Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server 273
DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.
Re:Google wrecked Usenet (Score:1, Informative)
I like how Google Groups are overwhelmed with people trying to get a response from Google. Google could learn about caring about people from slave labor camps.
Re:Obsolete (Score:3, Informative)
... And nothing of any importance was lost.
Really? Just have a look at some of these posts [google.com].
OMG all the articles linked from there return 502.
Re:Worry about the data (Score:2, Informative)
It'd be the modern burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Who cares? Humanity as a whole is too dumb to learn from history anyway. Even with all those documents still here, we repeat the same crap over and over again.
You could destroy every historic record older than a few decades and nothing would change. Humans for the most part are short-sighted idiots.
On the upside... (Score:4, Informative)
On the upside, Freenet [freenetproject.org] contains a distributed Usenet server, which has so far been kept spam-free by the use of trust lists.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:5, Informative)
No, that isn't a stretch. Google bought out dejanews to kill it off. Nowadays google groups doesn't work at all, with them not even bothering with spam (i.e., they don't do anything about the countless complaints regarding Google spammers and spam in google groups) along with them burying any search result that involves Usenet from their groups search. This has become so bad that Google's top search hits on programming topics frequently consists of sites that shamelessly mirror Usenet content to try to pass it off as their own forums, while it completely ignores any hit from the very same newsgroup.
Then there's Google's inability to find even popular newsgroups such as comp.lang.c++ [google.com] when you even when you explicitly search for the group [google.com]
If that wasn't enough, Google's newsgroup archive has since been eroding, which is a major blow to one of Usenet's most valuable use, humanity's best and most successfull attempt at an expert system [wikipedia.org].
So it isn't a stretch to claim that Google is the one responsible for killing newsgroups. The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:5, Informative)
Those were good times. Thanks guys.
I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews [giganews.com], they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.
And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:2, Informative)
Err what sort of crappy ISP where you with "I doubt they happen to have their own dedicated newsserver...", I don't know what rock you where living under then but at least in North America(eg Canada and the US) if your ISP didn't have a news server you where getting your dial up from one of those ad supported places and even most of them had news. No real ISP does not come with news, of course I used to be able to check my email with pine and had shell access, of course that was 4 or 5 years ago, never mind that was before web 2.0 err time, Oceania has always been the enemy .
Too much of Usenet is full of SPAM and garbage (Score:3, Informative)
Try and read aus.tv, aus.politics, aus.general or a number of other aus.* groups and you will see that far to many of the posts are garbage or SPAM vs legitimate postings.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:5, Informative)
You sadly don't know what you are talking about and you don't even try to disprove anything that I've said. For example, you replied to my comment regarding how Google is a disgrace at filtering spam with an idiotic statement that:
Either you failed to read what I've written or you tried to pull a red herring to divert the attention from Google's appallingly bad track record at tackling both spam and spammers to this absurd comment regarding user interfaces. My point was about Google's terrible anti-spam and anti-spammer track record, not UI design. So, where exactly did you get the idea this was about UI?
Then your next statement is this silly thing:
Once again you've failed to understand what has been said. No one said that Google stopped presenting usenet results. What has been said was that Google groups search is so bad that it even places on their top hits (i.e., what Google considers the best match) hits from websites that do nothing more than mirror usenet to try to pass off discussions from newsgroups as their own forums. As a quick and dirty demonstration, I've browsed comp.lang.c [google.com] and then searched Google groups for "How to use maloc with strcut" [google.com], a discussion which has been started quite recently and whose subject is somewhat unique. So, after searching for the subject through Google groups [google.com], you will notice that the first two [velocityreviews.com] hits [phwinfo.com] are from websites mirroring comp.lang.c. Granted, in this test (which was quick and dirty) a link to Google's site on comp.lang.c appears in 3rd place but this, unfortunately, isn't the norm. It is, quite unfortunately, an isolated incident. For example, if you search for "malloc array" [google.com] on google groups then all your hits will be from sites that either mirror usenet or provide rudimentary forums, with the first usenet hits appearing on the 3rd page and being from groups such as mailing.freebsd.stable and comp.unix.questions, the last one being a hit from 1991. In fact, the first hit that pops up from Google's usenet archive that comes from a C-related newsgroup comes in the form of this post from comp.lang.c.moderated [google.com] that appears at the bottom of the 5th search results page and is from 2003.
So, care to explain where exactly do you not see a burying of usenet's search results and an erosion of the usenet's archive?
You may play the role of one of Google's tireless PR drones by either slapping red herrings around in the attempt to conceal Google's problems such as the abysmal spam problem and it's usenet results' burying in it's Google groups search. You may even try to go into personal attacks such as claiming that Google's problems amount to nothing more than user dumbness. Yet, that doesn't stop people from looking stuff for themselves and, as a consequence, realize that your accusations are either baseless or patently false.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. About US$9.00 a month to NewsGuy [newsguy.com] in my case.
WELL worth that modest expense for access to practically all the USENET groups and alt. hierarchy.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:4, Informative)
>But what exactly was the main point of Usenet?
A store and forward messaging system. The Internet's BBS.
>Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site
Not when those articles consist of rips from BluRay disks encoded as 7-bit ASCII.
>The whole concept of usenet is out of date,
Just because it's misused doesn't mean it's out of date. It was just never meant to carry binary data. This is evident because every binary attachment has to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII. If you don't understand this then I don't know what to say.
>far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that.
What? And what happens when that one server goes down, or the owner can no longer pay for the bandwidth costs because everyone worldwide is contacting that one server? Eh? 'Splain this to me. How many websites do you know of that go back to the beginning of the Web besides CERN?
>I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper
You're kidding, right? Every web page owner that relies on ads to keep his machines up and the bills paid is raging at you right now.
>Argument against having standards
LOL U TROLE ME.
--
BMO
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:2, Informative)
But what exactly was the main point of Usenet?
I'll give you one big point: the ability to search for specific text strings (e.g. if I am researching some kind of driver weirdness or system behaviour) and get all matches across every single group that has a match on that search term ... and then to be able to view the entire discussion in a consistent, threaded format.
Google has recently been doing a better job of finding search results across all the many, many, many esoteric discussion boards out there, but it's still far from optimal.
Enough free alternatives are available (Score:3, Informative)
Just use one of the freely available text-only Usenet servers, like news.eternal-september.org [eternal-september.org], or choose to support a cheap one, like the excellent individual.net [individual.net] which costs just 10 euros (15 US dollars) per year.
Usenet is consolidating. It's not dying. Services like these continue to provide a spam-free, binary-free, high-quality Usenet feed.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:4, Informative)
What killed newsgroups for me was spam. I know they probably have a handle on it now, but back in the late 90's the signal to spam ratio was like 90%.
One of the few times in my life too when spam really started to piss me off - so much so I never went back. People must have bought this garbage they were pushing too - when some rec.arts group shot up to 10,000+ messages a *day* (from 20 or 30 - yes it really was that bad).
Its kind of sad too - unified message boards are now a thing of the past. Same with community BBS's (there was a time - I know its hard to believe, that you knew who in your community was doing what with computers, or radio or model airplanes because of the local bbs's).
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:3, Informative)
GreatBunzinni's original problem with finding comp.lang.c++ occurred because he didn't escape the +'s as %2B in the URL, and by convention Google treats unescaped +'s as equivalent to spaces.
His complaints about searching for the "How to use maloc with strcut" thread (dated May 13, 2010) are legitimate. Here are some specific results, the last of which provides an effective workaround if that's all you care about:
I also tried appending "subject:" or "subj:", as well as searching for a distinctive phrase within the body ("Why i get warrning" [sic]) instead of the phrase from the subject, none of which seemed to improve things - I didn't test every single combination, though, and anyway we've already found an effective workaround at this point.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:3, Informative)
Did you even try searching USENET through the link you provided? When I try it I get a bunch of results pointing to third-party websites and very few pointing to USENET posts.
Google is nearly useless these days if you want to search USENET specifically.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:4, Informative)
The difference being today, hardly a single page, server or service goes up without someone profiting from it. Even good old /. has banners and adds.
I know, right? I ran a web forum from 2004 to recently. It wasn't huge, 1,000 or so members, but it was a sizeable and active community. I paid $20 a month to run this service and another $7/year for the domain. I never put a single advertisement of any kind on my site as there was no need. I ran Simple Machines Forum and later phpBB and both were completely free. Nowadays "the big lie" is that it costs a lot to run websites. It doesn't, yet every small-time webmaster on Earth will argue they "need" those ads to afford to run the site, and that they "need" that VBulletin license, and this and that. I guess it's because 90% of webmasters are college kids who think $20 is a lot of money.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Informative)
Uhh, you can still check your email with pine.. but alpine is better (essentially pine 5.0) since it supports Unicode (spam won't screw up your terminal screen for one).