantly we still regularly talked about stuff that came up because someone had seen an article here. That was a pretty cool place to work.
I definitely miss Usenet, even though I didn't really get involved in that until after Eternal September. It doesn't
Re: The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:2)
icb was CB for the Internet. It's literally in the name.
IRC might actually have been more like CB, except netsplits.
USENET was more like a bulletin board... That the whole world can access. Its problems could have been solved mostly at at the client level, though. Obviously you need moderated groups as well. And rather than requiring moderator approval, you would need a system that automatically approved signed posts from pre-approved users.
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what spoiled it was indiscriminate access. the protocol and the "social contract" presumed bona fide, it wasn't hardened for 21st century psychopaths.
This is something I've thought about a lot, actually.
I was a part of usenet in the mid-1990s as an adolescent, after the Eternal September but before, I would submit, vBulletin forums and Livejournal supplanted it for the masses in the early 2000s.
The 'security' that was present on Usenet is interesting, in that it was up to the end users to make their own killfiles. Sure, there were plenty of pre-made ones, but it was possible to pick which one to implement and append it one's self. Toward the end this be
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Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing
What killed it was spam.
Spam was always a problem, but it was manageable. Your newsreader program can filter it out. The real problem started 5-6 years ago when everything posted to the binaries groups started being encrypted. Now everything has completely gone to shit and browsing the binaries newsgroups isn't even possible because everything there now has subject titles like:
c33yvcbig9UO9D8AjrN4iD
P212BL1703127587Ui9NT231221WRB
vxLx8hlEja7hgB1U5S8Eo6
5wfUEFhSsR36TUGrcopw3N
A212CR1703127159ugKL9231221WRB
Some of the newsre
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Along with jerks in college, a usenet account, and far too much time on their hands.
Kanter and Siegle, on the other hand, would up divorced and screwed to the wall.
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That's not quite true: a lot of Useness wasn't utter shit.
the key difference was ease of access, or lack of it. meaning you actually had to get a client and configure it to point to a server. this entrance bar is astronomically higher that tiktok, and that makes a huge difference on the network's population and signal/noise ratio. that was just a very specific and unique moment in human evolution and i'm happy i lived that, but it isn't coming back.
and btw ... is this news about google actually discontinuing usenet? well, thanks for nothing, google. i would say th
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"they just bought off the bulk of "content" (from dejanews? don't rememer), put it behind a disfunctional web ui and let it rot. honestly, good riddance."
Usenet isn't going anywhere. They are just dropping Google groups. The whole point of usenet is that it is decentralized and the content is replicated, unless EVERYONE decides to drop it usenet will still be around.
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Usenet isn't going anywhere. They are just dropping Google groups. The whole point of usenet is that it is decentralized and the content is replicated, unless EVERYONE decides to drop it usenet will still be around.
i know how nntp works, i was referring to google's archive.
usenet as a discussion forum is long dead, it's a file sharing system now.
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"But for the sake of fairness, shite though they, Twitter and Reddit don't carry kiddie porn. Usenet did. Silver lining I guess..."
You keep talking about Usenet like it is past tense. I use usenet daily.
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I use usenet daily
Are you a spammer?
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Nope. Can't really see why anyone would bother spamming usenet these days tbh.
Re: The comparison isn't strictly correct (Score:2)
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It's all still there and still more or less works the same way. But these days you don't actually have to do all that, there are tools to do all that automagically. Without a couple different providers and indexers you'll never find all the pieces for anything... with the right setup you can find EVERYTHING.
Usenet (Score:5, Informative)
Where you had to download six separate files, hoping one wasn't corrupted, and stitch them together to watch 30 seconds of porn.
Those were the good 'ol days.
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SmartPar/QuickPar was a game changer.
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Oddly enough, my dad is a ham and back then I figured out I could use one of his programs to do the work. I do not remember the name of the program.
After that, I can't remember what I used. I have a vague recollection of what it looked like. Two side-by-side windows. Left side was the list of groups, right side was the files within that group. I think across the top was the menu bar for connecting, downloading, etc.
You were probably looking at Newsbin (Score:2)
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Two side-by-side windows. Left side was the list of groups, right side was the files within that group.
No room for ads. Usenet had to go.
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you must have bailed out of usenet early, with the .par files included with the .rars any of the par included with the rar pile could be used to mend corrupt .rar, and the .par file length varied from very short up to as long as rar... so the smart thing was to download those par first, then just enough of the full length rar to complete a full tally of the total number of rars needed. if that optimistic assumption wasn't enough to put the movie together because of some corruption, then you'd grab one or m
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In the 1980's the area code didn't mean shit. Well, it meant long distance. But we still had to pay for charges within the area code to certain exchanges. I seem to recall that these were zone charges. My 313-776 exchange could not call a 313-386 number free of charge.
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"Not like present day where you get billed long distance"
Who gets billed for long distance in the present day?
Re:Usenet (Score:5, Interesting)
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STFU, you'll ruin it.
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Where you had to download six separate files, hoping one wasn't corrupted, and stitch them together to watch 30 seconds of porn.
Those were the good 'ol days.
Ah, yiss. I remember the good old days looking for a one handed gif viewer too.
I still use it extensively (Score:2, Flamebait)
Those Who Do Not Understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Filthy old technologies deserve to be destroyed. After all, they work and don't require permission.
We don't deserve the Internet.
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We don't deserve the Internet.
no, we don't. it's no wonder, we don't even deserve the planet we live on.
Re:Those Who Do Not Understand (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, they work and don't require permission.
I love it. What a simple way to phrase that. I totally agree with what I believe is your same sentiment, but allow me a verbose example.
I see this is the reason why vendors like NetApp and EMC cannot figure out how to kill NFS v3. NFS v4.1 has some great features like parallel servers, better locking including extent-locking, no more firewall futzing since it uses a static port instead of the RPC-hassle, and many other new advantages over v3. So, why do I still see so many customers use NFS v3 and refuse to upgrade? Well, in my experience, it's usually because they are afraid of some forcing them to try to integrate authentication and authorization from some filthy AD server or some other security hassle-factor. NFS v3 has a simple and open-ended access model. If I'm being fair, NFS v4's feature-optionality can be setup in such a way as to deliver only advantages over v3 and no drawbacks, but, by default, it's got some some Kerberos features enabled (or perhaps I should say "encouraged").
Administrators do not even like the idea of going from something that used casual network ACL's only to a full-blown Kerberos v5 setup (which may or may not conflict with their organizational standards and be a tremendous unwanted pain in the ass). NetApp cannot get people off v3 but is scratching their head asking "Why isn't everyone adopting v4? It's got so many more features!" Well, I believe NFSv4 got an image problem due to adopting Kerberos. Looks to the adept reading documentation like v3 would take moments (which is true) to setup but v4 is going to require a bunch of Kerberos keytab fru-fru they'd rather not hassle with (nor do they want to have to empower some Windows MCSE tyrant to be the sole one to reset and fix user or computer accounts on the AD/KRB5 servers). It's not precisely a true understanding (because you can setup v4 pretty much just like v3 if you hold your mouth right), but I can see why they think that. I also think the QoS features in IPv6 were not wholly positively received by some folks for the same kind of reasons: it enables Big Brother more than The Little Guy.
Back to the point, though, protocols that shift power to a central authority are favored by people who like to centralize authority. That'd be: most governments, ideological fascists, ideological communists, megacorps & employees, and co-opted corporate functionaries, or other conformists. Most well-known not-authenticated can-still-be-used-anonymous protocols have been demonized or basically driven underground. Anonymous DHT style sharing protocols are constantly demonized and criminalized. Big Brother doesn't like protocols he cannot get the NSA to log for him. Now, that's a fact, and Snowden proved it beyond any doubt whatsoever to anyone who was paying attention.
So, I see this as similar to a lot of older protocols. Folks claim to want to drive them into obscurity because they claim to fight for the users (like Tron) and those old protocols are insecure and dangerous. Occasionally, it seems like the truth is that, those old protocols weren't designed by people interested in providing authenticated-everything and selling every little bit of logged & personalized data. They were designed by people who wanted to share knowledge and make using computers easier, not lock down the Internet only to 100% tracked paid subscribers and enable corporate feudalism.
Re: Those Who Do Not Understand (Score:2)
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"nor do they want to have to empower some Windows MCSE tyrant to be the sole one to reset and fix user or computer accounts on the AD/KRB5 servers). It's not precisely a true understanding (because you can setup v4 pretty much just like v3 if you hold your mouth right),"
Whoosh my friend, whoosh. So close while missing the mark entirely. They know they can setup v4 like they do v3, they also know that it will be challenged here and there because v4 supports a more locked down configuration they can't justify
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One interesting customer who was skeptical of going full-featured krb5 nfsv4 and managed to torpedo the deal by cleverly turning the arms-folded-no-access attitude of the AD tyrants against them. He said that he'd upgrade to nfsv4 with kerberos as long as they let him federate his own *nix KDC into the AD realm/domain, after all he'd need to administer
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It's like country folks vs. city folks. In the country, people don't bother to lock their doors. They just walk into each others' homes all the time because they know each other that well.
In the city, everybody locks their doors. People don't even answer their doorbells because of the constant barrage of people trying to sell things.
THIS is what happened to usenet. It started out as a laid-back country place where everybody knew everybody and behaved. Then it grew up into a city, and people had to lock thei
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Oh, they DO require permission. It's simply that nobody pays any attention to Usenet these days because it's basically unknown and flies under the radar. Imagine that the alt.binaries.* hierarchy was ubiquitous and everyone started pirating movies on it... and watch the lawsuits fly and the carriers drop the binary newsgroups one by one... Usenet binary groups are easily killable by copyright holders or censors due to their centralized nature. Somebody above said that Usenet is better than torrents... but n
Problem was it existed (Score:3)
And did not use enough fad tech to advance careers and middlemen wetting their beaks in the way of getting the job done. Had to go. ISPs had no interest in keeping it alive once they went vertical. Piracy! No money or career advancement in it. Too old. Too wild! We can't be seen improving it or providing front or back end service to it or respectables will whisper, "you still support that trash?" and "no profit in it". It needed to be killed for good of civilized (wink) society.
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An expensive server for a small number of subscribers. ISPs ditched email, web space, and pretty much everything else except the raw pipe.
Which is what Slashdot used to want.. There are lots of posts about just wanting a raw, unfiltered pipe.
If you want Usenet then you can just pay for it. If you don't do binaries then the cost is almost zero.
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Good Old trn (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still waiting for some webforums type software to have an interface as simple, concise, and usable as trn. A quick "minimap" showing where I was in a thread, including what was read, and what was unread, and thread hierarchy. Simple keyboard controls for viewing.
I don't yearn for the pure text console view - I'm ok with more modern UIs. But I've yet to find *ANY* web forums that are as easy to navigate as Usenet TRN.
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Re: Good Old trn (Score:5, Interesting)
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I used one of the OpenLook threaded newsreaders. It was a positive joy to use - simple and elegant. Very unlike the apps for accessing social media today.
tin (Score:2)
I still use old school tin (http://tin.org). ;)
Unalive files (Score:3)
I would love if modern social media offered a filter score file like slrn had.
Ahhh the memories (Score:2)
Dialup Unix shell acount. Browsing the web using Lynx; I preferred Pine for e-mail and Tin for Usenet news. And we had a short period of limited service while they upgraded their (5, I think) computers from SunOS to this hot new Solaris.
Man, it was like living in a Star Trek episode every time you heard that modem handshake.
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I could tell how bad someone's phone lines were just by listening to that handshake.
Iz member... (Score:2)
alt.binaries...
You had to be very patient on a dial-up connection, lol!
See ba.broadcast (Score:2)
I used to follow and sometimes participate in a few ba.* "bay area" groups. One was ba.broadcast about over the air radio. Of course it went all over the place, got political and sometimes people were mean to each other but would get over it. However, there was that one nut. Blocking rules would work for awhile and the regular conversations would commence.
Eventually it got so bad that a moderated version was provisioned where permission was required. But no one went there. The public one was sticky. That ps
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As I recall, the single most popular group was ba.jobs.offered
That was in the days that the San Jose Mercury news Sunday edition was prized for its job listing section.
What a different world.
profile of a typical Usenet user (Score:2)
Besides the technical groups for discussing Unix, I thought this newsgroup that appeared one day summed up the nerd profile pretty well:
alt.sex.what.it.would.be.like.if.i.could.get.some
I don't get it (Score:2)
How is google suddenly the keeper of usenet? NNTP is a protocol.
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Google is the keeper of the largest Usenet archive.
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Absolutely correct.
All that happened here is that the main vector for usenet spam is closing down, usenet is all the better for it. The other server admins were publicly discussing "de-peering" Google Groups at some time in early 2024 anyway.
I wrote a much longer posting on this subject above.
USENET was doomed by design... (Score:2)
Average Joes can't connect to USENET and download the groups they want. It's a private club where you have to be granted access to connect.
Therefore the companies that can connect to it charge for access. Quite expensive access for the garbage that's on it.
With all of the other sources of 'free' information on the internet, no one wants to pay for access to sift through mostly garbage.
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Garbage.
There are a number of free servers out there and it's not particularly difficult to find them.
I don't believe any of them carry the alt.binaries.* (or is it alt.sex.binaries.* ?) groups, you have to go to the non-free servers for that.
Great Days (Score:2)
We had a news server at Plessey Semiconductors back in 1994. I discussed problems with my Slackware install with Patrick Volkerding. Enjoyed the build up to the release of Pink Floyd's "The Division Bell" with fans all over the world. Great days.
My productivity took a hit...
comp.lang.c (Score:2)
ftw
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comp.lang.cobol
comp.lang.fortran
comp.lang.c (as you said)
comp.lang.c++
comp.arch
sci.lang.japan
news.cyber23.de
There were several other groups spammed / DOSsed by Google Groups.
Now I want to see a story here: "The Rise and Fall of Slashdot".
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comp.lang.c++ for sure. We still get idiots there, but they're known.
Recently c.l.c++ had to filter out Google as a news server, as some jackass/bot was using it to crapflood with spam written in Thai. Ugh.
The real loss is that future usenet discussions will not be easily searchable.
porn hauler (Score:2)
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That was on the alt.binaries.* hierarchy? afaik none of the free Usenet services carry those groups, and virtually all of the content is text-only. There is one obnoxious troll I can think of who posts in text and html, the text version calls you an idiot for not reading in html.
My newsgroup reader has filters so I never get to see his crap any more.
My oldest presence on the internet (Score:2)
The oldest things I can find of my presence on the internet are Usenet posts back when I was in college 30 years ago.
The one I care about (Score:2)
Just as long as alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork is still going
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Found this gem from 1990:
In article , ch...@gara.une.oz.au (Prince Of Darkness) writes:
> I was just wondering what this newsgroup was all about, i see that i am the
> first to mail to it and was wondering if anybody else knows anything about it!
> Or even the person who created it would like to explain it's existance!
>
> bye
>
Well, I'm not the person who created this newsgroup, but I am his SO, and I
know the circumstances of the creation very well.
Jeff was (and still is, I think, or at least w
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And its meta-newsgroup, alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb
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alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hamster.ducttape :-)
There was never anything in it, but I checked it every so often, just in case I might finally find out what on earth this particular fetish involved.
Trip down memory lane (Score:2)
For anyone interested in how small the internet really was back in ancient times (early 80s) here is a list of all of the usenet groups from then:
https://www.tech-insider.org/i... [tech-insider.org]
To paraphrase Frank Zappa... (Score:2)
...Usenet isn't dead; it just smells funny.
Ah Usenet (Score:2)
A place where you could post a question and actually get a helpful answer. Where you could have meaningful discussions with other like-minded people.
Unfortunately it all went to shit the day AOL opened its gates and released it's horde of unwashed masses onto the internet. Usenet went from being a useful resource to a cesspool of useless garbage where discussions were little more than schoolyard name calling sessions.
Google didn't kill Usenet, AOL did...30 years ago.
Good memories (Score:2)
I first encountered Usenet in my late teens in the late 90s on a 14.4k modem. I was amazed at the range of topics. It showed me the potential of the Internet as a place of vast possibilities.
Continued using it into my early 20s in the early 2000s. Mostly for porn and "warez" (broke college student) heh.
Missing the threading and kill files (Score:2)
Most of the NNTP readers had great threading and kill files (across multiple newsgroups!).
I wish Slack, RSS feeds, Google News, any forum group (reddit, etc) had something half as good.
Imagine being able to read news and have a kill file that blocks any mention of a celebrity. I'd love if my news feeds never had a weather report in them. Or to block from your feeds anything by that annoying user who posts/comment on Slashdot, Reddit, HackerNews, Facebook, etc.
"Death of Usenet": #683 in a series (Score:2)
I think the first "death of Usenet" panic I was around for was when the 100th newsgroup was created. The Great Renaming also spawned one. alt.* traffic volume surpassing all the other hierarchies was another. There have been zillions since then. But here we are, 40 years later. One way or another, it'll live on.
What amazes me was that enough people actually archived enough early traffic that I can find stuff I posted in the very early 80's. It was hard enough justifying the cost of carrying net.flame over e
Rich History (Score:2)
Usenet had a rich history. Before NNTP became the dominant protocol, UUCP was used to connect machines in point-to-point connections via modems. And then there was the Great Renaming that occurred in the mid-1980s that lasted almost a year. Add to that the silly fights about creating new groups that led to the creation of groups like alt.aquaria, sci.aquaria, and rec.aquaria.
There were lots of good user apps, including my favorite, Gravity. Even GNU Emacs had a newsreader mode.
The whole thing started going
Re: (Score:2)
Google could only making money providing Usenet on GG by bombarding users with advertising spam.
Now Google is figuring out that users hate to be bombarded by advertising spam so stuff like GG access to Uzenet has to go ... no money in providing that.
After all ... at Google it's all 'bout da benjamins baby!
Re: (Score:2)
This is not the true evil yet... wait until they decide to delete the Usenet archives. Now THAT would be a crime against humanity.
Re:google killed this like they killed a lot of th (Score:5, Informative)
The whole article totally misrepresents what is happening.
Usenet relies on distributed servers all over the world. These servers have administrators and one of their main tasks is to filter out the spam, they talk to each other - often via usenet - and swap Spamassassin settings - not via usenet because the spammers are watching there too.
Then you have Google Groups. Around 98% (could be more) of the spam in usenet gets there via GG, and Google simply does not f***ing care. Back at the start of November, some groups were getting thousands of thai-language spam messages a day, all entered via GG. That is when the admins started using spamassassin and I believe the spamassassin settings the admins use only check messages entered via Google Groups (although that could be incorrect), they certainly get a higher weighting.
It got to the stage where the consensus amongst the admins was moving towards ceasing to accept messages input via GG.
Then someone found a way to get a bug-report into Google's system, I think some Android developers use Usenet and that was how he managed it. It was less than a week later that Google decided to drop Groups, in a few weeks time they will no longer accept postings, not even from usenet servers where the admins actually care.
Usenet is not dead, what is happening here is that the main vector for spam is closing its doors. My own opinion is that this was never about spam, it was a DOS attack on usenet.
The reaction to Google's announcement on the forums (newsgroups) where this was being discussed was rejoicing.
If anyone wants to look at some newsgroups which were being hit really hard until the 2nd/3rd of November, try
comp.lang.cobol
comp.lang.fortran
comp.lang.c (36314 spams in the first 10 days of October)
comp.lang.c++
comp.arch
sci.lang.japan
news.cyber23.de
There were a fair number of other groups affected. When the admins started attacking this s*** they sent "delete" requests out to their peers so they could take out the garbage themselves, a lot of the discussion in recent weeks is about identifying false-positives and tweaking the settings accordingly.
I'm assuming Google ignored these requests so it should be possible to see the damage there.
Google Groups no longer permitting spammers to spam usenet is a Good Thing, although it would have been better if they had still accepted messages from other servers.
Oh, and some spammers descended onto another server with a part-time administrator. He also stopped accepting messages altogether until the end of 2023. Maybe he'll have set spamassassin up himself by then.
Re: (Score:2)
That is being discussed.
The usenet groups are alive, kicking, and will be all the better for it when Google Groups stops permitting mass-spammers to use them as an attack vector.
https://usenetarchives.com/ [usenetarchives.com] is the only "other" archive at the moment and it does not even offer search functionality. Their content also apparently stops at the end of April 2022 and that is of little use to anybody.
Of course no-one wants the thousands of spam messages a day entered via GG in any archive.
Re: (Score:2)
I think a decent solution would have been for Google Groups to have supplied read-only access to USENET, without the ability for GG users to enter posts. I'm uncertain as to how many spam posts a day GG was used for but can't imagine the figure was under 10 000 for the whole month of October, Usenet should become useable again once they have left.
MUGA - Make Usenet Great Again.
Re: (Score:2)
I meant 10 000 a day over the whole of October.