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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

#141

Post by epc »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

There's weird gaps where groups have some posts from a given date but not all of the posts (e.g. I know I posted to csm.hypercard on 24 April 1990 and can see it in Google's dejanews cache, but not in this cache which has other posts to the group on that date). Was it just luck of the draw from what was cut to tape?

How do you handle cross posting?

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

#144

Post by stevula »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #86
jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

For future historians, the post is about the sex act known as the “dirty sanchez”.

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

#145

Post by Godel_unicode »

nitrogen wrote: post #135
Godel_unicode wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who does this kind of wild speculation help?

It's not speculation, it's basically an open source intelligence tool. I can't recall the name of the company I somehow stumbled upon, but they exist. Palantir, as an example, might be someone who you'd expect to develop commercial tools for intelligence gathering. High frequency traders or other investors also.

It is speculation. They do not exist. You're thinking of Maltego, and it's very far from what is being described. Palantir makes software, not a panopticon for their own use. High frequency trading is entirely unrelated to scrounging the deep dark web for crumbs to stitch together forum accounts.

This is a fantasy spurred on by too many dark mirror episodes, nobody does stuff like that for the hell of it. Storing the amount of data we're talking about is expensive. Collecting it is expensive. Processing it is expensive. There's little money to be made with it, but it sounds really good if you don't think too hard about it. It's illuminati conspiracy mumbo jumbo for nerds.

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

#146

Post by ehsankia »

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.

My guess is that they just used a fairly large word list, which contained a bunch of euphomisms like Dirty Sanchez.

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

#148

Post by bensw »

atdt wrote: post #50
hlandau wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems to me that archive.org, or some similar organisation, should petition Google to donate their Usenet archive, which they clearly don't care about, to them. Or possibly buy it off them. It's a long shot since it would require Google to actually do something with a dataset they clearly don't care about, but they could get some good corporate PR points almost for free.

I suspect there may be significant overlap between the DejaNews archive and https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical

You'd be correct, although "significant" is not a strong enough word

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

#149

Post by baby »

ravi-delia wrote: post #32
not2b wrote: post #20

I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lonely, indiscreet and posted using our real names, because it was a private club then (mid-80s).

Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.

I mean if everybody has something to be embarrassed about then nobody really is.

But yeah if youtube existed when I was young I would probably be internet famous in a bad way.

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

#150

Post by thimkerbell »

gravitas wrote: post #117
jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

Thank you! Is 2003 a hard limit to how far back was captured, or just a current point in the import? I was looking to comp.os.linux.* groups from a bit earlier than that, a lot of the 90s. Thanks again :)

People, once you get to a newsgroup, click on 'all years' to see which years are in the archive, and select which year you want. Don't expect posts from last millennium to be present, at least not yet.
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