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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some are still going.. https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/sci.electronics.design https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.arch https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.arts.sf.written https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.radio.amateur.misc https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.compilers
rec.arts.sf.written was the one I was referring to.
How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.) If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a…
One day identity verification will occur at the network level. Until then, we have all this half-baked shit.
In addition to the `trn` and Gnus readers that the article mentions, another great one was `strn`. They were much more powerful than any other forum interface I've seen since. Though the very compact thread views like in `old.reddit.com` and HN are nice.
Good times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take binaries froups.
> At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). How much of that was due to alt.binaries.*?
Most ISPs stopped carrying .binaries.* groups because of this.
How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.) If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a…
Yes. Same was true of email back in the day.
Any of you archivers out there know whatever became of the Deja News Archive after Google bought it? https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/ This was integrated into Google seearch, it worked great for many years, and then it seems Google slowly chipped away at access to the archive and now it all but gone. I know about the various Usenet archives on archive.org (utzoo (rip), some CD usenet archive),…
How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.) If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a…
Some of us would sign Usenet messages with PGP/GPG to deal with this. Lots of user didn't know what to do with the "geek code block" at the bottom of the message.
Some of the most interesting and intellectually interesting conversations I have every had online were on USENET back in the 80's. I literally made friends all over the world in fields spanning areas from model aircraft to electronics, software development and aerospace. Met a bunch of them. Visited each others' homes. Etc. Today? Geez. No comment. Every meaningful relationship I have online is from people I knew and…
Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…
Sounds like NNTP combined with BitTorrent.. Back in the day I remember dreaming ways to optimize the NNTP server- surely there was a better way than storing each article in a separate file.. but actually it was a very convenient to have a shell account on the same system that ran the server. This is why I enjoyed TheWorld (Software Tool & Die). You could cat the articles if you wanted. /usr/spool/news, C-News, innd (…