R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008

[front243]

Saw this one at slashdot yesterday:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326848,00.asp

Meanwhile, as multimedia became popular over the past ten years, Usenet started to become a way for pirates and pornographers to distribute massive quantities of binary files in a decentralized, untraceable manner; in other words, it became a proto-BitTorrent. That was likely when Usenet became truly doomed. Newsgroups had exchanged code along with text for years, but by the late '90s the "binaries" groups began taking up huge amounts of space and Net traffic, and since Usenet libraries reside on each ISP's server, service providers sensibly started to wonder why they should be reserving big chunks of their own disk space for pirated movies and repetitive porn.

[Skiz]

In what context are you saying it's dead?

If you read the article, the author is merely saying that the Usenet he knew and loved is dead; the Usenet which was used as a chat platform. He even makes the assertion that Usenet is currently thriving with regard to pirated content and warez.

He also makes the comment, "It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion."

Fear not...

[link2009]

Hehe, Usenet is a protocol, hence NNTP. If the major players do get shutdown by the MPAA, RIAA whatever, as long as someone wants to have a Usenet server, they will.

Just like Skizo said, 2 servers sharing = Usenet.

The only way I sense Usenet going down is ISPs restricting access to the servers, protocol, ports etc... Rogers has already done that with BitTorrent.

[Athlon64]

Time Warner Cable has recently removed its Usenet service about a week ago. It pretty crazy for us the user, but from there point of view its a win win.


It's unlikely Usenet will ever go away unless something bigger and better comes out for the masses.

Anyone think Bittorrent will still exist in five years? I see it being more likely going away then Usenet.

[Something Else]

Yeah. Usenet clearly has had and will have a longer shelf life than Bit Torrent or any other p2p application that we've seen so far.

[Skiz]

I hope Bittorrent stays around for a long time. It keeps the heat off Usenet and keeps the riff-raff away from Usenet.

[Windy72]

This is good news for usenet it will stop the free loaders who use their ISP accounts and complain about yEnc posts. The sort of people who cannot be bothered to update their newsreading software (they still use OE for binaries ffs!) will no longer be on usenet. Bloody great!

[GXice]

What an utterly impulsive topic title.

Made me look. >_>

[Broken]

I hope Bittorrent stays around for a long time. It keeps the heat off Usenet and keeps the riff-raff away from Usenet.

Long Live Bit Torrent!!!

[not2fast]

Just like with the mainframe, people have been predicting the death of usenet almost from the beginning. There is no doubt we have streched the protocol far beyond its originally intended use, but it continues to hold on.

The development of parity files probably rescued usenet back when it looked like the system was about ready to crash under the load of multiple reposts. The increasing size of hard drives and their decreasing prices have also contributed.

In the mid-90s, we used to marvel at the news servers that didn't implode when the daily load went over 1GB. That was over the total capacity of the largest hard drive available for personal computers at the time.

In the late 90s, when MP3s started appearing, everyone was predicting usenet would die before the daily load went over 100GB.

Then people started posting entire CD images and the load tripled almost overnight. DVD images came a few year later and the load tripled again. There were a lot of growing pains, but usenet held up.

By 2004, usenet had a daily input of over 1TB. We are now over 3TB/day and chugging right along.

This site has a good chart of the increasing usenet load:

http://www.news-service.com/history.html