"rising costs"
An NNTP server is pretty much fire and forget. It'll be mouldering in a broom closet somewhere, out of sight. Apart from a bit of juice and a few KB of bandwidth, what cost is there to rise?
Usenet's home shuts down today
Duke University in North Carolina is where Usenet began, and today the institution is shutting down its Usenet server. The college cites "low usage and rising costs" for the decision. The first messages began flowing in 1980, after two Duke students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, developed the protocol, using UUCP as a transport …
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:54 GMT jake
@Steve Foster
Yes, it can be inexpensive for a single user (or a few users). For example, my own "friends & family" usenet server is a Sun 3/470 "Pegasus", and has happily been serving news (and email, and hosting FTP services[1]) since 1989 (or thereabouts). It currently serves around 300 public & private groups, all text-only.
But once you start adding a few tens of thousands of users, and start including binaries, costs skyrocket. The frontend and backend systems get increasingly complex. See:
http://www.readfreenews.net/RFN-logical.png
And that's, essentially, a hobby system! Bandwidth costs can be astronomical, last time I looked a "full feed" was in the neighborhood of 5.5TB per day (although nobody sane takes feeds from the Dutch "dump" groups, the DVD/tv/game groups & the likes of "boneless"). Giganews has nearly two years of binary retention, and around 7 years of text retention. Geographically diverse, redundant storage costs, and internal network needs are like no other in networking. If I were looking to hire a network engineer, and an experienced "in the trenches" Usenet dude/tte applied, they would undoubtedly get the job.
Giganews may or may not have stats online, I can't be arsed to look.
[1] It is also the family WWW server ... but that's a johnny-come-lately thingie ;-)
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:57 GMT frymaster
*cough* *splutter*
"a few KB"?
seriously?
every post made in every newsgroup a server supports must be sent to that server, REGARDLESS of whether or not any users ever subscribe. with binary newsgroups, that's an astonishingly large amount of data every day
not to mention the disk cost involved in having a decent retention time
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Friday 21st May 2010 09:40 GMT Robert A. Rosenberg
Cost of a NNTP SERVER
Steve Foster posted
"An NNTP server is pretty much fire and forget. It'll be mouldering in a broom closet somewhere, out of sight. Apart from a bit of juice and a few KB of bandwidth, what cost is there to rise?"
Steve -
I doubt that a "Few KB of Bandwidth" is enough to support a NNTP Server (I think the full feed is in the Tens or Hundreds of GB/day). In computing the cost, you are also ignoring the cost for storing the articles (unless you have a short retention period). The amount of data being archived keeps growing (for the same retention period). There is also the question of how full a selection of topics you want to keep.
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Friday 21st May 2010 10:52 GMT amanfromMars 1
Ongoing catastrophic downturn/IP Meltdown
"rising costs" may be a euphemism for significant losses, Steve, as revealed here ..... http://www.duke.edu/economy/index.php
And in that frantic Transatlantic bun fight between the € and the $, is the Wall Street Ponzi Money up against Flash Teutonic Crash Cash. ......... as is revealed here? ...... http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread573000/pg1
[Although I have absolutely no idea how accurate and truthful that abovetopsecret account would be, as it does appear to be a somewhat ........ well, an alternative site is a pleasant enough description which should cause no real or imaginary offence.]
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Thursday 20th May 2010 17:14 GMT Tom Melly
Weird - I'm currently proposing to my company that we start up a news-server
We all work from home, and the endless round-robin of emails are hard to manage - a news-server seems like the perfect solution.
TBH I'm always surprised that news-readers never found a place in SMS - instead people seem to be happy with endlessly growing lists of CCs in emails....
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Monday 24th May 2010 21:10 GMT Scott R. Godin
NNTP is still alive and well though
gmane.org currently supports thousands of mailing lists and has access via nntp rather than "web BBS/archive" or plain old email.
I find "Bulletin boards" on the web to be hopelessly uselessly obtuse in comparison with the newsreader format, and almost never glean anything useful from them. The interfaces suck hard enough to pull the Earth thru a soda-straw. But then again I'm intelligent enough to hit the floor with my hat, so... perhaps they're not meant for me.
The newsreader format (still supported by thunderbird/mozilla, opera, and many others) is so far and away more pleasant to use, it's not even funny.
I owe Gmane some thanks for making such a thing possible, that I can still keep on top of the various mailing lists without all the email clutter.
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
A shame .... kind of...
Sad news, and a bit of internet history gone.
But perhaps not a calamity if the same fate followed the whole of usenet.
Twenty years ago when I first started using the internet, usenet was what attracted me most - countless special-interest communities where discussion, advice and help was paramount.
Five years ago, I dropped out of usenet altogether - it had been taken over by trolls and sock puppets, and the chances of intelligent discussion on any topic (especially the topic espoused by the usenet group itself) had become vanishingly small. Not to mention the binary groups, which apart from anything else made many isps back away from a medium they saw as fraught with porn and piracy.
So it's goodbye usenet. I'll miss you, but no question your time is up.
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:48 GMT Disco-Legend-Zeke
Usenet Was The...
...BitTorrent of it's day, and as such was attacked by the anti free speech and copyright enforcement communities almost from day one.
It continues to be a very important medium, supported by large ISP's, who benefit by local caching, and zillions of freetards and other users, who benefit by keeping abreast (ahem) of their topics of interest.
The 211 shortage over, I raise my glass to USENET.
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:57 GMT Joe H.
I remember...
... accessing usenet through a netcom unix shell account with a 2400 baud modem and until .html came along it was all we had to communicate. There were many fine ASCII artists that made amazing graphic pictures with nothing but letters and symbols from the keyboard.
<grasps sides of walker handles and shuffles away from keyboard muttering bitterly about how good the whippersnapper facebooking twitterers have it these days>
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Friday 21st May 2010 08:58 GMT alderson
NNTP? Really?
One quibble: The article makes the claim, perhaps inadvertently, that nntp predates the Internet.
Usenet used Unix-to-Unix-copy (uucp) over dial-up phone lines for a very long time. It wasn't until the Internet was firmly established that a TCP-based NetNews Transfer Protocol (nntp) was devised, and uucp was still the primary vehicle for Usenet for a long long time afterwards, since the world at large was not allowed on the Internet until the mid-1990s.
For a very long time, there were a number of sites which resided on both networks and acted as relays (sometimes in one direction only, sometimes bidirectionally).
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Friday 21st May 2010 09:40 GMT adrianww
I find that a bit sad...
...even though I haven't frequented anything nntp-ish for maybe ten years or more. I have some fond memories of first discovering the fun playground of the Usenet newsgroups back in the mid-to-late eighties. Feels a bit like a "passing of an era" moment, even if only in a very small way.
Now it all seems to be badgers.
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Friday 21st May 2010 09:42 GMT shrdlu
Death of Usenet: Film at 11?
Before September, usenet news was an invaluable source of information for those in the know. That hasn't changed much. It's still the best communications technology for fact-based communications, and not a few virtual communities. It's not going to die completely, but if the big servers go it will be balkanized. If necessary I'll hang a server off of my home broadband system to carry a handful of groups that interest me.
Maybe it's time to resurrect Fidonet?
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Monday 24th May 2010 21:13 GMT Scott R. Godin
ye gods, I remember that
Used to have a Fidonet Point off of the Dragons Cave BBS (which later became MacNETIC, no relation to Apple) to follow the 60s_70s_PROGROCK echo mostly, along with a few other things.
Had some nifty little software running on my Mac (SE/30) at the time to do this with. MacWoof, by Craig Vaughan.
I still get twitted by my beardy unix guru buddies occasionally, who remember when fidonet invaded usenet, and how godawful the fidonet addressing scheme had to be, at the time, in order to participate there. :D
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Friday 21st May 2010 09:56 GMT Robert Carnegie
I use Google Groups
Before that Deja News, before that Demon dialup and a real news server - and their custom dialer/newsreader.
I read rec.arts.sf.written, alt.fan.pratchett, talk.origins, and sometimes rec.arts.comics.* and the soon(?) closed down Microsoft support groups.
Usenet also gave us spam and still does, as well as a new way to catch worms.
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Friday 21st May 2010 10:51 GMT Al Jones
LOL? I don't think so.
My memory is that LOL came with the invasion of AOL users sometime in the mid 90's. In fact, a brief search on Google Groups (it was better when it was still dejanews) suggests that LOL meant Little Old Lady back then. ROTFLMAO was much more
I still recall encountering FFS in a post for the first time, and being highly amused. They were more innocent times.
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Friday 21st May 2010 11:56 GMT EvilGav 1
Was invaluable . . .
. . . was a major frequenter 10-15 years ago. It was how I found out about the latest goings on in the world of DVD's, with lots of technical answers before such things as Wikipedia existed.
It was how I got information from friends in New York on 9/11.
But it went down-hill rapidly with the advancement of always on broadband and TV Internet, two things that contributed to more idiots being on the boards than ever.
It may not be dead yet, but it is dying..
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Friday 21st May 2010 19:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dying Networkds never DYE
"It may not be dead yet, but it is dying.." but was merely one AIncarnation of The Great Network's Soul Heir Apparently.
Freenet and other Public Collections and Donations of PRivate Nodes are there for the Next Taking Rapture/Rupture for the Good of the Masses, if Better Betas and Algorithms can bestow True Cryptic Privacy from the EastAblishment's tentacles of Governments and Corporations.
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Friday 21st May 2010 19:04 GMT noodle heimer
They're. Not. Motherfucking. Called. Boards.
Newsgroups. That's the ticket.
The thing which distinguished newsgroups for me - and continues to do so, in principle - was that they were truly a many-to-many medium. Any individual post had one author, but when posting you knew many others would read and many others could comment and in an unmoderated group, there was no one with veto power.
Also very importantly, no one owned all of usenet or all of a newsgroup, in the way that entities own websites - and are thus in principle liable for their content.
Sadly, as other tools became available many of the best writers retreated to less noisy forums, and I think few understood how much less interesting and surprising an owned and/or owned and moderated platforms were going to have to be.
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Friday 21st May 2010 14:03 GMT justkyle
Google's war on the internet continues unabashed...
First, they came for Archie, then Veronica, nobody said anything.
Then, they took out the venerable Gopherspace. Nobody said anything.
With usenet being gone, how much longer before the internet becomes totally commercialized.
Oh, wait a second, we're already there.
15 years ago, I felt that the internet had such promise.
Now, I guess I know better.
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Monday 24th May 2010 09:22 GMT amanfromMars 1
Early Promise Dashed? Oh Please, You Cannot be Serious whenever So Much is Ongoing and Achieved
justkyle, Hi,
The internet, much to the increasing consternation of those who would think that they are effectively running Establishment Global Controls and National SCADA Systems, is for Newly Phormed Generations of Great Game Players, Majoring in AI and Neuro-Linguistic ProgramMING Fields [aka MkUltraSensitive Brain Washing Terrain], as their Base Home Computer/Virtually Dynamic Machine, for Full Customised Tweaking/Radical Driver Build.
And the Drag Strip/Dyno/Circuit for BetaTesting Performance and Components/Elements? ....... Colossal Cloud Strata ..... which "provides a complete integrated tool suite for developing and debugging embedded applications"
And I see no evidence of Google having any impact or influence in ITs Development Build, which is quite odd really if one is to be led to believe that they be thought and perceived to be so powerful as to warrant the headline, "Google's war on the internet continues unabashed..." whenever they do not even register as a blip on ITs Bigger Picture Screens.
Maybe their Presence and Input and Control is yet to Come or maybe they are a Past History and Memory Bank for a Future Operated Operating System? I suppose the answer to that question can only be supplied by Google themselves by their actions, or not, in ITs Live Operational Virtual Environment Fields. ... LOVE Fields.
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Monday 24th May 2010 09:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
outdated, nostalgia?
Despite being online since '94, I've barely ever used it.
I've met people who did, but they are generally extremely boring die hard linux console geeks.
I suppose it's old enough to be nostalgic in the same way the ZX81, Spectrum, Vic20 or Commodore64 are to most of us.
For the vast percentage of people, back in the 80's, the internet was completely unknown territory - we got our computer news and info from magazines - Usenet? I knew nothing about it till the mid-90's.
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Monday 24th May 2010 09:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re:LOL? I don't think so.
More like some AOL user saw someone else saying LOL, asked what it meant and was told "Little Old Lady". Being an AOL user they probably would have believed it as well.
Some other ones:
TBH - The Big Horse
WTF - Whip The French
ROFL - Remnant Of Fart Lingering
I'm pretty sure the only things AOL users every contributed to the internet was the frustration of every webmaster out there The Big Horse.
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Monday 24th May 2010 09:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
ot: Groklaw on why Acacia sued Microsoft
"why couldn't you have an entity like IP Innovation sue Linux vendors *and* Microsoft, and if they win, they get money from the Linux vendor, and if they lose, Microsoft agrees to settle? Would that not be slick?"
http://slashdot.org/submission/1244290/Groklaw-on-why-Acacia-sued-Microsoft
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Monday 24th May 2010 11:12 GMT Adrian Esdaile
Get ready for Judgement Day....
"left in a cupboard somewhere" and in the years since, this USENET server has become... SENTIENT. Having just been partly lobotomized, now it's ANGRY.....
On a lighter note... Bye, Duke, I can remember typing something .duke.edu back in The Day when I was reading USENET rather than actually doing work at University....
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
