further using usenet
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For for spring break I headed back home to Philadelphia, away from my slow NYU-Net dorm connection and back to my parents (relatively) speedy Comcast cable modem. As I mentioned last week, usenet server access was traditionally were served up by ISPs (internet service providers, such as NYU, or Time Warner, Comcast, or AOL) Since NYU has shut down it’s usenet servers last year, I set out to find if Comcast still offered this service. I was actually especially interested, as Comcast itself is notorious for limiting Bittorrent traffic. Because of this, I wondered how Comcast might limit any Usenet they may provide, as it too can be used for some serious hosted filesharing.
I was hoping to find some sort of small community of die hards, somewhere within some of the Comcast specific rooms, or within some of the Comcast specific rooms, (support or anything) but traffic seemed quite sparse, with only a handful of posts everyday. Very little files were shared, so it lead me to believe that Comcast still monitors this place for piracy. I actually ended up posting two a few of the Comcast rooms, but a dumb thing about Comcast usenet is that you can’t log in if you arn’t on a Comcast connection.
Since the Comcast servers weren’t such a hotbed of activity, I decided to hop onto one of the larger free networks, thinking that perhaps more people will be on since it is a more public server. freenews.netfront.net is a large free news group, which specializes in primarily news board, and less about files. Popular rooms seem to be those with classified (alt.forsale) athiesm (alt.atiethism) Cyptography (sci.crypt) French Politics (fr.soc.polituque) amoung others. All of these Groups has more than a half million posts (from the last server refresh, could be a year or two) So needless to say, some of these groups are frequented in ways simmilar to a traditional bulitian board community our generation may be familar with. One observational note: to browse text on usenet is slow. The client used to view this stuff is a cross between an email client and bulitan board….each message loads seperately, and when a room has many message, it takes awhile for messages to be read. This could be because I am using a free service, which most likely can not handle the load of a paid service.
So far, it has been less exciting than I would have hoped. It is hard to follow conversations, as all posts are posted chronologically, even if they are a response to an earlier thread, so you get a lot of “RE: this post” which you have to keep following as it gets updated.
Using usenet in this way still seems to be a big deal to some people, but with more specialized communities based of bulletin board scripts (such as vBulletin or whatever) which are very good for creating archived information for community support and information, I don’t see the real community draw for usenet in its current form. Next week, I hope to try and share some files with a paid service (looks like the only way one can share files is by paying :( )
Comments
these services are on the web; usenet is strictly text based, and operates on the internet, outside of the graphical web. Some web services have retroactively placed some of usenet content on the WWW (world wide web) such as Google Groups, however usenet is not a web-service. Edit: DC++ is a peer file sharing network, which seems to be a sort of midway point between usenet and peer to peer file-sharing, as it does have some centralized nodes to connect to, but the chat mechanism is closer to IRC rather than bulletin style posting.
Great article. There are some agents that allow you to manage how the articles are arranged, which might help a little.
Visit newsdemon.com. They are a paid usenet provider.
They will give you a free account for mentioning them in your blog.
Some things in life can still be free!
It’s interesting, but a bit too technical….Not quite familiar with the terms…
how does usenet compare with things like DC++, rapidshare or megaupload?