Google Groups has banned comp.lang.tcl
groups.google.com
groups.google.com
This awoke some latent memories of Forte Agent, the NTP (?) client? Good times..
Ah, simpler times, before everything turned to shit. I miss custom native internet clients.
EVEN IF THE KOOKS ADAPT AND USE PROPER CASE, THAT'S STILL A VICTORY.
Just a thought :)
Doubt? This is without doubt: For-profit companies cares about generating profits. If they own something that doesn't generate profits, the only reason they even own it is because they haven't figured out how to close it down yet, or how to earn profits on it, or they think it leads to profits in other areas.
Of course they don't care about making information more widely available for free, they care about making money. Hardly surprising that they prefer to spend the least amount of time on moderating, closing the entire group is way simpler and cost-effective (according to them, apparently).
History repeats itself
again these requests are very specific and in Italian, so I suspect it is from the same victim of the stalker/harasser, so I suppose that ONCE AGAIN[1] instead of removing individual defamatory posts, google has 'decided' to nuke the entire group.
For the sake of completeness, the last time I couldn't get anything out of, the whole experience with multinationals of a certain calibre nowaday is to talk to cheap and dummy bots or worse: people who are so underpaid or unprepared or uninterested in solving the problem that they don't even try to understand it.
[0] https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?sort_by=&term=%...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23982603
AN UPDATE:
Well, that's a big one. Apparently the stalker annoyed the wrong person.
This[2] "Court Order Complaint to Google" was compiled and sent by Mediolanum (yes that mediolanum, Berlusconi's company shell), I have downloaded the attached documents and they actually are court orders and biglawyers' stuff... I don't think it's over.
What is the word for painting a target on an innocent bystander so it gets bombed by the opposition?
Google bought dejanews, the historical usenet archive. They made it accessible via google groups. Now braindamaged bots are closing these archives. If google cannot fullfill their dejanews buyout promises they should hand it over to entities which are capable hosting these archives.
Not a single major newsgreoup like comp.lang.* may be closed by bots!
Subject: RAPISCE, INCULA E AMMAZZA I BAMBINI: ANDREA BAGGIO DI REPUTATIONUP CASTELFRANCO VENETO (TV)!
From: Andreas Nigg <andreasnigg.safrasarasin@gmail.com>Maybe user timonoko knows something more about this story.
You can also test this by putting Google Translate / DeepL Translate into "automatic mode" and putting "RAPISCE, INCULA E AMMAZZA I BAMBINI: ANDREA BAGGIO DI REPUTATIONUP CASTELFRANCO VENETO" to translate, both of them correctly identifies it as Italian.
Besides, this guy (Italian) has been writing these harassing things for years.
See e.g. https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.lang.lisp&mi...
=>
I particularly remember the spammer PERSEKUUTIO == "Cubed Asshole" (in Finnish). Because he was spamming for years everywhere about some PERSECUTION.
Much later we learned that the ARMENIAN PERSECUTION was a very real thing and suppressed by various reasons by everybody everywhere.
Was it? I can remember when it was a good search engine which let me find these, but I don’t think I ever thought “thank god google took this service over”, even back when they were building free services worth using 15 years ago.
Keep going ...
I at least still recall who sent me an invite to get access to the service, back when one was required.
And not sure what Gmail contributed to open source, I can think of 0 projects/libraries/protocols/specifications that comes from Gmail and is used elsewhere widely. I guess that you can export to mbox via Google Takeout is something, but has very little to do with open source.
For me 'old internet' was shitty ISP provided mailboxes that you lost once you moved away from your local dialup service.
GMail is still a substantial improvement over that.
Google created a new email service, they did not take over existing email infrastructure.
At least initially anyway, these days it's become quite hard to run your own email and have your messages be received.
Every time they pull this temporary ban, the quality of the affected newsgroups improves.
The most recent stunt pulled by GG is that some genius decided that punctuation characters should be dropped from newsgroup names when posting. So now when GG users post to comp.lang.c++, the post goes to comp.lang.c.
GG does not provide a useablee Usenet archive. GG's net contribution to the Usenet ecosystem is negative.
And I remember searching and finding an answer from myself. Then I realised all data we generate will be sucked up and remembered for as long as it is considered valueable.
At least the 'easily searchable' part of the old Usenet content is something that might come back with https://www.usenetarchives.com/
This call for deletion describes its history of confusion and moderation:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/PV3grfO5Ysg
RATIONALE: remove comp.windows.news
The last approved article was in March 2000. Sun Microsystems announced the end of life for the Network extensible Window System (NeWS) in the early 1990's.
During the early 1990's, traffic in the then unmoderated comp.windows.news was fairly light, less than 10 articles per week. In December 1995, the group was moderated in place in order to exclude misplaced articles related to "news" about MS-Windows. After the moderation, fewer than 20 articles were approved to the newsgroup.
Because of its name, conversion to an unmoderated status is not practical. An unmoderated newsgrooup would be overrun by MS-Windows traffic (see comp.windows.misc).
HISTORY:
The unmoderated newsgroup comp.windows.news was created in April 1987, soon after the Great Renaming. comp.windows.misc and comp.windows.x are of similar vintage.
The newsgroup comp.windows.ms was created in November 1988 for discussion of early versions of MS-Windows. Because of continued off topic posting to the other newsgroups in the comp.windows.* hierarchy, comp.windows.ms was re-organized into comp.os.ms-windows.* in 1992.
Despite creation of an entire hierarchy dedicated to MS-Windows, off-topic posting continued in the comp.windows.* hierarchy. The newsgroup comp.windows.news had the additional burden of a name that suggested it was for "news" about (MS)-Windows, rather than being about the NeWS.
In December 1995, comp.windows.news was converted to a moderated group in order to exclude off-topic discussion, as well as "debate" about the group name.
Over the next 5 years less than 20 articles were approved. The last approval was in March 2000.
The message I get sounds like there should be a way for advanced users to bypass it, but it's not totally obvious how to do so.
I tried to join the group, got a different error, then when returning to that page got a "continue anyway" button that wasn't there before.
"Banned content warning
comp.lang.tcl has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content.
For more information about content policies on Google Groups see our Help Center article on abuse and our Terms of Service."
I didn't bother looking further.
This hodgepodge is not solving a specific, well-defined problem. It's not guaranteed to terminate (the exact opposite actually). It doesn't produce the "correct answer" for every instance of the "problem" class. In virtually every aspect that matter it's not an algorithm. Arbitary programs are not algorithms.
: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation
broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end
"There are several search engines, with Google, Yahoo and Bing being the biggest players. Each search engine has its own proprietary computation (called an "algorithm") that ranks websites for each keyword or combination of keywords." — Julie Brinton
"… sometimes you solve a problem by coming up with an algorithm of some kind. But sometimes you solve a problem in a very ad hoc sort of way." — William H. Huggins
> I would argue that it is very intuitive that an alorithm made up of smaller algorithms is still, itself, an algorithm
is very unconvincing. Here's an "Algorithm" - compute the square root of 5 - for each number from 1 to n do 5 times : compute the square root of 5 times that number plus 19 - output the square root of 9 to the screen
Are you willing to accept this sequence of steps as an algorithm? I am not. And this sequence is even more of an algorithm than Google's products, at least it guarantees termination, correctly solves every instance of a (extremely artifical and meaningless) problem, and is effectively calculable (Google's and Facebook systems frequently need humans to decide or amend decisions, and the decisions are often arbitary and value-based). Neither of these things is guaranteed for Google's "algorithms".
>Most dictionaries appear to support OP's usage
I never said that this confusion isn't popular or documented in dictionaries and literature everywhere, the exact opposite in fact. I said I am annoyed that it is popular. Programs and Algorithms are different, and the difference is as meaningful and useful as the difference between "Writings" and "Poems".
But in the sense that an opaque, poorly-understood, by either users or the Internet monopolists themselves, black box has made yet another inscruitable, unanswerable, decision which cannot be explained or described, the phrase is accurate. Over the past decade, I've observed that Google's own staff can increasingly not answer why specific actions occur. The solution seems to be to tweak the training data and/or desired results set. Given the gradual extirpation of computer-language dedicated Usenet groups, this process seems at best slow, if not utterly futile.
It's not "an arbitrary program" either, at least not strictly, as the process is itself the end-result of a specific set of steps and processes. That happen to involve machine-learning and AI.
Pointedly, the decision isn't one that's based on a human agent, review board, or process.
If you'd prefer, "because a machine-learning based AI said so" would be more accurate. But it's also more of a mouthful.
Any alternate language you'd prefer?
The horse has flown that can of worms, however.
> comp.lang.tcl has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content.
This type of ban isn't new for comp.lang groups. In 2020 comp.lang.forth and comp.lang.lisp were banned with the same message: https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913/some-usene.... The response from a person with a "Gold Product Expert" badge in the support thread was that "since the Usenet newsgroups doesn't have owners there is not any way to appeal the Ban".
Edit: comp.lang.python is banned, too. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python
Look at the uproar over Freenode. No one would notice if IRC had been as obscure as NNTP over the last 15 years.
Also, I'm not sure I understand your argument about NNTP and IRC. Why did NNTP became obscure and why did its accessibility and visibility shrink, when the same did not happen to IRC? Given that NNTP is distributed and open and superior to many things that are not obscure, accessible, and visible, how could such a thing have happened?
The other thing is that people tended to rely on their ISPs to provide NNTP service, and they started tending to drop it in the late 90s and early 2000s, and there were few/no free alternatives at the time.
The way I remember it, back in the late 90s and early aughts every news group became useless due to cross posting spam. Sure spam was always a thing, but I remember groups I used to read became unreadable by the sheer number of binary files being posted.
IRC could avoid this problem because it is transitory. But I think the biggest reason is that usenet is unmoderated[0], while there’s always an op on an irc channel.
[0] Yes, there’re some things people try to do, but they always felt bolted on, and a bit awkward. I’m not even sure how widespread they are, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen them actually work. Then again, I’m talking about a Usenet from 25 years ago.
However one needs to put in some work to keep it running and given it's not exactly a mainstream service, many ISPs have decided long ago to shut down their NNTP servers.
Its superiority has been in question since September of 1993, when it noticeably buckled under the load of a million or so (and quite probably fewer) commercial dial-up service subscribers. Previously Usenet had a maximum user base genereally of less than 1 million. The pre-AOL Usenet probably measured less than 1 million potential users, and a small fraction of that active.[1] It dragged on for another decade, more or less, but was largely no longer freely available to dial-up / residential users by the early 2000s, largely due to its inability to police against antisocial behaviour, or mount a credible political defence against claims of rampant criminal activity (at least some of it reasonably well evidenced).
As such, actually offering Usnet access became a net liability to most commercial operators.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
________________________________
Notes:
1. Relying on Brian Reid's "USENET Readership Summary Reports", as of April, 1988, there were 381 newsgroups, 57,979 messages, an estimated 141,000 readers, of a total user population on connected hosts of 880,000. Cited in John S. Quarterman, The Matrix, 1990.
I can see posts I made thirty years ago on Usenet answering questions I might still have today.
It's possible that as few as none of the sites you described will be here in thirty years, and certainly _some_ of them will be gone.
I only started using Usenet recently (and only for text, not binaries); all of the spam messages I have seen are from Google Groups. Legitimate messages are sometimes from Google Groups too, but are also posted on other servers. (I wrote my own NNTP client software actually)
I also run my own NNTP server, for the discussions for my own projects and that stuff (it isn't connected with any other NNTP servers currently, although it could be done if wanted). Currently it does not include the web interface; those who are interested in it can help with such a thing. Web interface is then an alternative for the people who do not like NNTP; the web interface includes a clear link to the NNTP even if JavaScripts/CSS are disabled, so that if given the link to the web interface, you can still use the NNTP if you do prefer to use the NNTP.
(I also use 63-bit article numbers rather than 31-bit article numbers, although it is unlikely that they will ever reach high enough numbers that will exceed 31-bits, it is an available feature if it is needed.)
YouTube recently banned accounts and censored videos that contradicted the WHO - the same WHO that said you shouldn't wear masks during the pandemic.
Centralized systems are censorship accidents waiting to happen. It's super bad already, and we're still in peacetime. Imagine how shitty things are going to be if that changes and the nations that can exercise ultimate control these vast centralized systems feel that free communication via them poses an existential threat due to crisis.
Then there's the whole Instagram "no nudity" thing. Even outside of times of crisis, the de facto photo sharing default has excluded an entire category of human art and creativity. No single organization should have this much dictatorial control over our society's ability to express its own culture, nevermind its ability to permanently read (and share, and mine) your private conversations.
Build around centralized systems by running things yourself. Run your own mailing lists so your groups can communicate outside of algorithmically reorganized timelines designed to benefit advertisers. Self-host Discourse (forum) or Mattermost (web chat) or Gitea (git web). Make local backups of your servers and vpses data partitions so that you can fire them back up somewhere else when the time comes.
Your community will thank you in the long run, and you will be contributing to making all of society more resilient and more expressive/free.
The exact same issue applies to Gmail, which fronts another decentralized/federated system.
But I am old and I never understood why one would prefer a browser over native clients.
Same, obviously, goes for e-mail.
This is the case on the vast majority of technology developments -- things to solve mainly US centric problems are pushed out with massive amount of money to try to "solve" problems that don't exist.
A byproduct of this push is often to create those problems in other cultures. It's like the British empire of the 17th century.
Reddit, in contrast to Instagram, hosts porn of all varieties - from softcore nude art to hardcore fetish stuff.
The issue with the US is "family friendly" brand/advertising culture - no big brand advertisers want their ads to go next to a blowjob - and credit card regulations.
Ironic that this sentiment is expressed on HN, a centrally controlled site with strict rules around what can and cannot be said. "But all those rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) are good". Well, I agree. These rules are good. They are enforced well. It does foster a decent community with interesting discussion. But let's not mistake a well run, controlled system for a laissez-faire one. HN without moderation would not be the same site, and I'd bet most of us wouldn't want to be a part of it.
This particular comment is strange though - you rail against Instagram's no nudity policy, something that almost all people agree that the site is better off without. And yet, have you tried posting nudity on HN? Let us know if it stays up. HN's control over topics that can be discussed is so firm that even potentially interesting threads like the first one around the European Super League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854970) were shut down.
There's a big difference between a general photo-sharing platform like IG and a small, somewhat topic-focused forum like this.
It's like saying a recipe submission site is "censoring" nudity posts. I guess that's technically true in a sense, but it's also not really what the site's for.
Did you manage to create an FB account that isn't bound by the Community Standards (https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/)?
I say this on my own website, on other sites, and here too - it's not an exclusive thing. This isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.
> you rail against Instagram's no nudity policy, something that almost all people agree that the site is better off without.
Citation needed. This is your opinion, not fact. There are many thousands of fine art photographers who can't share the majority of their work on IG, and hobbyists who have lost their entire accounts and audience simply because Facebook's censors can't tell a male nipple from a female one. Many people into fetish clothing and jewelry design can't even post non-nude images showcasing their products. There isn't the wide consensus you imagine.
> And yet, have you tried posting nudity on HN? Let us know if it stays up. HN's control over topics that can be discussed is so firm that even potentially interesting threads like...
I actually wrote and operate a little hobby site that exists solely to detect and highlight stories upvoted by HN's readership and marked as off topic (and hidden) by HN's administrators: https://orangesite.sneak.cloud
People should be able to decide for themselves what they see and read, including delegating that authority. HN, for example, has the "showdead" preference option for opting in to seeing comments marked dead by the mods.
HN strikes a good balance, and lets people opt in or out of comment moderation. Facebook and Google do not.
> HN strikes a good balance, and lets people opt in or out of comment moderation.
While this is a good idea (and I use the showdead option myself), it is incomplete. To complete it might include such thing as:
- Add another preference option to force everything to be displayed in chronological order.
- If you have enough disk space to allow it, allow replies to dead and old messages, which are automatically also dead.