Re: I can't post to this group

On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.computer.security, in article
<dv7iu4$psg$2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Ant wrote:

"Moe Trin" wrote:

Despite its shortcomings, OE is fine if you know how to configure and
use it; certainly far better than a web interface. Anyway, you're a
'nix guy, so with no disrespect, what would you know about it apart
from what's evident in the cak-handed attempts by newbies, who know
nothing of computers and net traditions, to post Usenet messages?

Oh, so those CERT announcements in comp.security.announce, and all of
the stuff in the Bugtraq mailing list don't count? ;-)

In the groups I normally read, google.group postings tend to be blocked
or at least looked upon as noise to be ignored. Still, google has got to
do something to pay their employees and the landlord.

Yes, I'm aware of the "Usenet Improvement Project". I understand why
people would want to /dev/null most google-groupers.

Actually, I don't killfile google-group posts just because they're from
google-groups. I do killfile for a lot of other reasons, but that isn't
(yet) one of them.

[compton ~]$ grep -Ev '(^[\[%]|Score|^$)' /var/spool/news/killfile | cut
-d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | column
819 From: 1 Message-ID: 66 Xref:
2 Lines: 108 Subject:
[compton ~]$

Just under a thousand entries in the file - from entire Big 8 hierarchies
down to names and stupid words in subjects. The one 'Message-ID' kills a
domain with lots of morphing posters, but that's all it would take to
add google.groups.

New people online have no concept of Usenet. This is not helped by
major consumer ISPs failing to promote it and no longer providing a
news server.

Part of the problem occurred in 1995 when microsoft invented the Internet
and made look-alike tools (Lookout and Internet Exploiter) to handle
everything. People raised in that atmosphere think the entire world is
the web, and that you surf newsgroups. It's so easy - just click here!

As far as major ISPs dropping newsgroups, that is in a way regrettable.
Google suffered the most when AOL finally pitched it last year, and they
were told that google.groups was the new and improved way to surf the
news. It was a long time since 1993 when AOL first provided Usenet. Ever
wonder why you see "Today is 4565 September, 1993 UTC"?

Mine is about to drop theirs, so I'll be moving shortly.

If you like your provider otherwise, there are quite a number of public
news servers still out there - many free, while others are a relatively
nominal fee. Perhaps the best known is individual.net

It's all very well killfiling GG for a bit of short-term relief, but
where is the new blood coming from to sustain Usenet? Newbies need to
be educated (where possible) about the advantages of NNTP, and how to
use it.

That's mainly why I don't kill for that reason only. Several of the
newsgroups I follow have stats daemons that report the number of posts,
and all kinds of useless data - one of which is the newsreader used.
For about a third of the groups with those daemons, G2/0.2 is used for
about a third of the posts, while in the other groups where the info
is available, the numbers are at least 15%. The thing is, most of those
posts are the ones asking questions - some of them FAQs that have only
been answered several to dozens of times per week for years on end.
They post from google, but they haven't figured out how to use the
stupid search engine which would provide the answer in seconds, rather
than a day or week later till someone replies to their ill-formed
question.

Old guy
.

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