On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 18:47:56 +0100, Scott
wrote:

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:32:43 -0000 (UTC), Recliner
wrote:

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote:
Or you could just use a different news server. Usenet is a distributed system
and thankfully, Google does not control it, they just offer access. I was able
to add uk.railway from astraweb and downloaded over 1m headers.

Spam in unmoderated Usenet groups has been around since the beginning of time.
The traditional way of dealing with it is a newsreader than offers reasonable
keyword and baysean filtering.

Unfortunately there are people who think that usenet groups are part of
Google Groups, and not something that existed long before Google was
invented. So when GG cuts off access to a usenet group, because of all the
drug spam that was being injected via GG, those people think the group is
dead and gone, hence the misleading title of this thread.

My sense of history is that Usenet predated the Internet.

Sort of. It predates public access to the Internet, but the Internet's
antecendants go back a lot further than that. And the term "Internet"
was in use (albeit as only one protocol of what was then still ARPANET)
as early as the 1970s. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was first
documented in 1981, in RFC 791, which is slightly earlier than the first
documentation of Usenet in RFC 850 (in 1983). Although, of course,
Usenet, in a form that we would recognise as such, was in early use
before that.

It's probably more true to say that the Internet and Usenet originally
evolved separately, but converged in the early 1980s. RFC 850 explicitly
states that Usenet messages should be formatted as valid ARPANET mail
messages, even if not transmitted via ARPANET.

Mark