Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned | Hacker News Reader

Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned

groups.google.com

347 pointsveltas189 comments

Hi Folks,

I have archives of comp.lang.c group going back 35 years (1986-2021) and when I saw this news I decided to prioritize this one and just started synchronizing it into my archive. In a couple of hours, you should be able to see all of the posts ever made to: comp.lang.c group over at my Usenet Archives:

Here it is, enjoy: https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.c&y=0&r=...

BTW. I just reworked entire architecture of the site, which unfortunately also means I have to re-synchronize over 1 billion posts back into the archive. That will take some time, but anyways, just wanted to tell you that I prioritized this group. Enjoy!

"I just reworked entire architecture of the site, which unfortunately also means I have to re-synchronize over 1 billion posts back into the archive."

Thank you very much for creating and maintaining this archive.

I am not sure how big of a commitment I am making when I say this but we (rsync.net) would like to give you free service, forever, to back up this resource.

Please contact us if this would be useful.

Wow, I overlooked this post. But you have me interested. I would like to talk more about the details of your offer. Please send me your contact info.

His weblog post on this work:

* https://www.joe0.com/2020/10/07/converting-utzoo-wiseman-net...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25036780

Interview with Henry Spencer, who a lot of these early archives came from (along with Wiseman, who extracted the tapes):

* https://www.giganews.com/usenet-history/spencer.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer

First of all, thank you for making this available. However without Search functionality the utility of this archive is very limited.

Is Google indexing the content? Maybe you can search it that way.

"site:usenetarchives.com" has a bunch of results, so it seems so.

Hello, and thanks for your words, much appreciated. As far as search capabilities, it's a bit tricky to create a fast search, when you have over billion posts full of text to search through. But I am working on putting together a text search within a specific group, which seems to be working pretty fast. I should have it completed in a week or two.

Nowadays if the answer to my problem isn't in the first stack exchange answer in the first google result I just give up! Imagine having to post on usenet!

Some fun comp.lang.c history:

Dennis Ritchie posted, sharing an extremely early version of a C compiler. Richard Heathfield (well known C book author) jokingly chided Ritchie for posting something off-topic, as it was not part of ANSI C. In typical Usenet fashion, this triggered a huge thread, arguing over the appropriateness of the joke. Even Linus Torvalds got involved.

Apparently Heathfield emailed Ritchie privately to apologize, and Ritchie's response is well known to anyone in clc: "Usenet is a strange place."

Original thread: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wbzzoyS... (I believe it was crossposted to clc)

Some discussion of the saga: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie

RIP dmr

This is hilarious. I could see something similar happening on HN today.

Nerd discussions are always the same, no matter the medium...

It shouldn't matter whether or not it's hilarious. Attempts at humor often fall flat on the internet and are somewhat frowned on per HN guidelines. You're objectively wrong and anyone who agrees should chime in to say so. Disagree? Fine, but come to this thread to tell us why. #s

Humor is an integral part of the human experience and connecting with someone else. Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.

> Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.

...or makes it even more hilarious.

Because you really can't "ban" humor. A moderator who actually thinks that's possible will soon have humor flying over their head. Even Stackoverflow has humor despite the best efforts of the self-appointed vote-to-close police.

Poe's law

This is precisely the problem: differing views not just on what is actually humorous, but the role that is should play in conversations, written or otherwise. Better to just avoid it all together #s ::I think we're off to a good start replicating the usenet scenario::

You missed the "#s" at the end of the parent post

What does it mean? (Free bashing a newb opportunity ;)

Re humor on HN: not a problem in the guidelines or in practice. HN just has higher standards for humor, and that's a good thing.

Dang et al would never let it happen.

Personal attacks are not cool on HN. We ban accounts that post like that. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.

Wait what? I was singing HN’s moderators namely Dang. There’s no personal attack here.

If it’s not clear I was saying bannable speech and such would not be tolerated here because of the good moderation.

I think this may have been an attempt at humor by ruined where the post they made employs similar phrasing that dang uses when he's informing a user about a violation of the HN guidelines.

Well crap, it went over my head.

I think you might be right.

That joke is truly, laugh-out-loud funny.

Actually the annoying thing here is, that the pointless discussion is achieved, while the link to the source code doesn't work (maybe temporarily overloaded from HN? Maybe dead)

It is on the Wayback Machine at least:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070223091507/http://www.cs.bell...

On behalf of Usenet users everywhere, this is excellent news, and I wouldn't be surprised if Usenetters begin stuffing other useful newsgroups with crap in order to removed from Google as well.

Google's assimilation of Usenet content had promise at first but quickly turned into a dystopia and the general consensus on Usenet is that Google has been a disaster for Usenet.

Google had the most complete archive of comp.lang.c (and the rest of Usenet). That archive is now inaccessible.

Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped.

If Google made its archive of all Usenet newsgroups available, I'd be fine with them dropping the posting interface. (And some users actually managed to post to comp.lang.c through Google Groups without breaking things.)

> "... complete archive of ... Usenet"

<sotto voce> Usenet postings were never meant to be permanent. I was there in its heyday and nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.

Yup. I've met a number of old farts like me who were not thrilled when what we assumed was transient had been archived. I'm not a big fan of the opt-out model of archiving where archivers just assume that they have implied consent to grab anything and everyone from everyone who hasn't explicitly said no.

The problem is that opt-in archival is effectively no archival.

If you looked at how data is lost online, you'd find out that by far the most obvious and immediate cause of data loss was third-party intermediaries shutting down old sites. For example, when Yahoo! decided to burn down Geocities - and shittons of early Internet history - on the basis of saving some hosting and storage costs. A second cause is neglect; say, you move your blog to a new platform, but you don't bother redirecting the old URLs, so now you've just carved a hundred or so new dead links into other people's content. In both of those cases, data wasn't being deliberately removed because it needed to go - it just happened by accident.

Furthermore, we don't usually know when these accidents happen. Yes, occasionally some intermediary announces it in advance, but often times linked sites just die. This is a phenomenon known as link rot, and it can happen for a whole host of accidental reasons. Try going to a 10 year old news article and clicking on any of the links, or going to a decades-old forum thread and looking at any of the images. Count how many of them still work. It's depressingly low.

Now, try to imagine getting consent to archive in advance from people who do not know or care about the problems I've just mentioned. You won't get very far - not because the archiving is harmful to them but because most people do not understand the problem. People don't backup their own shit until after they've already lost heaps of data. Even in situations like the Geocities shutdown, the logistics of actually asking for permission to archive on top of running a bunch of scrapers to actually do the archival is... complicated. You could do it, but the vast majority of data would go unarchived purely due to an inability to locate the owner of the data.

Dunno. History matters and historians would probably strongly disagree. Some things are more important than you think.

Too much gets lost too easily.

Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower than the direct impact a google search has on his life today. So as you said, some things aren't as important as you think - in his case, privacy and respect are a bit more important than a historical record of a teenager seeking people to talk to. Every minute detail of history isn't as important as you think.

You'd be surprised from what is considered history. Nowadays, insights into the lives and emotions of ordinary people are considered invaluable tool in recreating the past: the context in which political, economical, and cultural developments happened. In fact, the spontaneous nature of certain artifacts makes them more valuable, because what we would call "official history" is always editorialized and subject to the influence of only few people and not produced by the entire society it originates from.

It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.

I think the biggest difference/problem is that these people are still alive in many cases, whereas the authors of historical letters are not. This is a big difference, I think.

O, yes, I agree. It would be ideal if peoples actions are like state archives (accessible 50 years after the fact). However, I wanted to underline how inconsequential people actually matter in history.

Once you publicly post something, or even post something privately to someone else, it’s not entirely yours anymore, in an important sense it’s theirs.

Yes Usenet used to gave a spool lifetime, but that was clearly variable and there were no guarantees about it. Anybody could set up a mirror and frequently did. Also anyone could copy out content to other media and there was no expectation that they couldn’t do that.

We are all responsible for what we post to other people and in some cases also the effect it has on them. Consider bullying, abuse, criminal conspiracy, the record of receiving a message belongs to the receiver not the sender.

Every single minute detail is exactly equally important, because you, nor I, nor anyone, has any idea what will be important or why it will be important.

To a sociologist

connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges

is a goodmine and insight into history.

Not sure why the sociologist’s desires should take precedence over the original posters’.

When pompeii was discovered we saw into homes 1,000 years ago. Without any regard to privancy for those covered in rock we broadcast their lives around the globe.

I don't think we give a lot of weight to what the original publishing intent was for anything published 100, 200 years ago, why would the change in the future?

Hence the old joke, "At what point does graverobbing become archaeology?"

When you can publish it?

Without publishing it rather becomes tomb raiding even after thousands of years

100 years ago is very different than thirty-years ago.

I think, judging what is going to be of value for people in the future is a much harder problem than you make it out to be.

Yep, see sociologists and archaeologists excitement over finding things like clay tablets with shopping lists or recipes on.

And yet Eric Schmidt says (2010)* we should change our name... Because everything is always kept

https://m.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

* It's ironic I'm referring to a 10yr old piece to refer to the danger of continuous archives.

In 2001, it was Scott McNealy :

https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200108/df20010808.jp...

If you are not familiar with Dr. Fun: Don Knuth Finally Sells Out https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jp...

Not really, that information gradually gets bit-rot and evaporates away to nothingness as website after website gets old and vanishes.

In the early days of the Internet, I often used to Google/AltaVista/Jeeves my own name. There used to be quite a few hits. Over the years, those old hits have just faded away.

That doesn't necessarily mean they disappeared, although chances are probably better that they did than didn't. Google has increasingly started incorporating recency in how it ranks search results, so if it's more than a few years old it'll fade away from Google results regardless if it's still around or not.

if it's more than a few years old it'll fade away from Google results regardless if it's still around or not.

If you can't find it, it's effectively the same as if it doesn't exist.

>Dunno. History matters and historians would probably strongly disagree.

People don't live or structure their lives to satisfy historians...

People also don't live or structure their lives to satisfy those who had a written conversation and want the copies burned.

Well, they should. Permanent record of every small transgression or juvenile excess or stupidity is inhumane...

What's inhumane is making every small transgression into some stigma that should follow a person around their whole life. I don't think we fix that by erasing all traces of the transgression, which in many cases may be practically impossible.

It's not obvious to me whether changing the view on transgression and stigma is practically possible.

In my experience it's strongly tied to personal experience: if I committed a transgression in my past I'm going to be more understanding towards others doing the same (still depending on the nature of the transgression and my rationalization of it). It's also worth nothing that what constitutes a transgression changes with the times, and often the public seem to forget/ignore this fact and retroactively apply stigma and resentment.

No. I'm struggling to think of a reply better than "Obviously, not."

I think your statement was already implicit in what I was saying. We should move on to the next bit where I say "But..." and you counter it.

Even if this were true, it would be better if the archives were not available for some decades after the original posting. I’m OK with my content being analyzed by historians, but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment that is not available short years after the post was made.

I think even leaving aside historians - the idea of making everything posting transient by default would have robbed us of a lot of stored knowledge. I'm feeling quite bitter about the rise of Slack and Discord over mailing lists and Usenet.

The ease in which one can find clues and solutions to decades old technical questions relies on everything being stored.

And more than just technical issues - I'm no historian but I've wasted endless hours following fascinating discussions from the past that suddenly become relevent because of recent events or unforeseen connections. I love how much is preserved by accident. It makes me slightly sad to think that it might be otherwise and that others would wish it otherwise.

And yet I used to regularly find answers on a Usenet or Google groups mirror with Google. Even sometimes in public irc logs. I have yet to find the answer in a public slack or discord log.

> but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment

The idea of everything you've ever posted becoming part of a giant "digital permanent record" used by data brokers, advertisers, credit bureaus, trolls, nosy people, etc. is somewhat unappealing.

Yet what was always predicted. Followed by homes taking families hostage and we are almost there.

It has to be available for some period of time after posting. Where would you draw the line? Hide them after a few weeks? Months? Years?

Before it becomes history:

Phase 1: hall monitor trolls in coordination with HR use it to keep people in line

Phase 2: the archive is rediscovered as truth about what the world used to be like and suppressed

Phase 3: there is no archive and never was

Phase 4: the archive is rediscovered, hidden and the esoteric knowledge used to start a cult

Phase 5: the cult eventually prevails in society, becomes a religion and suppresses inconvenient parts of the archive

Phase 6: well history repeats itself so why go on?

It's not much different than a recording of a conversation. I wouldn't implicitly expect the recording to be destroyed, or expect the law to require destruction when the recording was made on equipment I don't control.

I don't think that these are equivalent. This issue is similar to saying that every conversation will be recorded by default, unless you opt out of a recording beforehand.

This would be why pretty much every Usenet post I made from 1996 (or so) onwards had an X-No-Archive header. How many actually honoured it, I cannot say, however.

Yeah, Dejanews was the harbinger of the archiving apocalypse. I added X-No-Archive: Yes to have dejanews throw away my posts the instant I learned about it, and then later on when Google bought dejanews and gave us all a one-time "opt out or be archived forever" chance, I was able to purge all the rest.

When do you consider that heyday to be? I showed up in 1995 and my expectation was always that anything posted there would be permanently on the internet.

So I deployed Kester’s Rule of the Internet: Don’t put things on the internet that you don’t want to be on the internet. That way there won’t be anything you put on the internet that you didn’t want to be there.

It took years but all of my old Usenet posts eventually were removed. The people running archives tended to be real jerks about it - I’m pretty sure a couple of them got off on telling me no with long hand typed explanations, but in the end most of them were running archives on their employer’s equipment and when they switched jobs, got let go, or retired they couldn’t take it with them and nobody else wanted to maintain them so eventually the last copy I could find fell.

The jerk was someone publishing something publicly, voluntarily, then perversely trying to make anyone who might have saved their copies of the thing you gave them, delete them.

I'm amazed anyone gave you the time if day. I can't imagine I'd have even answered. I certainly never signed any kind of copyright agreement when I started posting on BBS's or newsgroups.

Somewhere on one or more old hard drives somewhere I may have a few years of whatever groups I was into at the time, and I tell you now, on this new similar public forum, I will not bother digging out and scanning all my old drives to find anything to remove it, and I will not promise never to add them to any public archive.

Different situation but same overall attitude. I'd send a polite one-line request asking to remove a specific message and I'd get back three or four hand-typed pages where the person was gloating that I was powerless to make them do anything, basically the the same thing I see revenge porn victims going through - though nobody ever tried to charge me to remove a post and nobody went the route of re-posting my messages to spite me.

Maybe so, but those of us who try to restore or emulate old stuff from those long ago times actually have to rely on contemporary information from Usenet because the old documentation no longer exists.

> nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.

I know that a number of posters in groups I used to frequent added the X-No-Archive: yes header to their posts in the early 2000s. The Google and Deja news archive before it did honor that header apparently.

This is hilarious because Google is probably the largest user of C++ and has the most people on the C++ standards committees .

This is about C, not C++. Though I haven’t been there in years, I chuckle to think what would have happened if you made this mistake on that news group.

Pretty sure OP is referring to this part of the comment they were replying to:

> Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped.

I would have thought that that had already happened to every Usenet group by now, or even 20 years ago.

Oh, Google. You never quite figured out adulthood, and now senescence is setting in.

Great word. For those like me:

  senescence (noun)
  the condition or process of deterioration with age.
  • loss of a cell's power of division and growth.

I resemble that comment

Quite aptly put. It's entering the "ending with a whimper" phase

We'll know they're done when this happens:

"google.com has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content."

We're not that far. I've had emails sent by google classified as spam by gmail.

> I've had emails sent by google classified as spam by gmail.

Was it wrong, though? (I'm... actually, I meant it as humor but depending on how much you've opted out of it's probably true)

The emails asked me if I still want "less secure apps access" to be on for a couple of gmail accounts so I'm pretty sure they were wrong in that case.

Yeah, I'm not celebrating until they actually lose their power.

"comp.lang.c has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content."

Hehe. Insert Rust joke here.

70 percent of all security bugs are caused by comp.lang.c

They should try rewriting their forum to be about rust.

I think you win the prize.

unsafe { comp.lang.c }

For some reason the first post there is "Is Covid19 pandemic a Hoax?". So it probably triggered something with the bot.

I am wondering if we could solve the current madness with arbitrary content policing by waiving copyright protection for monopolistic platforms and enforcing interoperability.

Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content, and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some content, the fork could easily show it from a backup, leading the users to quickly flee the over-restrictive platform to the fork with the most reasonable moderation.

As a nice side effect, this would kill the rotten ad-based revenue model where everything is free, but your data is sold to the highest bidder. Ad-blocking forks would quickly take over the originals, so in order to be profitable, the original platforms would have to charge the costs to the users directly (or to the forks that would pass them to the users with a possible markup for their added value).

That said, it would be completely against the interests of the VC crowd that wields considerable political influence, so I cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Europe is another story though.

So I pay my monthly subscription to FAANG which obliges me to allow every spammer in the world to syndicate my content, and the result is that conversations I start have replies spread across an unlimited number of platforms, each with their own EULA. Jeez, and I thought the status quo of social media verged on dystopic...

Monopolistic platforms don't own the copyright on user-generated content. The users do, and they license it to the platform.

Thats true but the license users agree to usually says they grant the platform full rights. Users still retain their rights but you would have to contact every reddit user for their permission individually.

Waiving copyright protection for FAANG wouldn't let you get at the content of the platforms - it'd just give you some poorly-debugged code for running your own platform.

What you're asking for is some kind of legally-mandated interoperability between platforms.

> enforcing interoperability.

It's called "common carrier immunity".

Telephone companies have had it for decades, maybe even centuries. It works great. They're not responsible for words spoken on their telephone network as long as they don't regulate that content in any way.

Section 230 simply should have offered common carrier immunity to websites when they act as common carriers. Problem solved.

The same thing happened last July to comp.lang.forth and comp.lang.lisp.

https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913

Lisp still might be popular if the Usenet group got banned back in the day. Lisp developers were famously incredibly rude for some reason and if you asked a question a guy named Erik Naggum would write essays screaming at you and tell you to kill yourself, then everyone else would call him "a character". I sort of think this is why people stopped using the language.

Eventually they calmed down and now everyone seem to be genuinely nice. I personally just had to live through a later period, where they didn't scream at you, but instead just constantly implied they were smarter than you in every way because you wrote in "Blub" or "Javascript".

I still remember when he compared Scheme to The Bell Curve

"well, enough marketing for Scheme. once you try it, you'll understand. be warned that lots of people approach Scheme the same way they approach controversial books (The Bell Curve comes to mind): they don't read it, they don't know any of the things it actually says, but they have a hell of a lot of opinions about it."

Good thing the precedent here is that they were reinstated.

> https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913

"This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

Gee, lovely.

Another case of ML based moderation. This ML based judging with no appeal must end. I was only mildly disturbed so far, but when it started affecting me personally, it really hit home. I wrote a book on third battle of Panipat and when I tried to advertise it on Facebook, the ML banned me because it thought that I am violating their guidelines and promoting violence. Alas, it can't differentiate between a 260 year old battle and today! And there is no way to talk to a human. If this is the way we continue, then no history books can be advertised since invariably our past has been filled with violence.

Needs a blockchain and AI based classification cluster.

Those were USENET groups. Then Google started acting like they owned them. Eventually, Google did own them.

It’s pretty depressing, particularly in light the current clamour for decentralisation. Everything new is old I guess.

People should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.

Nah, using cloud VMs over Web browsers feels just the same as X Windows Terminals to DG/UX central server in 1994, just with a prettier interface.

I used both DG/UX and MV/UX. I was sad to see both DEC and DG go out of business.

We used it on our campus until the server died around 1996, replaced by a PC tower running Red-Hat Linux.

This is an interesting point: that a commitment to practical free speech for everyone, everywhere, will tend towards consolidation of platforms and natural monopolies. Cancellation, deplatforming, etc. might actually drive platform diversity and innovation which will, in turn, further freedom of expression far more effectively than public pressure to tolerate everything.

Careful , it will also drive to isolationism, echo-chambers and the quashing of controversial dissenting opinions.

If you dont think right now we have opinions as controversial as "Gay people should be able to marry each other if they want" was 100 years ago,an opinion which right now we consider almost self-evident, I would urge you to think harder.

Forget 100 years ago. I'm only 40 and I remember when anything even remotely suggesting homosexuality was considered perverted, and marriage wasn't even on the table.

I understand the idea that a diverse selection of exclusive communities leads to isolationism and echo-chambers. I just don't know how to judge if it's true or not.

As others observe, those exclusive communities were the precursors of our inclusive communities. They gave the marginalized a safe space to learn acceptance, confidence, and toughness, and take that out of their safe space. And no one is a member of just one community, isolated from the rest, even when we try to be. The issue seems to me to be less about how exclusive of opinion those communities are, and more about how freely one may join and leave them while staying within bounds.

> it will also drive to isolationism,

This separation would be good. It would mean that LGBTI humans would be able to find their own communities without cispeople getting weirded out.

Right now everything about my gender is verboten because it is sexualized.

Overreliance on youtube means that medical information around gender issues has to be "coded" so as to not trigger banning.

Facebook outs people with their stupid names rules that puts real people in real danger.

If everyone was being deplatformed then there would be the platform diversity needed.

Remember when gay and lesbian bars were a thing; back when straight people steered clear of them because of the stigma?

Not having the stigma is good overall, but in many places there's no longer queer-exclusive spaces. That whole segment of culture is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Isn’t that a good thing though? This reminds me of the people complaining cochlear implants are destroying deaf culture.

An absense of queer-exclusive spaces would be as much as a loss as the vanishing of any other major ethnic or cultural space.

The Paradox of Tolerance comes to mind, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

If that group was relying on Google, that's on them at this point.

If you use any Google product, you better have an alternative ready. There's no telling when Google will either shut the product down, or just ban you.

comp.lang.c is a Usenet forum, that Google Groups provides access to. You can access it from any NNTP server that provides the core of Usenet without using Groups, and it's better not to use Google's horrible interface anyways.

I guess I’m getting old but I’m always amazed when people don’t know what Usenet is. Or at least aren’t able to spot a Usenet group by name.

Every ISP I used a decade or two ago had its own Usenet server.

No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use.

It's hard to blame them, with modern Web-based discussion forums able to do better in almost every way, but that's a lot of freely available information and insight about a lot of subjects that is being consigned to history. Maybe one of the official national libraries is at least keeping an archive of old Usenet content, though I'm not aware that any of them is (at least, not making the archive publicly available at present).

In the mid 90s the only reason that I wanted internet access was for usenet. The web felt insignificant compared to the information available on usenet. It did not matter the topic, there was a discussion group for it. Web sites and services slowly started to move me away from reading Usenet to the point today where I check posts maybe three times per year.

For the heck of it, I just fired up tin to see how many posts since I read last:

1 3866 alt.folklore.computers Stories & anecdotes about computers (some true!). 2 151 alt.hacker No description. 3 1951 alt.obituaries Notices of dead folks. 4 13 comp.graphics.algorithms Algorithms used in producing computer graphics. 5 5021 comp.lang.c Discussion about C. 6 17 comp.os.linux.hardware Hardware compatibility with the Linux operating system. 7 1 comp.os.linux.setup Linux installation and system administration. 8 30 comp.sys.hp48 Hewlett-Packard's HP48 and HP28 calculators. 9 comp.unix.misc Various topics that don't fit other groups. 10 501 comp.unix.programmer Q&A for people programming under Unix. 11 1 comp.unix.questions UNIX neophytes group. 12 1190 comp.unix.shell Using and programming the Unix shell. 13 comp.unix.admin Administering a Unix-based system. 14 465 comp.misc General topics about computers not covered elsewhere. 15 138 rec.games.roguelike.nethack The computer game Nethack. 16 4001 comp.lang.python The Python computer language. 17 2119 comp.sys.raspberry-pi Raspberry Pi computers & related hardware and software. 18 8 alt.sources Alternative source code, unmoderated. Caveat Emptor.

Not completely dead yet.

I could imagine accessing terminals in System Shock or Deus Ex and just reading a few lines of those descriptions to show what kind of thing the owner was interested in.

The old internet truly is a window into a different world.

> No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use.

The event that lead to a lot of ISPs dropping their NNTP service was when Andrew Cuomo, when he was the attorney general of New York, made a deal with several ISPs to block access to child porn[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/technology/10iht-net.1.13...

That, and the fact that the bulk of Usenet traffic is encoded binaries of copyrighted media and porn of varying levels of legality. The amount of traffic in the "big 7" hierarchy (like comp.*) is tiny compared to that.

I never got how this works. All of those encrypted binaries can only be decrypted using keys posted to private invite-only forums/groups. What's the point in making that extra detour through "binary usenet providers" compared to just having a private tracker?

Primarily, bittorrent didn't exist until 2001.

Secondarily, you need to find a person to seed a private tracker, and bandwidth is limited to the seed host. You pay to share the content. With the binary server, it's the speed of the NNTP host. Users pay to download the content.

Last time I used an actual usenet group must have been around 2000 or so.

I have no idea how I'd set up NNTP and get to a group now. Not that it wouldn't take me long to work it out, but I'd have to start from first principles.

I was regularly posting to several groups as late as 2014.

But setting up access is no different than configuring a mail client.

Configuring a mail client exceeds the technical comfort of most web users.

I haven’t manually configured a mail client in well over 10 years.

It was probably hard for an ISP to justify when dejanews, later acquired and transformed into google groups, was providing adequate access.

It's hard to justify when 99% of ISP's current customers will never understand what usenet is no matter what.

Where would you learn about it? I've never seen an invite or an indication that any form of contribution is welcomed, or even possible.

You don't "get an invite". You use an NNTP client to access from a service that supports the protocol. Once upon a time this was handled by one's ISP.

The only trick is figuring out how to post to alt.hackers where your contribution isn't welcome unless you can "hack" your way in.

> Where would you learn about [usenet]?

In the late '90s up through 2010 or so, one's ISP would provide instructions for configuring one's mail and news clients to access their email and usenet. From there, the client would show a list of groups and you could choose which ones to subscribe to.

At some point Google will ask themselves why they are spending money on running Google Groups in the first place. They may just decide to pull the plug.

That's the default trajectory for most things that google acquires. It gets ingested with a lot of fanfare, then gets integrated in some half assed way, you get a lot of funny colors you never cared about in the first place and eventually it just withers. Dejanews used to be a fantastic resource, and beat the pants of the likes of stackoverflow.

You can access the current posts from any good NNTP server, but Usenet isn't used that much these days anyway. What's more interesting is the historic posts from its heyday and I think Google might own the only good archive of them by virtue of purchasing it.

But if you want to find a particular post, it really depends on the retention policy of the server you use. Free ones may have a year of retention. Commercial one's have 12 years or so. The only one that I know of where one can find posts further back than that is Google groups.

astranews has comp.lang.c back to 30 June 2003.

Astraweb's landing page states they have 4000 days of retention (which corresponds to March 2010 as of the time of this post). I guess certain text groups have signfiicantly longer retention times.

They don't. It's a Usenet group.

Google bought Dejanews and was an acceptable Usenet archive, for a time.

Then Google put the Usenet groups under the same umbrella as their proprietary groups.

Then their index became spotty (and you could retrieve some posts under groups.google.com, but not groups.google.de, or vice versa).

Today, Google Groups is near useless for Usenet.

The default assumption for interpreting Google's actions is always that they want to close down communication channels they can't inject their ads into and/or can't control as a monopoly. Such that the fscking web with their millions of trackers dominated by G becomes the only form of digital communication possible. As happened with Usenet, XMPP, MMS, HTML/browsers, etc.

Google is so bad at product.

Outside of Hacker News, Google's moderation gets a lot less attention, whether it be regarding spam or politics or the complexities of managing communities.

I waver between Google's aggressive algo moderation being just because they don't see it as a priority to fix or because overzealous moderation might actually be a better strategy when dealing with a relatively casual userbase. Overmoderate and get a few wrong, but make sure that those errors have a path to resolution if they are popular enough (basically Hacker News). Otherwise when in doubt, ban.

If they get it wrong with under moderation then they get people complaining they're allowing nazis, spam, baby eaters, etc. This affects ads.

If they get it wrong with over moderation people just think they're stupid. This does not affect ads.

It also never blows up into a major story.

Most news stories about Twitter, Facebook, and even the few about YouTube have been about them failing to ban X. Overmoderate and the criticism comes in bit by bit.

That's natural, because the cost of mistakes in the two directions is not remotely close to symmetric. A few delayed messages to comp.lang.c is not the equivalent of [really bad thing].

What a time to be alive when a Usenet newsgroup is now referred to as a ‘Google Group’.

Probably some automated spam detector got it banned.

Here's the ban message for posterity: https://i.imgur.com/0lFapQ1.png

"Back to safety". Gotta love corporate BS

By using this phrasing as loosely as big tech does, they have trained a lot of people to ignore these warnings.

Even I started to raise an eyebrow whenever one of these companies claims to do something for my "safety".

Maybe the link goes to comp.lang.functional. ;)

Based on what I've seen in several groups, a lot of spam comes from posts made via Google groups.

Another victory for Machine Learning!(tm).

Nah, if we're going to blame the tools then I blame the C language without which ML would not be possible.

C is a dangerous language, but I would not ban discussions about it.

To be honest, the unmoderated (those not ending in .moderated) usenet groups were always a bit a home for flame fests - nothing particularly to do with Google.

Speaking as a contributor (not to flames, or at least I hope not much) way back when.

Why?

Who knows. There are so many algorithms and people at play in the decisions to ban things on large platforms that most people that work at the organization itself won't even be able to tell you who or what, specifically, was responsible.

That's why this gets posted to HN with hope that enough relevant people will notice such that remediation has a real chance of occurring, because with a normal 'appeal' your chances are basically nil regardless of how incorrect the ban was.

If I had to guess at a moment's notice, I'd say some kind of spam/malicious content tripped some kind of automated trigger. Hopefully it can be fixed soon. Usenet unfortunately harkens back to the era before there were bad actors at all and thus has the same vulnerability to spam and other issues as email does. I bet it's something along those lines.

Undefined behavior ;)

Unsafe content.

Predictable :)

I can't figure this out either. Is the internet now dead?

Excuse my ignorance but was comp.lang.c active? Is any of Usenet still active? I haven't used it in like 20 years and wouldn't even know which NNTP host to connect to.

It still looks fairly active - not completely drowned out by spam coming from google..

As for NNTP access: eternal-september.org might be an option, but there are still quite a few NNTP servers ticking with open registration.

Not that the comparison is equal, but imagine if one day the stackoverflow et al. went dark for good... (horror!)

How many important projects would suddenly need to extend their deadlines, how many hopeful interviews would go bust. How many coding approaches would have to be re-discovered or written anew based on present best-practices.

Where all that collective need for "tribal-knowledge" would channel to?

Donald Knuth, “The Art of Computer Programming” would grow more volumes by guest writers, perhaps.

Google should be made to review and justify every ban since they have have the majority of world power at this point.

Is there a standard way to get Usenet access these days?

NNTP is a standard. I use eternal-september.

I joined a couple of years back, but came away disappointed. All the groups I followed 20 years back are pale shadows of their former selves, filled with spam. And most of those were big in the day and included the comp.lang.c|c++ and a few of the comp.os groups.

There's still a need for usenet, and I'd love to participate if there was anyone worth talking to. But it needs fixing first.

> filled with spam

I was there for Canter & Siegel https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/

My first usenet post, sometime in the late 80s, was in a discussion about a possible future "digital newspaper"

comp.misc is still going strong. It has been "taken over" by people running away from Slashdot when it got "corporatized" some years back, and has some interesting discussions from time to time.

I know that misc is one of the big 7 hierarchies. I wonder if there's a misc.comp group :-)

Alas, there is no misc.comp group. There is a misc.misc group, however, but the bad news again is that comp.comp group does not exist. :)

I dunno, you can write malware easily with C if you're not careful with pointers, memcpy, etc. The code samples have to be full of it.

Well I mean you can also write "malware" easily with styrofoam and gasoline in the right ratios. You can also make some sweet wargaming terrain with styrofoam and fuel a car with gasoline.

Unrestricted goto considered harmful.

This time the proponents of 'safe' languages have gone too far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com