Usenet newsgroups[Telecom]

But, a large organization like AT&T would have many customers who would complain about a service being lost. So, yes, they would care.

However, if the number of customers of a large company is small, then unfortunately it simply doesn't pay to carry a service for which there is little demand.

Usenet is an old service and has some weaknesses. Perhaps many of those seeking to communicate have moved on to other venues.

Yes, there are "smallish local ISPs" but they have some serious limitations.

[balance snipped before I get into trouble with some comments about the "good ole days".]

II just started using motzarella.org yesterday and really don't see much difference between them and the AT&T servers, except the AT&T update faster.

-- The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2009 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Sadly, that is not my problem.

It IS all about *ME*, isn't it ??? ;-)

done

Most reputable transit server operators run some sort of anti-spam software. Nobody wants their resources to be wasted transporting spam. Current anti-spam software is reasonably effective, although not as effective as anti-spam software for email (which invests much more CPU power into each message than most Usenet transit servers are able to). Most of the newsgroups I read see very little automated spam; I don't think there's enough CPU power available anywhere to reliably distinguish human-injected spam (which, in the newsgroups where I see it the most, is difficult to distinguish from legitimate content).

Some transit servers will drop articles which have passed through known spam havens. I haven't heard of anyone completely blacklisting Google Groups, but I wouldn't be surprised.

They need training anyway. Many people are cheering the demise of ISP-provided news servers, for precisely that reason -- which just leaves Google Groups as the primary source of clueless lusers. (Unfortunately, losing GG would be a two-edged sword, because many more people benefit from having access to the archive Google acquired with DejaNews than benefit from not seeing posts from clueless GG users.)

-GAWollman

Not on Usenet, or at least it shouldn't be........and that was exactly my point.

If the various SysAdm's would still require that ALL their users be "known" to them with some kind of verifiable identity information, then legitimate sites would NOT have any spammers posting. AND If spam friendly sites lost all their peers, Usenet spam would largely be non-existent.

Problem IS that there are too many "big guys" in the game now that don't really give a crap about spam and the like........like but not limited to Google.......to make ANY solution effective.

The cows are out of the barn AND the barn has burned. It is too late to go back now.

This too, like all good things, will come to an end, hastened by the idiots of the world.

***** Moderator's Note *****

If the "big guys" don't care about spam, it's because biger routers and fatter pipes are cheaper than the cost of controlling it.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

What makes you say Google Groups is such a problem?

It isn't dying. It's dead. All of the groups I used to frequent have long lost quality, relevant discussions.

Even this group, which still has some good discussions, is a pale shadow of it's past glory. It is very rare that we'll see a discussion of current issues or technology here; when many years ago it was the norm. This group used to get well over 200 messages a day.

All of the other comp.* groups that I used to read have gone silent, except for the occasional spam.

If you want further proof, ask anyone under the age of 30 if they know about Usenet. Chances are you'll have better luck playing Powerball...

As to why I'm still here? Good question. Mostly because I'm stubborn and I general don't like web interfaces for forums. I haven't found any web based forums that provide anywhere near SNR that used to exist in the good USENET forums. So, I stick around Usenet mostly out of habit.

-Gary

This is a very important point in the communications and information processing world. Electronics for hardware has become incredibly cheap while labor continues to go up.

If an ISP were to _properly_ verify its users' identity and monitor usage to avoid abuse, it would have to expend considerable human time to do. That's very expensive.

But now hardware is so cheap and powerful we don't have to worry about that stuff as much (we still should to some extent).

Thus, it becomes simpler and easier, especially in the short run, to simply buy a bigger disk and pipe than truly deal with a problem. Compounding the problem is that there's no coordination or resolve. That is, even if one ISP works hard at it, he will still get flooded with spam from others, so he'll _still_ need the bigger pipe.

have always devoted considerable effort to shaving off bits and processing cycles to squeeze out as much productivity from the machine as possible. In the very beginning this effort was extremely intensive--programmers worked in assembler/machine language (the lowest level) to carefully optimize performance. Later, faster and bigger machines allowed higher level languages (eg COBOL, FORTRAN), but even then programmers still need optimization techniques. For instance, computers have several ways of doing arithmetic, and programmers used the most appropriate way for the circumstances. The wrong way would greatly increase run time. Likewise with memory-- early computer screens and reported made heavy use of coded abbreviations to save space.

It is this cheap hardware that gives us unlimited long distance telephone service and very cheap wireless service. These services require massive amounts of computing power (both switches and carrier terminals), but the computers are cheap.

It might be the newsgroups you read. The old Apple 2 in popular again and busy.

As to the posting here, you are right there are not as many, that maybe because Pat only did the newsgroup, plus he posted a lot of posting that repeated themselves.

I think one reason users are abandoing Usenet is the increased politics of discussions ("politicization"?). Unmoderated groups are gettings lots of off topic posts (many crossposted) in support of or in criticism of various politicians. Further, even in on-topic posts people can't seem to resist including a little dig at the party/ politician they don't like. All sides (left-wing, right-wing and nutcase-wing) do it equally.

There are of course times political policy is relevant to a discussion, but now it's gotten ridiculous. The world is not gonna come to the end 'cause Obama is now president, nor would've if McCain was elected. If your pizza delivery is late today it's not Obama's fault, nor if it was late last year it's not Bush's fault; no matter how much you're convinced their meddling or lack thereof is responsible. Further, there are many decisions made by govt that would've been made _regardless_ of the party in power.

Another reason is web-forums that are moderated, which seem to attract more people than Usenet. On one newsgroup I participate in, from time to time someone references a post from a moderated web forum, and I'm surprised to see that that forum has much more activity than the Usenet newsgroup.

[huge snip]

As I heard it (somewhere), the designers of the Internet didn't *have* any implementable, really secure authentication. They chose to let everyone know that *nothing* was secure instead of making some stuff

*look* secure and fooling people.

Thanks --

David (Remove "xx" to reply.)

***** Moderator's Note *****

You're probably right. I might wish it had been different, and I can Monday-morning-quarterback until I'm blue in the face, but it won't change the past. As much as I dislike spam, I don't know of any magic bullet to stop it, but I _do_ know that better minds than mine have been working on the problem for years and that there's no end in sight.

Those who have been in the trenches of that war have told me that they don't expect to eliminate spam, but rather only hope to keep it from becoming a tool of mainstream advertisers. They feel they are winning the fight so long as Proctor & Gamble doesn't turn to spam.

My fear is that the sewage will start to overflow and block ordinary commerce to the point where too many users retreat to "walled gardens" such as AOL or Yahoo: that will spell the death of the "real" Internet. The only other scenario I can think of will be a glut of "Virtual Communities", made possible with W.A.S.T.E. or similar software, and open only by invitation.

Usenet is in a slightly better position: it's likely that most groups will be moderated by-and-by, with people like me being trusted to filter spam on behalf of readers. Although Usenet approvals are trivial to forge in the current system, a more robust paradigm is much easier to implement becaust of the relatively small number of moderators involved.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

AFLAC (you know the duck) have started using spammers, as well as one of the largest holders of the Dish Network. So they either feel the risk is worth it or were sold on something they know noting about.

IMHO, a big part of the problem is not technical, but a political/ policy one. That is, much could be done to reduce spam if there was a _will_ to do, and willingness to accept that some feathers would be ruffled.

In other words, some elements of the Internet could reduce spam if they were forced to do so, but no one (ie govt) is willing to apply that force.

Also, I understand some spam originates overseas but apparently no one wants to interfere with overseas communiations.

A final couple of thoughts about USENET.

I don't agree it's dead. People do still use it and some newsgroups are quite useful. I still much prefer USENET to web-based forums because they're lighter weight (some web forums I find to be slow and more difficult to navigate that a news reader). I can easily save postings locally and read them offline. And this might seem odd given what we went through during our Eternal September, but USENET is more intelligent than many forums (this is only because the mindless ones have gravitated to the web and abandoned USENET).

What I meant before by "dying" is slowly, one-by-one, ISPs are dumping it. At what point will I decide it's simply not worth the hassle or expense to use?

I often feel like I'm on the right course because I have a way of enraging the left and right-wing fringes on so many topics. I don't know if our society has become more polar or perhaps all the new media and way we connect allow us to see each other's extreme views. Before Facebook I might not have known a friend had such a diametrically opposed view on some topic. I personally don't expect everyone to agree me. However I find not everyone extends to same courtesy to me. In fact there are topics where I agree with someone, but for completely opposite reasons, and that isn't good enough because I'm not seeing it their way. Strange world we're in.

John

It's called 'cleanfeed' and we've run it for years. It's remarkably effective. It needs careful setup and some reasonable attention, but it does a remarkable job of discarding multiposts, spam, binaries posted to discussion groups, etc. I can't imagine Usenet without it.

Occasionally when I need to look up long-expired articles I will use the Google web interface, and I am always blown away by the huge amounts of spam postings that Google picks up (the majority of which sadly originate from Google as well). I don't see any of that stuff here, thanks to cleanfeed.

--scott

Yes. Looking over my server logs for the past nine hours, I would say about 90% of the stuff that the server filters have discarded is stuff that came from google. That's in terms of number of messages, though, not kilobytes. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

***** Moderator's Note *****

Are you checking "From:" fields, or actual IP addresses? Almost all spammers forge the From: field to avoid getting caught by MTA's that check for valid addresses.

If you check IP addresses, you may find that Google isn't the source.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

I finally got an official e-mail from AT&t stating they were doing away with their USENET servers as of July 15,2009.

I also received an e-mail from Motzarella saying that on July 1, 2009 they were replacing their 5 servers with 3 new one. I configured today and all seems to be good. I wonder why?

Well good for you. Due to a kook war on a newsgroup I used to read, everything I ever posted from 1991 to 2000ish is completly gone from google groups, forever. Their 28 year figure is complete crap. *