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2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

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Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#121

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #97
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

Yes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.

I remember reading corporations crawling the so called "deep web" and even the "dark nets", advertising their capabilities as superior for gathering new insights/intelligence a few years ago. Was just a short blip on my radar, because I haven't seen it mentioned afterwards.

Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper.

And then the next leak happens.

And somewhere on some site like Have I been owned?, or in a torrent there is a comma separated list with many, or even all of your former pseudonyms connected with your current address, social security, drivers license, younameit.

Gotcha!

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jolmg wrote: post #113
usefulcat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored, but this one really puzzles me: "Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require pipelining. Keeping the p e(s) full seems to require a certain amount of parallelism and regularity." https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965... Edit: Ah, the irony. HN markdown causes two consecutive asterisks to disappear.

> For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored. Actually, it's not that obvious. It censored "Dirty Sanchez". I'm thinking it thought it was a person's name, and censored it for privacy reasons? > Keeping the p e(s) full seems to I suppose "pipe" can have an offensive/sexual connotation. Even if it doesn't so much today, perhaps it did back then.

[deleted]

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#123

Post by indymike »

bonoboTP wrote: post #38
johannes1234321 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important part about usegroups is that it is from an era of dial-in connections. One can dial into your ISP, sync News (fetch new messages in groups one is subscribed to and send messages) and then go offline and read/answer the messages without paying per minute and without blocking ports for other dial-in customers. This also worked between different news servers in distinct networks with unreliable connections.…

I see. It seems somewhat like mailing lists to me. I go online, my client sends and receives messages depending on which groups I'm subscribed to, and messages bounce around in a distributed fashion, somewhat like emails bouncing between SMTP servers. I still don't quite get the user experience. What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? That wouldn't make sense.…

Mailing lists were many times archived to a usenet newsgroup. The user experience was like a big, threaded email box. You would download headers and a few KB of the text part of the message, and then select the binaries you wanted and your client would download the full message and decode them. Really not too different than a pop or imap email client. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroups you wanted, there were many open usenet servers and paid services as well. Groups were not really a hierarchy. You could only subscribe to groups that had messages. Dot paths were used to make them make sense to humans.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#124

Post by visiblink »

bonoboTP wrote: post #76
_y47r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to eternal-september.org, sign up, set up Thunderbird or another NNTP client, and you can experience Usenet today in all its glory. Comp.misc is a good group to start with.

Thanks! I just did it. Very interesting.

If you want to set up slrn -- as suggested in another post -- I can help. It's not particularly intuitive. I first used Claws Mail and Thunderbird and then set up slrn.

I still use Thunderbird most often.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#125

Post by indymike »

irrational wrote: post #33
bonoboTP wrote: post #18

Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?

Not only was it outside of the WWW, it predated the existence of the WWW by a good 15 years.

One of the more interesting things about usenet was it was all text, and when the web took off, some readers (ahem Netscape) tried to push HTML messages into Usenet. Btw... Usenet was incredible for in-company communication. Used to have a private newserver for our employees with names like .customer.help .hr.questions and so on. Was super useful until someone decided to try to put all the things in Outlook.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#126

Post by indymike »

bonoboTP wrote: post #43
jrm4 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think something like Reddit + Bittorrent. Slight difference -- there would be no main "front page," -- only individual self-hosted hubs that could choose which "subreddits" (newsgroups) they would carry.

How did you get a username? What was its format? Something structured like an email address or just any string?

You just made something up. If you wanted to ensure your messages were untampered, you signed with PGP.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#127

Post by Godel_unicode »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #121
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.

I remember reading corporations crawling the so called "deep web" and even the "dark nets", advertising their capabilities as superior for gathering new insights/intelligence a few years ago. Was just a short blip on my radar, because I haven't seen it mentioned afterwards. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. And then the next leak happens.…

Who does this kind of wild speculation help?

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#128

Post by [deleted] »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #106
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

For any who are interested in witnessing a fictionalized example of applied Stylometry, I highly suggest the Star Wars Thrawn series by Timothy Zahn. Thrawn's specialty is making tactical inferences based on the physical art pieces created by a culture. It's a really interesting read, but don't take my word for it!

[deleted]
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