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.
...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:5, Interesting)
Best web forums are somewhere on par with late 1980's news readers. I mean, even *threading* is something that you really don't see at too many places. Not to mention the fact that you have to create a separate account for every forum. And each forum looks just a tad different.
One thing I like about Gmane mailing lists is that you can access them via your newsreader at nntps://snews.gmane.org/.
At my old company they had a discussion board in their intranet that was ran in same fashion as Gmane - simple web Interface and also access via newsreader. It got replaced with a "fancy" Phpbb forum at some point....and that was called progress.
This nothing to do with low usage (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who still uses usenet regularly like me knows they're just as alive as ever so the slow closing down of usenet has nothing to do with declining usage, but in my slightly paranoid opinion I suspect it has everything to do with it not being self funding. Ads simply don't work on usenet (probably because of its text based nature) unlike with web sites and no revenue = no reason to keep the service going.
When it does eventually die I'll miss it since as yet I haven't seen an alternative that works nearly so well and has so many different topics under one roof so to speak.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google killed news groups for me. This might sound a bit of a stretch, but I really loved dejanews, and all the time google group search was orange, and on the main menu, it was an excellent search tool for usenet.
Then one day it turned into a shitty blue forum that nobody uses.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:1, Interesting)
I think what killed news groups was the pirates. All those smug people talking about how the just pay monthly to download directly rather then torrent ruined it for everyone.
Re:Worry about the data (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm more worried that the proper care is made to archive the data for future generations.
I wonder how unlikely it would be to lose all history of the internet culture in a giant magnetic wave that deleted all hard drives.
It'd be the modern burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Fight for control of information (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a silent war on usenet. The piracy-argument is just a cover. The real issue is about editorial control. Usenet remains as one of very few information channels which can not be censored by any single entity, and with decentralised storage as one of its main features. Free speech advocates should really get on top of this.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:4, Interesting)
> I think what killed news groups was the pirates.
I used to follow various cycling and some tech, related news groups, and what killed them was the rise in trolls/bigmouths.
Slowly people migrated away to web-based forums, often where a moderator removed some of the worst offending users.
Re:combinations (Score:1, Interesting)
What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?
I don't understand. I would say that, if anything, Goggle contributed killing Usenet in the long run. I remember that when Dejanews was around, I always managed to find things. When they moved everything to Google, after a while, it started missing things. It may be also due to the fact that a lot of the discussions already moved to forums, but I remember searching for specific terms about posts I did in the past and not being able to find them (unless playing around also with dates and other things).
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Interesting)
And exactly what services did your ISP provide ? I doubt they happen to have their own dedicated newsserver, and if they did, kudos to them. Most ISPs back then would provide you with a shared homepage server, a mail service, and IP access to the internet. If you were lucky.
The INTERNET was free, some places however you might have to pay for access to it. You still do today. 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.
Is Google winding down Usenet support too? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone know if Google is starting to wind down Usenet support too?
I only ask because sometime early last week, I stopped getting digest emails to the Usenet groups I'm subscribed to via Google Groups. It happened without warning: no reports of dropping support for digest emails or Usenet, no reports of problems they are working on, etc. It seems quite a few people are having this problem as well...
Any information would be appreciated!
Death of USENET predicted! (Score:3, Interesting)
Death of USENET predicted! Film at 11.
This has been predicted so many times all throughout the years, it's hard to take it seriously.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:4, Interesting)
I accessed Usenet through a local BBS, and the guy charged nothing for it.
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:1, Interesting)
False, false, false.
- I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s. True google added some new user-created groups, but that's a GOOD thing. It's expansion with new features.
- I don't see any evidence of archive erosion. I can still find my ancient high school post from 1988, 89, and so on.
- Google search results DO link to Usenet groups. Goto the front page and type something like "politics" in the second user-input box, and you get a list of all the groups related to politics (alt.politics, myc.politics, tx.politics, etc). OR you can click the "browse usenet" button and dig into the Usenet hierarchy directly.
- And here's the search results for comp.lang.c++ - apparently there are SEVERAL of these, including foreign languages and a moderated group: http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?lnk=nhpsfg&q=comp.lang.c%2B%2B&qt_s=Search+for+a+group [google.com]
I think the real problem here is not Google but PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair).
Almost all your complaints boil-down to not knowing how to use the googlegroups software.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Interesting)
back then the internet was totally free
It was? Funny, I remember my ISP wanted to be paid...
Some places had free access - Georgia had Peachnet for example that was accessible via dialup.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why AT&T and Verizon dropped Usenet at the very mention of child pornography by Eliot Spitzer. Eliot was grandstanding and everyone new it. It was the best excuse to drop the expense of Usenet altogether. They could have simply dropped the binaries. Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet. I predict that within 2 years, ISPs carrying Usenet will be ancient history.
It is the small number of users involved in copyright infringement that use up the largest amount of bandwidth by at least several orders of magnitude. Disk space, electricity, hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth are not free. Binaries are big bandwidth, and the ISPs do not charge any different whether you participate in text only or you have a peg leg, hoop earring, greatcoat, tri-corner hat, and a parrot on your shoulder. Giganews, on the other hand, charges between $3 and $30 a month depending on usage, which is why they're not exactly complaining about load. And even $3/month for text-only more than makes up for Giganews' costs - there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free.
So I blame the pirates. Your abuse of a medium not suited for large binary files has led to providers determining that it's not worth the bother. For them, I have only two words: Fuck you.
--
BMO
Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.
The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.
If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!
Cost-benefit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran a very small dialup service in 1992-1996 and we ran a usenet server. I also allowed users to run perl scripting for their websites and gave them a shell login.
It's crazy that today you cant find an ISP that gives you 1/4 of the services I used to give users. I bailed when 56K modems became popular as my cost as an ISP went through the roof..
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you can really blame the pirates, because there's not enough decent performance free usenet servers out there that actually do offer binaries.
Everyone I know personally that uses usenet to download files has an account with the likes of Giganews, certainly I don't know anyone whose managed to find a decent free usenet server that holds all binaries and provides decent download speeds.
I don't even think I've had an ISP in the UK for years now that's had binary newsgroup access, only text. I think it was about 2003 since I was last with an ISP that provided binary newsgroup access.
Really, I think as is often the case with these sorts of things, the only real blame lies with the corporate greed machine that tries to seek out every single penny of profit it can, regardless of the goodwill it costs the company.
I'm not sure what you mean about Usenet not being suited to large binary file transfer though, that doesn't make a lot of sense, because, well, it is, hence why people use it for that. It's generally far more efficient for the job than the likes of P2P in fact.
Re:Google wrecked Usenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you can: by restricting the query to a whole hieararchy. Just add, e.g., group:comp.* to your search.
Lately, though, I've found the results to be incomplete (by searching for my own posts).
Re:It's Still Open For Now (Score:5, Interesting)
here [faqs.org] is a good place to start :)
Funny that they mention such high requirements:
A serious Usenet server system, carrying all of the standard 8 Usenet
| hierarchies, a large hunk of alt.* and various regionals, is typically
| going to need a Sparc 20/HP 9000/7xx series or better, with 64Mb or
| more RAM, and at least 8Gb of disk
I guess nowadays it is possible to have a usenet run as a "virtual machine"
In fact, someone should make a VMWare appliance (or whatever is called for VirtualBox or QEmu with a Linux usenet installed ready to use!
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious.
That is still true today. It's still cheaper for an ISP to store all the Usenet messages locally, and have users access that store, then to setup long distance connections. The concept is not obsolete.
Another advantage of Usenet is that it served a global community, so that everyone was seeing the same identical posts, whereas web forums only serve a few hundred people and they are fractured. With usenet I can visit just one group (example: rec.games) and see all the posts at once, but with web forums I have to read across about 10 different gaming forums to catch up. It's less convenient.
With apologies to Paster Niemoller... (Score:5, Interesting)
First they shut down TPB, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Limewire, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Newzbin, but I didn't care because I could still download the headers and summarize them with a shell script.
Then they shut down USENET, and when I finally got fiber to the home, there was nothing left to download.
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:3, Interesting)
>I don't even think I've had an ISP in the UK for years now that's had binary newsgroup access, only text. I think it was about 2003 since I was last with an ISP that provided binary newsgroup access.
That's the difference.
Here, in the US, ISPs had carried all of Usenet. Even the binaries. What is happening now is that the binary groups have become so large they dwarf the text groups and the bulk of the cost is for those.
So rather than simply dump just the binary groups, ISPs in the US are dumping all of Usenet.
By the way, when the number of binary-carrying Usenet servers declines to just a handful of companies, expect Giganews et alia to be sued into oblivion by the media companies never to appear again. Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to copyright infringement. Look at what happened to Newzbin. Even though Newzbin never actually infringed, the mere act of advertising as a gateway to copyright infringement brought dark clouds of lawyers and it went down in flames.
The pirates are in the process of killing their own gold-laying goose.
The pirates are killing usenet.
--
BMO
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:1, Interesting)
My first internet access was free through a local college, I wasn't even a student there at the time. They didn't begin to charge me until the world "noticed" the internet about 5 years later. At one time, knowing how to hold a geeky conversation with a professor was a more reliable way to get connected than money, there weren't even commercial ISPs in the area =]
Usenet 2.0? (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, Usenet was the quintessential Internet protocol for revealing the power of collective thought. It never failed to amaze me what could happen if you grouped the passionate and learned practitioners of every common and exotic discipline known to man, and exposed a simple, textual communication interface. In one swoop you could be following a lively discussion on the new Giant downhill mountain bike, while your question on Fourier expansion edge cases spawns a bunch of responses.
But one cannot deny that Usenet, like email, has fallen prey to challenges that were simply not on the radar in their genesis. The only difference is that the ubiquity and return on investment ratios for email supply a dirty life line to an already dead technology.
What then, I earnestly ask, could replace Usenet? What's right and wrong with Usenet and what's right and wrong with phpbb et al? It seems to me that these features are essential:
As well as the significant technical issues, there are major governance issues in developing Usenet 2.0. But I am genuinely curious - what do you think the successor to Usenet should be, and where do you think it will come from?
Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing (Score:4, Interesting)
"Here, in the US, ISPs had carried all of Usenet. Even the binaries. What is happening now is that the binary groups have become so large they dwarf the text groups and the bulk of the cost is for those."
But again, the UK ISPs ditched them with the same excuse years ago, when usenet was far less used for piracy because BitTorrent was at it's peak. It's a business decision based on increasing profits by dropping an unpopular service, it's really just as simple as that. No one signs up to an ISP because it does or doesn't offer usenet anymore, they haven't for years, most people don't even know what it is. It's cheaper for the ISP to just to ditch it.
"By the way, when the number of binary-carrying Usenet servers declines to just a handful of companies, expect Giganews et alia to be sued into oblivion by the media companies never to appear again."
Except usenet is already fairly well protected by legal precedent. Newzbin wasn't a Usenet provider, but was an indexer, it performed a similar role to The Pirate Bay. Besides, your assertion that Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to infringement is outright false, it does nothing of the sort, in fact, on the contrary, it states quite clearly on it's site in multiple places that copyright infringement is a breach of terms of use of their service. Usenet can fairly easily be hosted in countries with less hostile IP laws too- whilst places like Sweden were willing to stretch to attacking the likes of The Pirate Bay, it's almost a certainty that a Swedish court wouldn't rule to close down a usenet provider.
I know you're enjoying continuing your rhetoric about how pirates are to blame, but let's face it, the reality is you're just pissed off at finally losing a service that was being provided to you via subsidy from the majority of other subscribers to your ISP. Certainly your subscription alone wouldn't have covered the cost of running the usenet servers. If you don't want to pay your fair share, then tough shit, either pay up, or complain to your ISP for not being willing to use income from other users to subsidise usenet servers for you and the handful of others that use it on your ISP.
Blaming pirates though who are almost in their entirety using paid for newsgroup services instead simply because you don't want to pay for a service yourself is just comical. You really can't see the hypocrisy in that?