5 ms·

No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially a

No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything. And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.

ape4 7y ago
Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations. For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
  - chalst 7y ago
    Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would work. Implementing this is nontrivial, but it's an essentially easier problem than spam.
    - kick 7y ago
      Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would help. Though for significant messages, one still has sock-puppet accounts (or aggregates of like-minded individuals with copies of the source message pooling their resources). And, of course, upper bounds create knock-on restrictions (should the system be allowed to transmit public-domain large-volume data? A bandwidth limit blocks that "valid" use too). It's fun to game-theory how such limits can be broken.
  - ape4 7y ago
    They were uuencoded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Unfortunately, technically banning binaries merely means binaries will be transferred in a more spacetime-inefficient manner. You can mathematically prove atop Shannon's theorem that if the system can transmit comprehensible text information between two users, it can transmit binaries. Worst-case scenario, the users could use the text information layer to just say 'one, zero, one, one, zero, one' at each other, etc. (Socially banning them can certainly "work," in the same sense that social banning works in any context: pushes it underground out of the moderators' lines of sight. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that can be good enough).
  - tomjen3 7y ago
    I have given this some consideration, and what I ended up with is super low tech: require a user registration where users can't just sign up for N accounts and limit all accounts to 10 MB a day. Too little to share any meaningful binary data and way more than a person can type in a day.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      It's a good idea. What stops a user from registering for N accounts? How do you tie one account to one human?
      - tomjen3 7y ago
        In my original consideration you could only sign up with government ID -- actually the original problem was what to do prior to the day reddit banned your community, so that you could keep going. In either case it was pretty trivial to picky bag of existing IDs, if I ever solve that for the general case, you will find out.
ajross 7y ago
Yeah, exactly. I worked for a small employer in the early mid-90's who maintained a NNTP feed (and had for years), and ultimately had to shut it down because it had basically become a giant unmanageable firehose of porn and piracy. The actual human-written text content had dropped down to the 1% level or worse. Usenet died for the same reason Facebook won: people exploit "free" forums in ways that ruin the experience. It's simply not possible to have an unmoderated discussion environment in an unrestricted internet, which is why we're having this discussion on a moderated site.
chungus_khan 7y ago
My ISP still includes Usenet, which is pretty cool.
- Melting_Harps 7y ago
  Who do you use? I had Cox because they were the only one left offering usenet (albeit capped). I was a really late adopter to torrents because of my background in usenet, sometime around 2010 all the alt.binaries I used to frequent went dead or were broken with little par2 support. It was a great time back in the early 2000s, though. If I'm honest, I don't download as much as I used to, but I do miss the niche communities based on those groups, though. They have since moved to IRC but for the most part its all gone from what I can tell.
  - chungus_khan 7y ago
    Cogeco in my case. No cap either, which is pretty cool. Those little niche communities on usenet were what originally got me so excited about the internet. Both participating in ones that interested me and just exploring all sorts of interesting little communities.
cat199 7y ago
many interesting usenet groups were long dead before that due to spam... the things you mention are more like pulling life support than the cause of death
- takeda 7y ago
  Spam started when Google acquired DejaNews renamed it to Google Groups, and have Usenet access to everyone without responding to any abuse complaints.
  - iso1631 7y ago
    Not sure, wiki puts that as 2001, and I remember being annoyed with spam in the 90s. I think the rise of web-based forums is what killed off usenet as a general tool.
  - kps 7y ago
    Usenet spam started in 1994, before DejaNews existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
  - webmaven 7y ago
    That's a bit ahistorical. The "September that never ended"[0] (aka "Eternal September") was in 1993, the Canter and Siegel Usenet spam[1] was sent the following April. The DejaNews acquisition[2] wan't until 2001. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups
dspillett 7y ago
> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down. Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs. > they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom. Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Usenet wasn't dependent on binaries groups in the 90's. There was plenty of active discourse. Non-commercial hosts could easily drop binary groups. Commercial providers were the ones stuck in a bind. The massive cross-posting of troll threads in the late 90's is what helped kill it off. The lack of effective moderation controls is the biggest weakness of Usenet.
u801e 7y ago
There are a number of free text only usenet providers out there. Why couldn't the ISPs simply stop carrying the binary groups instead of discontinuing their usenet service entirely?
pwg 7y ago
I don't think the RIAA's efforts had much effect on Usenet, since in that time-frame the RIAA all but ignored Usenet. They were much more in shock-and-awe over Gnutella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella) at the time. What I think led to the decline was at least a combination of: 1) an overrun of SPAM - Usenet was first to be hit by the spam flood, email SPAM came later as Usenet usage died off. 2) the 'newness' factor and the 'new shiny object' factor of the web drew away existing users, and resulted in new users never joining (i.e., pictures, fancy formatting, etc. all made plain text character Usenet posts look "old-fashioned"). And once you have a situation where new users don't join, and some number of existing users continue to depart, you are on a downward slope to disappearance. Both of the above helped contribute to ISP's dropping NNTP service. Bandwidth costs for #1 (plus bandwidth if they were carrying alt.binaries.*) and a drop in NNTP usage due to #2. They (ISPs) no longer saw offering NNTP as a sales factor for obtaining subscribers, and once NNTP was no longer a "hook" to bring in subscribers, it was only a matter of time before they decided to just drop it entirely. And of course ISP's dropping NNTP accelerated the issues around #2 above.
- u801e 7y ago
  Another reason was due to the actions of former New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo in 2008 where he got several major ISPs to block access to Usenet newsgroups that were used to distribute child pornography[1]. IIRC, those ISPs discontinued Usenet service not too long after that. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-t...

ape4 7y ago

Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations. For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
- chalst 7y ago
  Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would work. Implementing this is nontrivial, but it's an essentially easier problem than spam.
  - kick 7y ago
    Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would help. Though for significant messages, one still has sock-puppet accounts (or aggregates of like-minded individuals with copies of the source message pooling their resources). And, of course, upper bounds create knock-on restrictions (should the system be allowed to transmit public-domain large-volume data? A bandwidth limit blocks that "valid" use too). It's fun to game-theory how such limits can be broken.
- ape4 7y ago
  They were uuencoded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding
shadowgovt 7y ago
Unfortunately, technically banning binaries merely means binaries will be transferred in a more spacetime-inefficient manner. You can mathematically prove atop Shannon's theorem that if the system can transmit comprehensible text information between two users, it can transmit binaries. Worst-case scenario, the users could use the text information layer to just say 'one, zero, one, one, zero, one' at each other, etc. (Socially banning them can certainly "work," in the same sense that social banning works in any context: pushes it underground out of the moderators' lines of sight. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that can be good enough).
- tomjen3 7y ago
  I have given this some consideration, and what I ended up with is super low tech: require a user registration where users can't just sign up for N accounts and limit all accounts to 10 MB a day. Too little to share any meaningful binary data and way more than a person can type in a day.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It's a good idea. What stops a user from registering for N accounts? How do you tie one account to one human?
    - tomjen3 7y ago
      In my original consideration you could only sign up with government ID -- actually the original problem was what to do prior to the day reddit banned your community, so that you could keep going. In either case it was pretty trivial to picky bag of existing IDs, if I ever solve that for the general case, you will find out.

ajross 7y ago

Yeah, exactly. I worked for a small employer in the early mid-90's who maintained a NNTP feed (and had for years), and ultimately had to shut it down because it had basically become a giant unmanageable firehose of porn and piracy. The actual human-written text content had dropped down to the 1% level or worse. Usenet died for the same reason Facebook won: people exploit "free" forums in ways that ruin the experience. It's simply not possible to have an unmoderated discussion environment in an unrestricted internet, which is why we're having this discussion on a moderated site.

chungus_khan 7y ago

My ISP still includes Usenet, which is pretty cool.

Melting_Harps 7y ago
Who do you use? I had Cox because they were the only one left offering usenet (albeit capped). I was a really late adopter to torrents because of my background in usenet, sometime around 2010 all the alt.binaries I used to frequent went dead or were broken with little par2 support. It was a great time back in the early 2000s, though. If I'm honest, I don't download as much as I used to, but I do miss the niche communities based on those groups, though. They have since moved to IRC but for the most part its all gone from what I can tell.
- chungus_khan 7y ago
  Cogeco in my case. No cap either, which is pretty cool. Those little niche communities on usenet were what originally got me so excited about the internet. Both participating in ones that interested me and just exploring all sorts of interesting little communities.

cat199 7y ago

many interesting usenet groups were long dead before that due to spam... the things you mention are more like pulling life support than the cause of death

takeda 7y ago
Spam started when Google acquired DejaNews renamed it to Google Groups, and have Usenet access to everyone without responding to any abuse complaints.
- iso1631 7y ago
  Not sure, wiki puts that as 2001, and I remember being annoyed with spam in the 90s. I think the rise of web-based forums is what killed off usenet as a general tool.
- kps 7y ago
  Usenet spam started in 1994, before DejaNews existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- webmaven 7y ago
  That's a bit ahistorical. The "September that never ended"[0] (aka "Eternal September") was in 1993, the Canter and Siegel Usenet spam[1] was sent the following April. The DejaNews acquisition[2] wan't until 2001. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups

dspillett 7y ago

> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down. Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs. > they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom. Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

Usenet wasn't dependent on binaries groups in the 90's. There was plenty of active discourse. Non-commercial hosts could easily drop binary groups. Commercial providers were the ones stuck in a bind. The massive cross-posting of troll threads in the late 90's is what helped kill it off. The lack of effective moderation controls is the biggest weakness of Usenet.

u801e 7y ago

There are a number of free text only usenet providers out there. Why couldn't the ISPs simply stop carrying the binary groups instead of discontinuing their usenet service entirely?

pwg 7y ago

I don't think the RIAA's efforts had much effect on Usenet, since in that time-frame the RIAA all but ignored Usenet. They were much more in shock-and-awe over Gnutella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella) at the time. What I think led to the decline was at least a combination of: 1) an overrun of SPAM - Usenet was first to be hit by the spam flood, email SPAM came later as Usenet usage died off. 2) the 'newness' factor and the 'new shiny object' factor of the web drew away existing users, and resulted in new users never joining (i.e., pictures, fancy formatting, etc. all made plain text character Usenet posts look "old-fashioned"). And once you have a situation where new users don't join, and some number of existing users continue to depart, you are on a downward slope to disappearance. Both of the above helped contribute to ISP's dropping NNTP service. Bandwidth costs for #1 (plus bandwidth if they were carrying alt.binaries.*) and a drop in NNTP usage due to #2. They (ISPs) no longer saw offering NNTP as a sales factor for obtaining subscribers, and once NNTP was no longer a "hook" to bring in subscribers, it was only a matter of time before they decided to just drop it entirely. And of course ISP's dropping NNTP accelerated the issues around #2 above.

u801e 7y ago
Another reason was due to the actions of former New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo in 2008 where he got several major ISPs to block access to Usenet newsgroups that were used to distribute child pornography[1]. IIRC, those ISPs discontinued Usenet service not too long after that. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-t...