Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June 306
Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it. From the note that subscribers received: "Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Declining newsgroup usage in recent years has highlighted the need to focus our resources on other priorities, such as increasing our Internet speeds and providing new services, including Cox Media Store and Share. We understand that our newsgroup subscribers may want to continue accessing Usenet. Therefore, we have worked with leading newsgroup service provider Giganews to offer special pricing for Cox subscribers."
Gripes Existential Wombat: "$15++ a month for something Cox provided as a part of the service? Of course they will be reducing everyone's monthly tariff by the value of the service they no longer provide. Yeah, right."
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that they will not be charging less even though they are providing less service hits the nail on the head.
For 99% of their customers, they're *already* not providing that service.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
So we should just use a crappy web interface when there are vastly superior stand alone applications, is that what you're saying?
Every time some protocol gets eliminated. Every time things move from the open to the closed, the proprietary, the world sucks just a bit more. Interaction quality goes down, and you end being able to do less and less.
Let me guess. Twitter is better than email right? After all, a 140 character statically allocated array is enough for everyone. Or are we supposed to all be sucking at the tit of Mark Zuckerman's stolen walled garden?
This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content.
Actually it's a price hike for everyone jackass. When cost stays the same, and service goes down, you're actually paying more for less. It's the oldest trick in the book. Haven't you noticed that your box of Wheaties is smaller [cnn.com], but costs the same?
Re:Not that I'm actually TALKING about Usenet, but (Score:2, Interesting)
NNTP's weakness is searching for old threads, i.e. to save asking the same ol' question over and over in a given group. I moved away from groups a while ago, very few people were using them for communication, which is a shame. Anyone remember TIN?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism in action.
Sure, but in this case, I dunno that Cox are being the complete ass clowns they usually are. I was a big time usenet user, long ago. Lately, I've forgotten myself that it evens exists. Yes, I'm sure that there are die-hards who will take issue with this. To them I say "GET A LIFE". There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests. Besides, usenet has become a huge pornography distribution network with a few anecdotal, non-porn topics anyway, who really gives a sh*t if isp's are getting a little tired of carrying it. There's better ways to distribute porn than usenet as well. Usenet was one of those great protocols that came with this new-fangled internet thingy. Now its a little passed its prime and ready for pasture. Let it go.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use USENET legally and Google Groups and other free sources just don't provide what I want. Firstly, they dont cover binary groups and secondly they aren't nearly as easy/convenient to use.
Honest question here. I understand why people would prefer to use a real news reader as opposed to mailing lists or web forums, as they are much better tools for the job. But binary groups? That is like preferring to get binary files as shar [wikipedia.org] email text rather than an attachment. It was a hacked in use and I never saw the appeal apart from piracy.
What features of USENET make it better for obtaining legitimate binaries compared to FTP or HTTP or Bittorrent?
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
People like to throw around competition as a core concept of capitalism but that's just marketing, really. In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection. It would be redundant and a waste of natural resources that, again, would be put to better use providing new service to people, or more likely, serving an entirely different function in a different industry altogether.
Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing other than availability.
Personally I'd prefer a (free) comprehensive and up-to-date ftp or web-based version of all the content on alt.binaries.emulators but there isn't one that I've found.
Bittorrent is just too damn slow and annoying, especially if no-one is seeding the file you really want.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Canadian, not US but my ISP still has Usenet though they did drop all the binary groups a couple of years ago. Still it has been at least 15 minutes since I've posted to usenet (comp.os.* and mozilla.* mostly).
My last ISP just subcontracted with supernews for usenet instead of dropping it.
Re:Institutions (Score:3, Interesting)
I use my alma mater for my permanent address.
It's interesting that the academic world has understood the value of a stable, permanent email address, while the commercial world doesn't believe it's anything valuable.
I've also changed ISPs every few years, though often it was actually the same ISP but the name changed due to a buyout or merger or for marketing reasons. Notifying all my contacts of the name change each time was a royal PITA. We also had a change of phone area code here some years back, which had a partial result of a significant number of customers shutting down their land line and switching to cell-phone-only mode.
Meanwhile, I got a university email address back in the 1980s, and it still works fine. They actually changed the official FQDN about a decade ago, but they made sure that the old one still worked (by forwarding to the your new address). It still works, though most people now have email to the old address classified as spam, since the marketing folks are the only ones who still use it after 10 years ;-).
The usual ideologies would have us believe that it would be the commercial world that would give their customers what they want, and would provide stable email addresses. In fact, they have pretty much universally not done this. Meanwhile, the impractical "ivory tower" people in academia saw the value immediately, and have provided it, usually for free, to anyone ever associated with the institution. This really goes against what the ideologues all "know" about both the commercial and academic worlds.
Maybe we should revise our ideologies a bit, so that they can explain why in this case, it's the academic world that gives (literally, at no charge) the customers what they want, while the commercial world continues to refuse to do something so easy and so useful, even when people are willing to pay for it. I don't know how to explain this anomalous result, though. Maybe some economist or sociologist can explain it?
(There's also the further irony that one very commercial corporation, google, has taken the academic approach and provided free email with a stable address to anyone who fills out their form. But I guess they're not what anyone would call a typical corporation. ;-)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have not shopped at Wal-Mart in 10+ years, they are the main reason you go into any rural area you see blighted towns.
Actually, the small town that I live (near) in has a Wal-Mart and it might appear that the town is 'blighted' by it. However, they moved to a new building not too long ago, and the former Wal-Mart location is now a thriving flea market. And I'm sorry, but the tradtional 'small town merchants' rolled up the sidewalk at 6PM. Wal-Mart is 24 hours. That's liberating, if you're a geek or live any kind of a non-traditional lifestyle at all. It's actually possible now to live way out in the country and not suffer from Main Street fascism as in the past.
Just because Wal-Mart drove the old-line small-time merchants under doesn't mean they destroyed the entire market for everything. Many of those small-time merchants were charging extortionate marked-up prices because they had a captive small-town customer base to screw.