uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted". does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this? -- Henry Yen <Henry.Yen@Aegis00.com> Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700)
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
UUNet's still been running NNTP/NNRP servers? I had an NNTP feed from them...back in 1995...when you could actually do a feed on a T1 and have room for dial-up customer traffic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
UUNet's still been running NNTP/NNRP servers? I had an NNTP feed from them...back in 1995...when you could actually do a feed on a T1 and have room for dial-up customer traffic.
UUNet hasn't been relevant to USENET for many, many, many years. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Mar 30, 2012, at 3:47 PM, Jon Lewis wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
UUNet's still been running NNTP/NNRP servers? I had an NNTP feed from them...back in 1995...when you could actually do a feed on a T1 and have room for dial-up customer traffic.
There's a flashback! I was still shoveling news over UUCP to customers in Texas in '93 :) -b
On 3/30/2012 4:41 PM, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
Obsolete protocol is obsolete? Andrew
On 3/30/2012 4:41 PM, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
Obsolete protocol is obsolete?
Guessing: you mean ipv4? Because NNTP is still alive and kicking. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 03:55:14PM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
Because NNTP is still alive and kicking.
Of course it is. Usenet is *still* the best experiment ever run in the area of scalable, distributed forums, which I think is a tribute to the vision of its originators (and to the architects of NNTP). Newsgroups share a number of significant advantages with mailing lists -- not surprising, given their lineage and the observation that mailing lists have been unidirectionally or bidirectionally gatewayed with newsgroups for decades. 1. They're asynchronous: you don't have to interact in real time. You can download messages when connected to the 'net, then read them and compose responses when offline. 2. They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion. 3. They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up. Web forums and social sites require that you go fishing for it. 4. They scale beautifully. 5. They allow you to use YOUR software with the user interface of YOUR choosing rather than being compelled to learn 687 different web forums with 687 different user interfaces, all of which range from "merely bad" to "hideously bad". 6. You can archive them locally... 7. ...which means you can search them locally with the software of YOUR choice. Including when you're offline. And provided you make backups, you'll always have that archive. 8. They're portable: lists and newsgroups can be rehosted relatively easily. 9. (When properly run) they're relatively free of abuse vectors. 10. They're low-bandwidth, which is especially important at a point in time when many people are interacting via metered services that charge by the byte. (Obviously I'm talking about text-only newsgroups in this point -- of course I am, they're the most important ones.) And so on. ---rsk
Less, and less people keep using Usenet... A lot of people just use Search Engine, Web download, P2P... I guess given the traffic and data too stored, it may not be useful for the effort to keep Usenet service running. Alex On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 3:41 PM, Henry Yen <henry@aegisinfosys.com> wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
-- Henry Yen <Henry.Yen@Aegis00.com> Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700)
On Mar 30, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012 <SNIP>
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
No comment just a question... Why did it take so long? All good things must come to an end. and for NNTP that end was when web based Forums software and P2P was invented. Seriously does anyone still use UUCP for email? I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's).. but that ended up fueling the need :) Who is the Kim Dotcom of usenet? Lets bust him and move on. -Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "K. Scott Bethke" <scott@virtuaprise.com>
No comment just a question... Why did it take so long?
All good things must come to an end. and for NNTP that end was when web based Forums software and P2P was invented. Seriously does anyone still use UUCP for email?
Yeah, that has nothing to do with whether Usenet is useful. Nobody (to speak of) has used UUCP for *Usenet* since about 1997 or 8.
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
And yet, I was a fairly active participant in several tech and rec groups in 96 and 02-04ish, and it seemed perfectly serviceable to me. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
Many of the tech groups remain quite healthy. I still moderate comp.compilers which gets about 100 posts/month. Actually, it's fine with us that the ignorant masses think that usenet is dead, since it tends to keep out the riffraff. R's, John
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
Many of the tech groups remain quite healthy. I still moderate comp.compilers which gets about 100 posts/month.
Those of us still doing work with USENET know that it isn't dead, far from it, but we're aware that there's a certain amount of illicit traffic. It's kind of like the way that pr0n and w4rez dominate all the Internet, but this doesn't seem to faze Internet network operators.
Actually, it's fine with us that the ignorant masses think that usenet is dead, since it tends to keep out the riffraff.
And that's the difference between USENET and the Internet; we've largely gotten our nice messaging network back now that all the AOL newbies are instead attracted to all the forums and blogs of the Internet; running a newsreader client is needlessly complex and may be beyond some of them. :-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Joe Greco wrote:
Those of us still doing work with USENET know that it isn't dead, far from it, but we're aware that there's a certain amount of illicit traffic.
A certain amount? Even years and years ago, when I last ran a server, I'd wager porn and warez was statistically "all" of the traffic.
It's kind of like the way that pr0n and w4rez dominate all the Internet, but this doesn't seem to faze Internet network operators.
Perhaps because the pr0n and w4rez are just bits on the wire for most operators, not terabytes of disk space on servers we own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
Jon Lewis wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Joe Greco wrote:
Those of us still doing work with USENET know that it isn't dead, far from it, but we're aware that there's a certain amount of illicit traffic.
A certain amount? Even years and years ago, when I last ran a server, I'd wager porn and warez was statistically "all" of the traffic.
It's kind of like the way that pr0n and w4rez dominate all the Internet, but this doesn't seem to faze Internet network operators.
Perhaps because the pr0n and w4rez are just bits on the wire for most operators, not terabytes of disk space on servers we own.
Yeah.. but that's like saying video is all there is on the Internet. I don't know about the rest of you, but I exchange a LOT more email every day that the number of videos I watch, but... the bandwidth involved in all that email pretty trivial, even counting all the list traffic going through our list manager. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> wrote:
Perhaps because the pr0n and w4rez are just bits on the wire for most operators, not terabytes of disk space on servers we own.
pr0n, w4rez, and other large binaries encoded with UUENCODE are easy to identify and block. It's not pr0n that's killing Usenet, the problem is spam junk mail chain letters E-mail address harvesters (where you get bombarded with direct-emailed crap if you dare post a message to USENET). And the like. The advantage 'forum sites' have is, you don't reveal your e-mail address to the public when posting. And automated spam sending can be mitigated through the use of CAPTCHAs. --- -JH
On 30/03/12 7:48 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
E-mail address harvesters (where you get bombarded with direct-emailed crap if you dare post a message to USENET).
I've been posting with a real gmail address for years, and google does an amazing job with filtering out the resulting spam, with very few false positives (mostly badly designed marketing email from companies I've opted n to receive marketing email from, and whose spam-trapped messages are no real loss). jc
It's not pr0n that's killing Usenet, the problem is spam junk mail, chain letters
I gather you haven't looked at usenet for a long time. The spam and chain letters have followed the crowd. I can't remember the last time I saw a chain letter, and there's surprisingly little spam.
E-mail address harvesters (where you get bombarded with direct-emailed crap if you dare post a message to USENET).
Spam sucks, but I've been posting to usenet with my real unmunged email address since 1981 and my inbox remains entirely usable. The idea that the way to avoid spam is to hide from spammers is so 1990s. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
On 31 Mar 2012 08:55:48 +0200, "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Spam sucks, but I've been posting to usenet with my real unmunged email address since 1981 and my inbox remains entirely usable. The idea that the way to avoid spam is to hide from spammers is so 1990s.
So desu, ne.
On 31 Mar 2012 08:55:48 +0200, "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Spam sucks, but I've been posting to usenet with my real unmunged email address since 1981 and my inbox remains entirely usable. The idea that the way to avoid spam is to hide from spammers is so 1990s.
LOL yer not kidding. https://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22johnl%40iecc.com%22 --> About 60,800 results (0.27 seconds) -- Landon Stewart <lstewart@superb.net> Sr. Administrator Systems Engineering Superb Internet Corp - 888-354-6128 x 4199 Web hosting and more "Ahead of the Rest": www.superb.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Spam sucks, but I've been posting to usenet with my real unmunged email address since 1981 and my inbox remains entirely usable. The idea that the way to avoid spam is to hide from spammers is so 1990s.
I've been posting to Usenet with my real *cell phone number* in my sig, not to mention a dozen mailing lists. You know how many unsolicited phone calls I've gotten in 29 years? Maybe as many as a dozen. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 09:48:58PM -0500, Jimmy Hess wrote:
E-mail address harvesters (where you get bombarded with direct-emailed crap if you dare post a message to USENET).
Insignificant: email address harvesting activity, in toto, on Usenet, is tiny compared to that conducted elsewhere. (A few moments' thought will suggest why.)
The advantage 'forum sites' have is, you don't reveal your e-mail address to the public when posting.
That's a bug, not a feature. And "forum sites" lack the far more important features that I enumerated in another message in this thread.
And automated spam sending can be mitigated through the use of CAPTCHAs.
Captchas have been quite, quite thoroughly beaten for some time. ---rsk p.s. Before anyone says "but *my* captchas appear to be working", let me suggest this exchange as guidance: "Londo, they could've killed me!" "Nonsense, you are not important enough to kill."
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Joe Greco wrote:
Those of us still doing work with USENET know that it isn't dead, far from it, but we're aware that there's a certain amount of illicit traffic.
A certain amount? Even years and years ago, when I last ran a server, I'd wager porn and warez was statistically "all" of the traffic.
That clearly explains why glorb.com, a text-only transit site, is currently rated fifth. http://top1000.anthologeek.net/
It's kind of like the way that pr0n and w4rez dominate all the Internet, but this doesn't seem to faze Internet network operators.
Perhaps because the pr0n and w4rez are just bits on the wire for most operators, not terabytes of disk space on servers we own.
Oddly enough, I'd think that "bits on the wire" are kind of expensive. Ports, circuits, etc. and those are on routers you own and circuits you lease. I can pick up a 4TB hard drive for $229. And that's currently an inflated price; back in September, 3TB drives were around $100. With traffic rates steady around 6TB/day for the past few years, IIRC, it isn't too fantastically expensive to store two weeks of binaries. Certainly cheaper than your average Cisco router. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Joe Greco wrote:
Oddly enough, I'd think that "bits on the wire" are kind of expensive. Ports, circuits, etc. and those are on routers you own and circuits you lease.
I can pick up a 4TB hard drive for $229. And that's currently an inflated price; back in September, 3TB drives were around $100. With traffic rates steady around 6TB/day for the past few years, IIRC, it isn't too fantastically expensive to store two weeks of binaries. Certainly cheaper than your average Cisco router.
I would agree. When I still worked for an ISP, we outsourced our way out of the NNTP business around 2001 or so. Disk was much more expensive at that time, as was bandwidth. While I was successful in the mandate I got from the CEO in 1997 ("Our news server sucks. I want you to make it kick ass.") and got our feeder up into the 300 range on the Freenix top 1000, it became apparent pretty quickly that the amount of money we were spending on bandwidth to sling all of that NNTP traffic around the net, and the $$ we would've had to spend on a larger disk array to keep retention times on the warez/por--- er... 'alt.binaries.*' groups would have been impossible to justify. Like most ISPs, we didn't charge a separate fee for access to the news server, so it was essentially a non-revenue service. Sure, there were a very small handful of die-hard news users who bought their service from us solely because our news server was good, but there were not enough of those users to justify the continued expense of running it, so we got out of that game. I think we outsourced to Remarq, or whatever their name was before it became Remarq, and as far as I knew, some of the die-hard users didn't know the difference, or didn't care enough to switch providers. jms
John Levine wrote:
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
Many of the tech groups remain quite healthy. I still moderate comp.compilers which gets about 100 posts/month.
Actually, it's fine with us that the ignorant masses think that usenet is dead, since it tends to keep out the riffraff.
And NNTP is still one of the most brilliant protocols ever written. Replicated information, no central control, ad hoc group creation. It's really a shame that the Netscape Collaboration Server was never open sourced (easy newsgroup management, a layer of user management) - facebook or googlegroups without the centralized control. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
On 30/03/12 2:55 PM, John Levine wrote:
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
Many of the tech groups remain quite healthy. I still moderate comp.compilers which gets about 100 posts/month.
I'm on a handful of not-tech discussion groups which are still fairly active. However, one of them is busy dying as most of the discussion traffic moved to a Facebook group. (I'm also on a number of mailing lists that are quickly dying as most of their traffic is also moving to Facebook groups.) We had a thread a few weeks ago in one group after an ISP announced they were dropping usenet, and customers of that ISP were being pointed to aioe and eternal-september.org as alternates (for text-only newsgroups). jc
On 3/30/2012 5:55 PM, John Levine wrote:
I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's)..
Many of the tech groups remain quite healthy. I still moderate comp.compilers which gets about 100 posts/month.
Actually, it's fine with us that the ignorant masses think that usenet is dead, since it tends to keep out the riffraff.
R's, John
+1
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Bertoch" <jason@i6ix.com>
On 3/30/2012 5:55 PM, John Levine wrote:
Actually, it's fine with us that the ignorant masses think that usenet is dead, since it tends to keep out the riffraff.
+1
+5; September is finally over. Now, where can I get a non-commercial rec.arts/tech-groups feed? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
No comment just a question... Why did it take so long?
All good things must come to an end. and for NNTP that end was when web based Forums software and P2P was invented. Seriously does anyone still use UUCP for email? I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's).. but that ended up fueling the need :) Who is the Kim Dotcom of usenet? Lets bust him and move on.
-Scott
I think there is still a place for things like NNTP and UUCP but maybe not as they were used in the past. Private NNTP groups could be used to create discussion boards or even a coordination system for emergency response with each jurisdiction having its own group hierarchy. UUCP could be used to move mail and "news" between locations via telephone dial if the conventional internet is broken. UUCP has the advantage of moving email for entire domains rather than simply a user. It could be a good emergency backup or used in places where Internet connectivity is spotty/denied but telephone service is available. In fact I once had an idea of using NNTP as the "backend" database for a distributed ticketing system though it wouldn't "look" like NNTP from the UI.
George Bonser wrote:
No comment just a question... Why did it take so long?
All good things must come to an end. and for NNTP that end was when web based Forums software and P2P was invented. Seriously does anyone still use UUCP for email? I thought it should have died when pr0n and w4rez took it over (in the late 90's).. but that ended up fueling the need :) Who is the Kim Dotcom of usenet? Lets bust him and move on.
-Scott I think there is still a place for things like NNTP and UUCP but maybe not as they were used in the past. Private NNTP groups could be used to create discussion boards or even a coordination system for emergency response with each jurisdiction having its own group hierarchy. UUCP could be used to move mail and "news" between locations via telephone dial if the conventional internet is broken. UUCP has the advantage of moving email for entire domains rather than simply a user. It could be a good emergency backup or used in places where Internet connectivity is spotty/denied but telephone service is available.
How many of you realize that JOPES (Joint Operation Planning and Execution System), used by the Pentagon for command and control at the Joint Chiefs level, uses classified newsgroups for distributing operations plans and orders? -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
How many of you realize that JOPES (Joint Operation Planning and Execution System), used by the Pentagon for command and control at the Joint Chiefs level, uses classified newsgroups for distributing operations plans and orders?
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. The NNTP protocol can be used for lots of things and not just public newsgroup discussions. For a company that has a lot of offices distributed around the world there could be many applications for it. It would also be pretty handy for emergency response for major natural disasters, too, for asynchronous communications between people, departments, etc. It lends itself easily to the forming of ad hoc teams and there is even access control possibilities with various groups of users having access to various hierarchies. It is a great tool that can be used for a lot of things without having to re-invent the wheel for collaboration, information sharing, etc. There's nothing obsolete about the NNTP protocol. Usenet might be obsolete, but NNTP can be quite useful.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. The NNTP protocol can be used for lots of things and not just public newsgroup discussions. For a company that has a lot of offices distributed around the world there could be many applications for it.
Microsoft uses it for support of their semi-public product betas. I think they also use it for internal support. R's, John
On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, John Levine wrote:
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. The NNTP protocol can be used for lots of things and not just public newsgroup discussions. For a company that has a lot of offices distributed around the world there could be many applications for it.
Microsoft uses it for support of their semi-public product betas. I think they also use it for internal support.
We used it at work for many years for that same purpose, however all of those support functions were migrated to mailing lists over the past few years, and the news server itself was finally de-commissioned last year. jms
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Henry Yen <henry@aegisinfosys.com> wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
This is really about: "What do our customers pay for?" more than anything else. Keeping 12 diablo servers running for the zero actual customers who use them is ... patently a waste of assets. one server is ~1 sun-something + 1 large disk-array (at least)... so there's some significant savings in power and network ports alone. plus, Verizon is a Cellular carrier, just look at all of the advertisements you see for them, ever seen an "internet" add? or "usenet" ? (fios doesn't count as it's a move by VZ back to monopoly-carrier status, not "internet")
On Mar 30, 2012 3:13 PM, "Christopher Morrow" <morrowc.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Henry Yen <henry@aegisinfosys.com> wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably
deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
This is really about: "What do our customers pay for?" more than anything else. Keeping 12 diablo servers running for the zero actual customers who use them is ... patently a waste of assets.
one server is ~1 sun-something + 1 large disk-array (at least)... so there's some significant savings in power and network ports alone.
plus, Verizon is a Cellular carrier, just look at all of the advertisements you see for them, ever seen an "internet" add? or
Looks more like news groups than cellular to me. : / http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-K71MpwCko Cb
"usenet" ? (fios doesn't count as it's a move by VZ back to monopoly-carrier status, not "internet")
On 03/30/12 13:41, Henry Yen wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
Only a retrospective: I was hired by the central networking group at UC Berkeley in the late 90s to run the USENET service for campus. At the time, the USENET service was still critically important for the teaching mission of the campus, as many courses (especially in EECS) had very active class newsgroups. As you can see from examples such as CS 61a ( https://groups.google.com/group/ucb.class.cs61a/about?pli=1), use of these groups peaked while I was operating the service. (The numbers are probably skewed a bit, as I don't know how much of the archives google was able to get from before the early 90s. But still, by sheer volume, the early 2000s was probably the peak of the ucb.class hierarchy.) I was following big footsteps: Chris van den Berg preceded me, and he made UCB the #3 USENET transit peer in the world. Before that, Rob Robertson ran the service and he was the one who created the first overview database for INN and contributed the code for that. I enjoyed running the service: It was heavily used and I enjoyed making contacts and setting up peers. Then layers 8 and 9 settled in. Commodity bandwidth became very expensive, and demand for bandwidth simultaneously exploded due to file sharing, legal or otherwise. My job became less of a matter of running a world-class service and more of a matter of "how do we throttle this thing, or just get rid of/outsource it?"--a question management would often ask. I spent a lot of time adjusting rate-limits for peers and at one point we ended up putting USENET into the scavenger class behind a packetshaper. An indignity, to be certain. By the time of the economic collapse, usage had declined sufficiently that USENET was easy for management to put on the chopping block. This, even though bandwidth had become much cheaper. My job (thanks to my USENET tasks and systems background) had evolved into more of a general network engineering position, and I had a surplus of interesting work to do, so it wasn't a major loss for me. Still, I am glad that USENET (and NNTP in particular) is going strong elsewhere. I learned a lot from running the service, and to this day, I am still one of the more "systemy" network engineers out there. I enjoy running DNS, NTP, and other system-based network services an much as I like configuring routers. I think running USENET a while back had a lot to do with that. michael
Michael Sinatra wrote:
active class newsgroups. As you can see from examples such as CS 61a ( https://groups.google.com/group/ucb.class.cs61a/about?pli=1),
Can someone help out mrshare? https://groups.google.com/group/ucb.class.cs61a/browse_frm/month/2010-08 The above link and this one are a fitting illustration of what has happened to usenet in the last decade and a half...
"systemy" network engineers out there. I enjoy running DNS, NTP, and other system-based network services an much as I like configuring routers. I think running USENET a while back had a lot to do with that.
For the last 2 decades or so I have repeatedly tried to "get into" usenet. But every time I loose interest and give up. I am not entirely sure why because it can be a great source of information and to communicate. It's probably a combination of signal to noise ratio, epic flame wars, the user interface of many clients and the actual size (information overload ;-). But I am glad there exists something beyond "the web". Greetings, Jeroen -- Earthquake Magnitude: 5.2 Date: Friday, March 30, 2012 19:51:04 UTC Location: Bougainville region, Papua New Guinea Latitude: -6.6076; Longitude: 154.5824 Depth: 45.70 km
USENET is definitely not dead. I wrote a search engine and aggregator for multipart articles posted to USENET binary groups over the course of a year and a half at the largest providor of USENET services in the world -- just a couple years ago. The data rates of incoming articles was just staggering...and growing by the day. One of the members of my development team on the USENET binary search engine project had been a principal at UUNET, so I do have a pretty good idea what happened to that outfit, organisationally. The details are unimportant. I do not think that the closing of a service that's undergone multiple acquisitions by actual competitors is at all surprising. Did the closing of Alta Vista a couple years ago after its acquisition by Yahoo! spell the death of internet search? No.
C. A. Fillekes wrote:
I do not think that the closing of a service that's undergone multiple acquisitions by actual competitors is at all surprising. Did the closing of Alta Vista a couple years ago after its acquisition by Yahoo! spell the death of internet search? No.
Well, it's a bit hard to kill off internet searching. Because looking for stuff is pretty much everyone's main "raisin d'etre". It's not like you can replace searching with something else. You can replace email with another form of communication, but searching is searching... Since quite a number of years altavista.com searches are just submitted to search.yahoo.com and some time ago I noticed on yahoo's site the words "powered by bing". Does that mean yahoo's search engine has been abolished also and is being ran by microsoft (technology)? In that case the two main search engines of the 90s are dead. Nobody missed them though... Regards, Jeroen -- Earthquake Magnitude: 6.3 Date: Monday, April 2, 2012 17:36:43 UTC Location: Oaxaca, Mexico Latitude: 16.4769; Longitude: -98.2867 Depth: 12.30 km
Just curious, what's the source of this uunet announcement (as in a link or cite, not "uunet!")? On March 30, 2012 at 16:41 henry@AegisInfoSys.com (Henry Yen) wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
does anyone on NANOG have any thoughtful comments on this?
-- Henry Yen <Henry.Yen@Aegis00.com> Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700)
-- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 20:40:06PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
Just curious, what's the source of this uunet announcement (as in a link or cite, not "uunet!")?
On March 30, 2012 at 16:41 henry@AegisInfoSys.com (Henry Yen) wrote:
uunet/vzb "will terminate its United States Newsreader and Newsfeed services on March 31, 2012, with no plans to offer a replacement, and any content/data remaining after that date will be unrecoverably deleted".
it was a written letter to (some or all) transit customers of verizonbusiness. no, the word "uunet" isn't in there, but that's how i think of them, even before wcom and mci (and metro fiber). i was more interested in comments regarding the feed (nntp) side rather than the reader (lotsa choices, including gated feeds, dejanews/google, etc.). -- Henry Yen <Henry.Yen@Aegis00.com> Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700)
participants (26)
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Alex Ryu -
Andrew D Kirch -
Barry Shein -
Brett Watson -
C. A. Fillekes -
Cameron Byrne -
Christopher Morrow -
George Bonser -
Henry Yen -
Jason Bertoch -
Jay Ashworth -
JC Dill -
Jeroen van Aart -
Jimmy Hess -
Joe Greco -
John Levine -
John R. Levine
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Jon Lewis -
Justin M. Streiner -
K. Scott Bethke -
Landon Stewart -
Michael Painter -
Michael Rathbun -
Michael Sinatra -
Miles Fidelman -
Rich Kulawiec