> what (almost) killed Usenet was ISP's shutting down their NNTP servers. It used to be that every major ISP ran an NNTP server you could connect to > [...] >

> what (almost) killed Usenet was ISP's shutting down their NNTP servers. It used to be that every major ISP ran an NNTP server you could connect to > [...] > A big reason they stopped doing that was that most of the NNTP volume came to consist of copyright-infringing binaries. Another reason was the deal that Andrew Cuomo (when he was the attorney general of New York) made with a number of major ISPs to prevent dissemination of child pornography. That lead to a lot of them discontinuing their Usenet service. > There is little economic incentive for anyone to provide a free Usenet server, because there is no revenue. It could be done using a web portal like they do for free email service, but it would be cumbersome to use. > Before BitTorrent, people posted binaries as multi-part MIME or uuencode jobs to Usenet, believe it or not, using multiple articles. They still do, but they use a more efficient encoding scheme called yEnc, which only has a few percent overhead in terms of attachment size, unlike base64 which has a 33% overhead. > It would be nice for Usenet to come back without the alt.binaries.* cruft I've always wondered why feeds couldn't be configured to exclude alt.binaries.*. Was it due to peering arrangements with other servers?