Cyde Weys Musings

I feel obligated to report on this story because many people of my Internet generation don’t know about the rich history of Usenet, and thus will not appreciate what is being lost. Usenet is the original Internet discussion system. It’s been around a lot longer than the World Wide Web. Prior to 1992, there was email, for private correspondence between small numbers of people, and then there was Usenet, for larger discussions amongst huge groups of people.

Usenet is still around in its original form, though it has long since been eclipsed by web-based discussion forums. It still has a certain appeal to it though, and in high school, I was a very active participant on the newsgroup talk.origins, which is a newsgroup devoted to the discussion and debate of biological and physical origins. I was also rather active in rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.composition, the former of which deals with professional speculative fiction (aka science fiction and fantasy) and the latter of which is a resource for people writing their own speculative fiction. Alt.atheism was fun too, although it naturally had quite a few trolls.

Nowadays, many ISPs no longer offer direct newsgroup access. It used to be that your ISP would run newsgroup servers (for instance, news.comcast.com), and you would use newsgroup clients such as Xnews (which feels sort of like an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, which can also read newsgroups) to connect to Usenet. Nowadays many people just access newsgroups directly on the web through services such as Google Groups — which I will point out is a rather confusing service because Google doesn’t make much distinction between the Usenet hierarchy, which they are merely displaying messages for, and user-created groups that only exist in the Google Groups service and that Google has full control over. As a result, a lot of people using Google Groups think they’re just chatting away in a Google discussion group, when in reality they are merely using Google’s web portal to something much larger.

I have lots of fond memories of Usenet, and I still check up on some of my favorite groups to this day. There’s a certain camaraderie that develops there that’s unlike the other kinds of social interactions you run across on the Internet. The users have generally been on the Internet forever (many from the pre-Web era), they trend toward academic types, and the discussions are fascinating. I met up with regulars from talk.origins a couple times in Washington D.C.; these events were scheduled every so often in areas with a large concentration of participants, and people would even come down from New York City to the DC meet-ups! Hell, I believe a large part in what helped me earn my full scholarship to University to Maryland was my education on evolution through talk.origins. One of the professors on my scholarship interview panel was a biologist, and I floored him with my knowledge of the rather complex topic of evolution and impressed him with my firm stance in favor of science over ignorance. So you can definitely say I have a soft spot in my heart for Usenet.

Now that you know what Usenet is and what it means to me, perhaps you will understand why I am so saddened that Verizon has removed the entire alt hierarchy from its Usenet servers. Verizon is a huge Internet Service Provider, and this will affect millions of their customers (including me!). The alt hierarchy was by far the largest hierarchy in all of Usenet; in web-equivalent terms, it’d be like if your ISP blocked access to all websites with the .com Top Level Domain. Their excuse is that there may have been some child porn on some of the alt.binaries groups (groups that are used for trading files, as opposed to discussions). Be that as it may, it doesn’t address at all why they blocked access to the non-binary parts of alt, including, say, alt.atheism and thousands of other groups. And to extend our Web analogy, child porn is available on .com sites as well, so by their logic, shouldn’t they be blocking all .com sites on the Web?

Child pornography is one of those problems that I hate not just because it is evil, but also because it is consistently used as a scapegoat by crooked people in justifying otherwise unjustifiable actions. The real reason Verizon dumped the alt hierarchy is because it contained the binary groups, which take the most bandwidth and storage resources to handle. But if they phrased it in this manner, there would be wide outcry. So instead they say they did it to “prevent child porn”, and all of a sudden, that outcry is muted to a great degree. Well, I’m not fooled. Verizon is my ISP, and I really resent that they’re forcing me to turn to services like Google Groups just to handle my Usenet needs. I certainly pay them enough money to expect better than a crippled Usenet experience.

The gist of all of this is that Usenet is slowly but inexorably fading. My previous ISP was Comcast, who used to offer really good Usenet servers. Now, they’ve contracted out their Usenet access to Giganews, with a ridiculously low transfer limit of 2 GB per month. You can run into that limit just doing a lot of text-only reading and discussing, never mind transferring binaries. Other ISPs have also contracted their Usenet access out to inferior services or dropped Usenet altogether. Usenet is thus in its waning years as ISPs continue to drop service and newcomers to the Internet head exclusively to web-based discussion boards. So if you’re at all interested in Usenet, get on now, before it becomes permanently too late!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 21:41 and is filed under Net. Keywords: Tags: alt hierarchy, child porn, ISP, newsgroup, scare tactic, talk.origins, Usenet, Verizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.