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
Obsolete protocol is obsolete?
Andrew
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
Guessing: you mean ipv4?
Because NNTP is still alive and kicking.
... JG
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
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
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
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
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")
> 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
There's a flashback! I was still shoveling news over UUCP to customers in Texas in '93
-b
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
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
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.
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-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.
Just curious, what's the source of this uunet announcement (as in a
link or cite, not "uunet!")?
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