uk.railway - gone
 

On 13/10/2020 18:47, 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.


ITYM Usenet predated the World Wide Web

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

uk.railway - gone
 

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

uk.railway - gone
 

Graeme Wall wrote:
On 13/10/2020 18:47, 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.


ITYM Usenet predated the World Wide Web


Yes, I was accessing usenet before the Web, more than 25 years ago. In the
early days of the Web, of course, there wasn't much available, and it was
hard to find. No one search engine could find everything, so I had a group
search utility that fired off searches on half a dozen different engines,
then aggregated and ranked their results. All via dial-up, of course. It
made each search a project in its own right

ancient usenet, uk.railway - gone
 

In article ,
Graeme Wall wrote:
My sense of history is that Usenet predated the Internet.

ITYM Usenet predated the World Wide Web

Both, really. In its first decade, Usenet traffic mostly went over
dial-up phone connections using uucp. I think I still have the Telebit
modem card I got because it had special coding to make uucp data
transfer faster. I unsoldered the UART chip and installed a socket for
a better one that made it easier or my 386 Unix box to keep up.

We had gateways to the Internet but in that era there weren't a lot of
usenet sites on the Internet. That changed around the time the Web
appeared.

--
Regards,
John Levine, , Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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

uk.railway - gone
 

wrote:
On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:50:39 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:36:04 on Mon, 12 Oct
2020, MikeS remarked:

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.

It's the archive search which is most important.

If it leads to the end of "But 5 years ago you wrote this...","Yes but 7 years
ago you stated...." type threads that go on forever it can only be a good thing.



It rarely does; however it can be useful to find some obscure fact or quote
posted a decade ago.


Anna Noyd-Dryver

uk.railway - gone
 

On 30/10/2020 03:03, Anna Noyd-Dryver wrote:
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.

I wonder if any of the web archive sites such as archive.org would be
interested in expanding their remit. A problem is that they might have
to become selective to avoid storing copyrighted or obscene content but
omitting binaries should solve most of that (and save much space).