If you want to experiment the real thing, there is https://news.aioe.org/ , a public news server.
2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
201–210 of 320 posts
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#202Folks, 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.
It is also homophobic as the word "lesbian" is one of the words censored.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#203Folks, 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.
Some of us appreciate a good mask of asterisks.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#204Can 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?
[deleted]
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe rot13 the words you think you need to censor? That'd be in keeping with the usenet tradition at least from the mid-late 90s when I was reading/posting heavily. And maybe add a simple javascript ROT13 widget so people can easily reveal it? (There was a time in my life when I could read ROT13-ed things pretty accurately in my head.)
Double rot13 just to be sure.
:-)
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe rot13 the words you think you need to censor? That'd be in keeping with the usenet tradition at least from the mid-late 90s when I was reading/posting heavily. And maybe add a simple javascript ROT13 widget so people can easily reveal it? (There was a time in my life when I could read ROT13-ed things pretty accurately in my head.)
Double rot13 just to be sure.
It's 2020 and we're under threat from state-level hackers. We need quadruple rot13!
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
This really isn't how this works. Stylometry is a thing, sure. But it's rarely accurate enough to use on bulk archives in an automated way, especially when archives come from different domains (eg, technical vs social writing). It's useful for identifying possible alternate authors plays attributed to Shakespeare[1], but a lot less useful for trying to tie a reddit identity to a github profile. Anyways, what can be d…
Consider the spelling "chaff" for Rokos Basilisk :)
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#208Can 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?
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.
The above post is the best answer to what is Usenet; understand it from using it.
For anyone who doesn't want to sign up to try it, there's also:
news.aioe.org
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#209Can 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?
Others have covered what Usenet was. To further give you an idea of how different those times were, here is my email address from the signature on one of my Usenet posts from the '80s: ihnp4!{cithep,wlbr!callan}!tim What that meant was that to get an email to me, your computer should arrange to deliver it to ihnp4. That was the name of a machine at a Bell Labs office at a place named "Indian Hill" in Naperville, IL.…
> what Usenet was
Usenet is still around, I still read it most days, with trn.
Most newsgroups are either dead or pure spam, but some are active with real content.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#210Earlier 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.
"pipe" means blowjob in french. Maybe the filter dictionary is multilingual?