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Old October 30th 20, 03:03 AM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport,uk.transport.london
Anna Noyd-Dryver Anna Noyd-Dryver is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jan 2015
Posts: 355
Default uk.railway - gone

MikeS wrote:
On 12/10/2020 10:07, Sam Wilson wrote:
Certes wrote:
On 11/10/2020 17:19, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 16:02:42 on Sun, 11 Oct
2020, remarked:
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.

I'm curious as to which drug dealers are so dumb they think the
demographic
on usenet would be the slightest bit interested in their wares. They'd be
far better off spamming snapchat or tiktok in some way.

What's going on here is that the people purporting to sell the drugs
(let's assume for now they aren't actually trying to propagate
drive-by-malware) are sold a package of 'places/people we'll spam for
you' by a broker.

It's the broker who adds Usenet to that portfolio, and frankly the
spammers don't have much of an incentive to try to reduce the price by
asking them to desist from spamming Usenet.

Perhaps they have never heard of Usenet but target Google Groups, seeing
Google as a young trendy company with products attractive to drug users.
From their perspective, Google Groups used to run a forum called
uk.railway which has now been banned by Google and no longer exists.


Interestingly I’ve seen one Ketamine etc ad since the cut off, ostensibly
injected into Usenet from XSUsenet.com with no sign of Google in the Path:
header or elsewhere.

I don’t know who XSUsenet are and I’m not sure I want to poke too hard.

Sam

Much of the drug etc spam on Usenet seems to arrive via Google so it
would be best if they drop all Usenet groups.

Usenet was designed to use with clients and there are still plenty of
free PC ones. I cannot understand why anyone in this thread is lamenting
the loss of access from Google Groups except perhaps the dearth of free
Usenet clients to use on a phone.



Google have what was the DejaNews archive, painstakingly created at the
time from several people's own private archives of early Usenet posts. It'd
be rather a shame to lose that.


Anna Noyd-Dryver