R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008 by Sascha Segan of PC Magazine 07.31.08

On Aug 2, 9:25*pm, "Edward Dolan" wrote:
Here is an article from PC Magazine that I found interesting and I suspect
some the rest of you might too.

If JimmyMac can stop stalking me momentarily, he could perhaps explain what
binaries are. He is a computer expert and would probably know about this. I
do not believe I have ever encountered it. It is sometimes referrered to as
alt.binaries.

If Dolan were not a professed sloth, the ex-librarian could put his
skills to use and do his own research.

I believe the only member of ARBR who could be classified as an an old-timer
and who is still with us is Tom Sherman. Perhaps he could tell us if ARBR
was any different back then than it is now?

I thought you were much older than Tom ;^)

I came to Usenet rather late and after a year or so I could clearly see that
it was doomed. Usenet was for the cognoscenti and NOT the general public. It
requires a high level of civility and restraint on the part of its members

and, you are a shining example???

in order for it to work. It is now nothing but an asylum for the insane.

Regards,

Ed Dolan the Great - Minnesota
aka
Saint Edward the Great - Order of the Perpetual Sorrows - Minnesota

Child-porn investigations have doomed one of the last remnants of a smaller,
kinder Net.

by Sascha Segan

Buzz up!on Yahoo!
Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about
sex on Usenet. A few years later, on a Mac SE in a college basement, I met
friends I still have today. We "spewed" about our teenage lives in ways that
would be familiar to any MySpace blogger circa 2008, but that were radical,
strange, and comforting in 1993. We made faraway friends, burned yearbooks
to CDs and mailed them to Finland with way too many stamps. We were the
first Net kids, really.

In a way inconceivable in today's Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was
where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of
the Internet, it was-well, it is, but it mostly was-a series of bulletin
boards called "newsgroups" shared by thousands of computers, which traded
new messages several times a day.

On the text-only Usenet of my memory, nobody knew whether you were a dog, or
a kid, or Finnish-only what you wrote. There wasn't the obsession with
photos and video that overruns today's social networking sites. Yeah, I know
that sounds like "get off my lawn you darn kids" crotchetiness, but there's
something really nice about just talking to people and not caring what they
look like.

Serious conversations went on in forums like comp.sys.atari.8bit; more
frivolous chatter appeared in groups whose names started with "alt," a
freewheeling free-for-all that nobody owned, nobody managed, and nobody
policed. It was a more innocent time on the Net, before most of the
spammers, the crooks, or even the general public showed up. People hewed to
a loosely agreed-upon set of net.manners enforced by self-appointed cops.
The society worked-at least for a while.

Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with
unclear ownership. While different people hung out in different groups,
everyone accessed the same group list and there was plenty of
cross-fertilization. Control came down to a bickering cabal of scattered IT
administrators who generally preferred to leave well enough alone. Compared
to chat systems like IRC (and later, instant messaging and texting), Usenet
encouraged thoughtful, long-form writing with lots of quotation and
back-and-forth.

Usenet has been dying for years, of course. Some people date Usenet's
decline as early as 1993, when millions of AOL users dropped into what was
previously a geek paradise. As the '90s went on, the eye candy of the Web
and the marketing dollars of Web site owners helped push people over to
profit-making sites. Usenet's slightly arcane access methods and text-only
protocols have nothing on the glitz and glamour of MySpace.

The Web also gave Usenet a new life through the mid-90s as a searchable
database of questions and answers, via DejaNews and Google. But
searchability also killed off some of Usenet's social functions. More
chaotic and ad-hoc groups functioned through a sort of security in
obscurity; as long as nobody bothered to click on them, nobody would know
what people were talking about. With Google Groups, every word you wrote
became enshrined and eternally searchable.

Meanwhile, as multimedia became popular over the past ten years, Usenet
started to become a way for pirates and pornographers to distribute massive
quantities of binary files in a decentralized, untraceable manner; in other
words, it became a proto-BitTorrent. That was likely when Usenet became
truly doomed. Newsgroups had exchanged code along with text for years, but
by the late '90s the "binaries" groups began taking up huge amounts of space
and Net traffic, and since Usenet libraries reside on each ISP's server,
service providers sensibly started to wonder why they should be reserving
big chunks of their own disk space for pirated movies and repetitive porn..

It's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin. AOL dropped Usenet in
2005, but many other large ISPs kept carrying newsgroups. Now major
providers are dropping the full alt. hierarchy, and even Usenet entirely, as
part of a New York State government crusade against child pornographers
who've been using the alt.binaries groups to distribute their wares.
Dropping all of Usenet to lose alt.binaries.videos.of.criminal.acts is
definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but at the same time I
don't have much pity for the binaries crowd. Usenet is a hideously
inefficient way to distribute binary file-you end up making thousands of
unused copies on various servers and encoding your files in inefficient
ways. And way too much of the binaries traffic consists of piracy and warez.

It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as
Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll
continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or
long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums
boards on tech-support Web sites. Obviously, people lead lives, converse,
and learn on the Internet far more broadly than they did in 1993. But give
me a moment's nostalgia for a Net that had one place to go, that everybody
knew about, but nobody owned.