AOL Kills Usenet Access 576
Numair writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL is about to terminate Usenet access for its users. Now, before everyone starts rejoicing ... where is the Usenet community going to find another large media company to protect it from frivolous copyright lawsuits?"
Good for AOL (Score:4, Informative)
Giganews and other big name vendors will gladly sell you Usenet service and best yet you can change the port in which you connect with; say port 80 and AOL cant block as they cant figure out if your using HTTP or NTP; they could block the IP address but then again you could use an anonymous proxy and the battle continues. That being said, I hope people know that there are other ISPs that are willing to have you as a customer. If the law suites go after say Giganews then I bet there is some Swiss news account (ok ok when I say Swiss accounts I mean services that wont divulge any information to anyone no matter who's asking).
Whatever gets AOL off the net is fine with me. (Score:5, Informative)
Hm, for the most part, they're still just exactly like that. Nothing's changed in 11 years. Unfortunately, this isn't going to kill AOL, as one other person suggested. Somehow, as badly as AOL sucks, they manage to continue to survive. Maybe it's all those CDs they keep distributing everywhere. Want an AOL CD? Go to Burger King! They make half-decent frisbees...
But I'll take anything that reduces AOL's Internet presence as a good thing for the Internet.
Oh, and the frivolous lawsuit was against AOL, not Usenet. You can't sue Usenet. It's too decentralized.
So did Comcast, what's the difference? (Score:5, Informative)
They gave a viable alternative by pointing people to Google Groups. At least they didn't shut off free access then start charging their users for it.
AOL has a large userbase of morons. How many of those morons read Usenet anyway? It's likely that it is a tiny group of their overall base. Why support something that no one uses and that you can get through other sources anyway?
Just use this free usenet server: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
For those who don't get it:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that- never-ended.html [catb.org]
Re:Real uses for USENET anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
comp.lang.c is a great example of this. I owe them a LOT regarding my growth in understanding of C.
Re:So did Comcast, what's the difference? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, if you're downloading a lot of binaries, you're going to hit the wall pretty fast. But if you're just doing text, the Comcast/Giganews partnership gives MUCH faster access, MUCH longer article retention, and a MUCH wider array of groups than Comcast ever did.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
The green card spam, heh (Score:4, Informative)
Now within the last 6 months, I see the same 1 or two spam posts on every single usenet group I'm subbed to. Sad, really.
I would say spam has claimed a victory here. i do find some good usage out of local groups like mn.general(which is generally spam free, but not political cook free), and the grand-theft-auto newsgroup.
But with the playstation2 group, it's 99% cross-posted-to-other-groups flamewars between ps2 and xbox users. *sigh*. Never bothered with the binary groups since I just could not figure out the obfuscated mess that is FreeAgent.
Comcast supposedly moved everyone over to giganews, which is a paid service with either 1 or 2 gigs a month. Wow, 2 gigs of spam per month! Sign me up! Thankfuly their old server still works, but they keep it quiet.
But with the poor s/n ratios of newsgroups, I can see why ISPs are jumping ship.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Resident Nub Says: (Score:1, Informative)
Comcast just changed its Usenet policies as well (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest policy change was that they only allow 2GB of data transfer per month. That sounds like a lot, but to a data addict like me, I can go through that amount of data in a day. Actually, I did, and now have to wait a month before my quota is reset.
Right now I have a couple options if I want to continue to support my usenet addiction. I can subscribe to a monthly service like giganews for $25 a month (in addition to my $40/month Comcast bill), or I can switch to Verizon DSL for cheaper. I'm most likely going to jump on Verizon, but part of me wants to sign up with giganews and use Comcast's network to download ungodly amounts of data, just to say fuck you to them for shutting me off.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Informative)
I do agree that it is ridiculous that Firefox 1.0 was let out the door with this bug. For people on slow or even medium-speed connections, this bug happens a lot, and many have no idea how to fix fix it. I have friends who tried Firefox and decided that they hated it because of this bug. I'm guessing the developers are all on fast connections and thus had no idea how often this bug manifests.
Re:Comcast just changed its Usenet policies as wel (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Spot on (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good for AOL (Score:3, Informative)
Alternately, you could just RTFA... "The ISP's pop-up message advises subscribers that newsgroup services are available from third-party providers."
They don't care if AOL subscribers access USENet. They just don't want to provide it as a free service anymore. And, even as an old-timer (from waaaaay back inn'a win'ner of '91) that still reads and posts to USENet, I can appreciate (and in fact, applaud, if it will cut down on clueless AOL users on USENet) their stance. 95% of people haven't even heard of NNTP, 4.999% use it to suck down massive amounts of copyright-infringing material, and the remaining 0.001% probably has the ability to find an alternate source (such as GigaNews).
Personally, I have to wonder why people even still use AOL. Once upon a time, in the early days of the 'net, AOL actually had aquite a lot of content that you couldn't access without an account. But now? Nothing but a web-browser-with-training-wheels that charges you for the "service" of treating you like an intellectual toddler.
Re:alt.tasteless (Score:1, Informative)
Alt.tasteless is running on fumes and has been for years now. Oh sure, occasionally someone new comes along and tries to breath some life into the group, but honestly the group sucks more than Spammy when she's short of cash.