Comcast no longer supports usenet

In article
,
" wrote:

On Oct 30, 7:32*am, Qui si parla Campagnolo
wrote:
On Oct 29, 11:20*pm, "* * Chas"
(remove spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an
old dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt
compared to Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12
years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

NOT a computer kinda guy but....'google' at the top, click on
'more' and then to my 3 groups..all via comcast. May be a pain
compared to Outlook but still easier than shifting up the cogset
with DAe.

I'm with you Peter. Never knew there was any other way to get to
Google groups other than going to the Google page, clicking on More,
then clicking on Groups. Seems pretty simple and easy. No room for
complaints. Apparently its far more complex than I realized.

Well, rec.bicycles.* are not "Google Groups" and have been around far
longer than Google itself- I think you've been around here long enough
to be familiar with that history.

Google bought the DejaNews Usenet archive and consolidated it into their
Google Groups portal, as well as providing an Usenet portal without
clearly demarcating the distinction between Google Groups and Usenet.
For 99% of Google Groups users, the difference is probably not
significant. For the Usenet old farts like me, there's something kind
of annoying about Google implying ownership of Usenet.

Reading and participating in the newsgroups using the proper interface,
a newsreader, is vastly faster and easier than Google's clumsy and
inefficient interface. That's what Chas is referring to in his post in
his reference to OE. I use MT-NewsWatcher or Emacs Gnus on my Mac;
these allow scoring and junk filtering of posts and rapidly working
through a newsgroup with thousands of posts.

For Chas, there are lots of news servers out there; some are free, some
are by subscription. Google- ironically enough- will find them with the
keywords "Usenet server" and/or "free Usenet server."

In article
,
mtb Dad wrote:

Noobie question.

I've only ever accessed this group through Google. What is a news
reader and why is it better?

This will be long winded and probably waaaaay more information than you
wanted. Read the first two links below, which will probably answer
almost all of your questions.

As you might have noticed in my reply to Russell Seaton, there is some
history here. This group is part of Usenet, which has been around for
nearly 30 years. It is a sort of electronic bucket brigade, with
hundreds of computers around the world acting as servers and passing
messages back and forth. Messages are organized into "threads" which
are then "spooled" on the servers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Newsgroups could only be accessed through a program called a newsreader,
which could query the news server using the NNTP protocol. The first
newsreader was called "rn" ("read news") and existed long before
graphical interfaces. One read and replied in text only. The number of
newsgroups proliferated over and were organized during the Great
Renaming (seriously, evne though it sounds like something out of
Tolkien) into hierarchies represented by three or four letter prefixes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big-7

Now there are something like 80,000 newsgroups out there. An
organization called "DejaNews" archived the Usenet posts into a
searchable database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News

Google eventually bought DejaNews in its quest to own all the
information in the world. Google Groups was created and is something of
a hybrid between Web-based bulletin boards and listervs and Usenet.

A newsreader is a program on your computer that contacts a news server
and requests the headers (e.g., the subject, author, date etc. of the
article) in the newsgroups to which you have "subscribed." These are
organized into threads for easy reading. Most modern newsreaders can do
spam filtering, junk filtering, can highlight topics or authors, can
"kill" topics or authors, etc. The interface is much faster to use than
Web-based services like Google Groups. Web servers and Web browsers are
slow because they have to transmit and render huge amounts of
information for even small changes on screen (greater use of Ajax
technologies would probably reduce this), whereas transmitting plain
text has very little overhead and is rendered almost instantaneously on
the screen.

Almost all ISPs used to have a Usenet server. With the advent of AOL
and the Web, however, the percentage of Internet users participating in
Usenet has plummeted and most probably do not even know it exists. Many
ISPs (like Comcast and Qwest) have stopped providing Usenet access to
save costs. Additionally there has been pressure brought to bear on
ISPs to filter or eliminate Usenet as it is seen as a haven for child
pornography and music/software piracy. Most ISPs don't want to
jeopardize their common carrier status by taking this on- once they
start examining content, they are no longer acting as a common carrier
and could lose the liability protection this affords them- so they are
dropping Usenet.

There are many accessible Usenet servers out there, some free and some
for a small subscription (usually less than US$20 per year).

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:27:18 -0700, RS wrote:

In article ,
says...


On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:30:01 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Oct 29, 10:20*pm, "* * Chas" (remove
spamski to e-mail me) wrote:
Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt
compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

I have the same issue with Comcast dropping. I switched to Google
Groups, bookmarked R.B.T, and it works. But its more time consuming
than the old newsreader I used, Winvin. I could just look at headers
and ignore most posts if I wanted to in a string. Motrarella looks
interesting and I'll try setting it up later with my newsreader.

To pull an add-on service like 2G / month of usenet to its customers I
only see as a cost cutting move by Comcast. They were paying Giganews
something for the service, now they're not but Comcast customer bills
have not gone down accordingly.

Dear Ron,

Based on the savings of not offering usenet, how much would you expect
Comcast to lower its monthly bill?

Given the size of Comcast as an ISP versus the pitiful size of usenet,
this is about like expecting Andrew Muzi to lower his prices if he
starts selling bicycles without valve caps.

Some idea of how much Comcast is saving is indicated by the fact
Google Groups offers free access to most newsgroups, while
www.motzarella.org offers free access to most text newsgroups.

(I'm paying exactly the same for Comcast plus newsgroup access now as
I did last month--I just changed three settings in my newsreader to
get RBT from the free www.motzarella.org site. So far, no problems.)

(Once again, that's www.motzarella.org, in case any Comcast users want
to solve the problem for free.)

And once again, rumor has it that the reason Comcast and 17 other
cable providers are dropping usenet is because they're afraid of legal
problems that dwarf any hope of financial gain:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ut-for-usenet-
access-through-comcast.html

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Giganews, which Comcast was using, is going to charge $7.99 for 2G per
month with a 20% discount for ex-comcast subscribers first 3 months. Was
comcast paying them half of that, 25%? Whatever it was I wouldn't mind
my Comcast bill going down a few bucks each month rather than creeping up
as it has been.

Dear RS,

Comcast provided a zillion subscribers with _potential_ usenet access.

The vast majority of Comcast subscribers never even _knew_ that usenet
existed.

It's unlikely that even 1% of Comcast subscribers (or any other major
ISP) ever connected to usenet.

So you need to divide your hoped-for monthly price reduction of $7.99
by about 100 (or more) to get even a ballpark figure for how much each
Comcast subscriber was actually paying for usenet access.

That works out to less than a dime per month.

You might as well expect a restaurant to lower its prices because it
disconnected the clock on the wall.

Again, www.motzarella.org provides the same service for text
newsgroups for free. So far, I haven't noticed the slightest
difference. And Google Groups gives access to newsgroups for free.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:08:49 -0700 (PDT), mtb Dad
wrote:

Noobie question.

I've only ever accessed this group through Google. What is a news
reader and why is it better?

Thanks!
L

Dear L,

When you use Google Groups, you use your internet browser program and
view threads stretching back to the crack of doom. (Google Groups is
by far the best archive to search for old RBT posts.)

Click on a thread, and you see a long tree of posts, and you can move
up and down and read them.

But all the posts are there, all the time, all the time. Your browser
can't change what Google Groups displays.

A news reader is a program devoted to handling news groups. You give
it a url, a login, and password to a news server (a site that holds
threads and posts like Google), and the newsreader program copies the
new threads and posts from the site to your computer in a couple of
seconds and takes care of filtering, indexing, and displaying them.

With a news reader, you browse the downloaded threads and posts, just
as you do with Google Groups.

But you can delete posts and threads that you've read and filter out
stuff that you don't want to bother with.

A newsreader offers more options and faster navigation than Google
Groups.

I use an old free newsreader, Forte Free Agent, to grab RBT from the
www.motzarella.org free news server site. There are lots of other
newsreaders and news servers.

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:
http://i33.tinypic.com/29cvvbc.jpg

Red means new posts. Clicking on any thread expands the whole thread
to the tree view. The green icons on the left mean that I've read and
protected the posts so that I don't accidentally delete them (you can
get them back if you do). I can mark and delete posts and threads with
a click or two, jump around easily, and generally waste my time more
rapidly and efficiently.

Like most such things, until you try it and spend a little time
learning how to use it, the advantages of the newsreader over using
your browser to connect to Google Groups aren't obvious.

As an analogy, Google Groups lets you use your internet browser as a
file viewer with no filters that will eventually let you wade through
RBT and see any post.

A newsreader is a much more powerful file viewer that lets you spend
more time viewing the files than navigating or scrolling past files
that you didn't want to view.

Google Groups is not nearly as bad as some news reader enthusiasts
insist. There's no law against taking a brief, horrified look at
newsreaders and deciding that you don't need them. Plenty of people
are happy riding fixies.

I'm fond of my ancient Forte Free Agent, but most posters use other
news reader programs.

Here's a site with more about news readers:
http://www.newsreaders.com/

In the unlikely event that anyone wants the ~4mb install program for
the no longer available Forte Free Agent, an email will cause one to
appear. I imagine that there are newer and better programs, but I hate
to change.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:20:46 GMT, "* * Chas"
(remove spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

Dear Chas,

I switched to the http://www.motzarella.org news server, which I
already had ready.

It's free and works fine so far. My vague recollection is that it
might take a day or so to get the email with your account and
password.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Yup, Comcast cut me off, motzarella.org is working great. Took about ~2
minutes for my password to arrive.

Mark J.

In article ,
wrote:

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:08:47 -0700 (PDT), Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On Oct 30, 8:32*am, Qui si parla Campagnolo
wrote:
On Oct 29, 11:20*pm, "* * Chas" (remove
spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

NOT a computer kinda guy but....'google' at the top, click on 'more'
and then to my 3 groups..all via comcast.

And, of course, bookmark the page once you're there. With Firefox,
I've got r.b.tech in my bookmarks toolbar at the top of the screen.

- Frank Krygowski

Dear Peter, Russell, & Frank,

Google Groups works fine for less obsessive posters with a more
relaxed approach to the newsgroup.

And a cheery good day to you.

--
Michael Press

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:38:50 GMT, Still Just Me wrote:

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:43:00 -0600, wrote:

You might as well expect a restaurant to lower its prices because it
disconnected the clock on the wall.

Comcast is joining a trend instigated by the New York Attorney General
and picked up by nearly every major ISP.

Several months ago, the NY AG sued several large providers claiming
that by carrying 17 specific newsgroups that potentially had kiddie
porn, they were knowingly storing KP on their servers and therefore
subject to arrest under KP laws.

Instead of removing the KP groups, they all used it as an excuse to
cut usenet services dramatically and eliminate an expense used by a
relatively small group of subscribers. Keep in mind that many
terabytes of storage were needed to store even a weeks worth of NG's.
Since the NG's were a major source of warez and questionable A/V, they
chewed up lots of bandwidth. Add to that the fact that the RIAA was
already engaged in trying to sue providers to make them remove groups
that contained A/V... and the ISP's had an easy decision to make -
Screw the limited number of customers who knew what the usenet was and
pull the plug.

Verizon, for example, cut all groups except the big 8. Others removed
all usenet service. It was only a matter of time before Comcast
followed suit. None of the providers has reduced charges.

Dear SJM,

Yes, usenet had become a giant headache for the ISPs, with practically
no profit. I think that you understand it, but other posters are still
imagining that the ISPs will somehow pocket huge profits.

Posters who want their monthly ISP bill to drop when the ISP drops
usenet just don't understand that over 100 other subscribers who never
heard of usenet were paying for their posting.

When you spread the $8/month that's been mentioned as the "cost" of
usenet access for one person over more than a hundred other
subscribers who never heard of usenet, the cost works out to less than
a dime per subscriber per month.

And that assumes that Comcast was paying anything as high as that $8
per month individual rate.

One way to illustrate the economics is to ask how much Comcast should
reduce its charges for no longer offering me the usenet access that
www.motzarella.org has been offering for free for years?

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:48:03 -0700, Mark
wrote:

wrote:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:20:46 GMT, "* * Chas"
(remove spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

Dear Chas,

I switched to the http://www.motzarella.org news server, which I
already had ready.

It's free and works fine so far. My vague recollection is that it
might take a day or so to get the email with your account and
password.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Yup, Comcast cut me off, motzarella.org is working great. Took about ~2
minutes for my password to arrive.

Mark J.

Dear Mark,

Glad it worked for you, too!

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Oct 30, 10:39*am, wrote:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:08:47 -0700 (PDT), Frank Krygowski



wrote:
On Oct 30, 8:32*am, Qui si parla Campagnolo
wrote:
On Oct 29, 11:20*pm, "* * Chas" (remove
spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

NOT a computer kinda guy but....'google' at the top, click on 'more'
and then to my 3 groups..all via comcast.

And, of course, bookmark the page once you're there. *With Firefox,
I've got r.b.tech in my bookmarks toolbar at the top of the screen.

- Frank Krygowski

Dear Peter, Russell, & Frank,

Google Groups works fine for less obsessive posters with a more
relaxed approach to the newsgroup.

Oh YEHHH!! WHATDAYAMEANBYTHAT!!...Just kidding.

A good test is whether you mind having Google stop dead for a few days
every month, showing no new posts, and then suddenly come to life
again.

Just happened..these groups are mostly entertainment and some info for
me. Not job related, not that important.

If you don't mind that kind of interruption (or haven't even noticed
it), then Google Groups is probably all you neeed and want.

I agree....

A newsreader program that pulls new posts and threads off a news
server site can make following a newsgroup much easier and quicker.

Many posters find that once they try a newsreader, they never go back
to Google Groups.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

In article ,
wrote:

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:08:47 -0700 (PDT), Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On Oct 30, 8:32*am, Qui si parla Campagnolo
wrote:
On Oct 29, 11:20*pm, "* * Chas" (remove
spamski to e-mail me) wrote:

Comcast is no longer supporting Usenet. I've had to switch to an old
dialup connection.

Connecting online through Google Groups in a pain in the butt compared to
Outlook Express which I've been using for the past 12 years.

Any suggestions for easier connections?

Chas.

NOT a computer kinda guy but....'google' at the top, click on 'more'
and then to my 3 groups..all via comcast.

And, of course, bookmark the page once you're there. With Firefox,
I've got r.b.tech in my bookmarks toolbar at the top of the screen.

Dear Peter, Russell, & Frank,

Google Groups works fine for less obsessive posters with a more
relaxed approach to the newsgroup.

Yeah, really!--posting technical content in a technical news group.
I ask you... A more relaxed approach writes 22 articles
for a total of 4700 words excoriating a computer manufacturer's
sales copy. Get with the program, Peter, Russell & Frank.

--
Michael Press