Comp.lang.c is now full of spam
groups.google.com
groups.google.com
Google: nah.
Honestly I shouldn't even suggest that, it will probably get google groups closed in a whim.
I have trouble imagining what a vim/emacs user group would be: either some sort of nonstop abusive flamewar or some kind of kumbaya group you can only join if you can prove you're on a dangerously high dose of lithium.
Also groups that trade baking recipes in org-mode format plus vim macros so they can share the fun.
That's a great point, and I would add that when Google launched Google Groups, there was this widespread concern that Google would abuse it to kill Usenet and force users to switch to its own walled garden.
Since then, Google already tried and failed to launch a couple of social networks, but Usenet is still around.
Public groups is just one aspect google groups, probably not the most important use case.
HN has some of the flavor of discussing technical stuff with experts and amateurs chiming in. But everything here is geared towards news, so the longer, deeper discussions are missing.
Perhaps I'm just getting old though.
You could spend a day working on a reply, and people would get it next time they downloaded messages.
Everything now seems to focus on "the now", incentivizing fast replies and new content.
Though, as the other responder mentions, it certainly would struggle with "web scale" amount of participants.
I distinctly remember thinking that this was really efficient. At the very least, it made lists a lot more entertaining to read than they would be today.
...is this "legit", besides the whole illegal drugs thing? Selling drugs with PayPal, on a .com? I remember people doing it with Bitcoin and Tor but this is very in the open. They do also take Bitcoin.
or is this entirely a scam? But if so why would they take PayPal which has buyer protection, although I don't know how PayPal responds to someone complaining "they scammed me and didn't send my illegal drugs".
No way Paypal or GooglePay would allow such a thing longer than a few hours, just enough for their own crawling engine, intented to automate verification of compliance to their policies, to ring the alarm bell on the screen of a human operator.
No way also a scammer would be dumb enough to use such services which require extensive verification process, with ID, proof of incorporation and so on...
It's just FBI, DEA or whatever, 'sting' operations. Like the kind of website where you can buy Red Sulfurous from somewhere in eastern europe countries(for example bellarus), but when you make a Whois of the website, it leads straight to an obscure hosting company located in... California.
The reason they asking minimum $150 (or even more on some website) order is because they want to use it as an argument in court to prove your intentions were to resell it, no matter if it's true or not, in order to force you to take a plea deal and send you in jail for 3-10 years and ruin your life forever.
Why do they do such thing when there is so much real real shit, in every sense of the word, going through mexican border ? Because it allows them to improve their stats on the back of idiots or naive young people who don't know were else to go.
There is a shitload of reports of orther similar false flag operations from US LE regarding 'terrorists', 'sexual predators', and on and on.
Just take a look at https://www.sugardaddy.com/ for example... This site promotes with no other possible interpretation prostitution, while presenting it as something else than prostitution, and while prostitution, to my knowledge, is forbidden everywhere in America. This site has been up for years (I know about it because Bill Maher made a joke about it years ago). The worse is you export your methods to other parts of the world (look at the bottom of the page) (UK, Australia, Canada, where prostitution is forbidden). But funnily enough (do I dare say?) New Zeeland, one of the rare country (if not the only one) were prostition is legal and regulated, is not represented at the bottom of the site.
A few days ago, there was a post here about an article regarding 'testilying' from police officers in court.
It's no wonder so much american people don't trust their government and accumulate tons of gun to defend themself from it... just in case.
There is something rotten in the Kingdom of the United State of America.
Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?
The clients will all be hopelessly outdated, I imagine WinVN will still run but you probably wouldn't enjoy the experience much.
The big issue would be preventing the server/servers from filling up with AI entities. If you're attracting enough of a userbase to be worth influencing they will creep in unless you somehow find a way to guarantee that all users are real people, and that presents its own problems.
No accounts without government ID, no connectivity without it either, open access points illegal, and so on.
Governments and police would love this, and with AI, spam (as you elude to) is going to rise to a new level.
And there are already issues, with most of the net's citizens, unable to detect fraudulent posts.
Countries have already had civil wars, thanks to Cambridge Analytics, and disinformation will only make this worse.
Long story short, accountability is impossible with anonymity, and so to sue, to charge with crimes, I sadly think the internet will soon change.
That said, this is the same problem you have with loads of other accounts. Be it banks, trading houses, or just compromised meta, X, or whatever accounts.
Still, my point wasn't whether or not it would work, but merely that it will happen. Governments will become more and more frustrated with a deluge of propaganda, which makes what we see today seem inconsequential. And I believe this will be their response.
And it is already true in many countries.
I did say it makes me sad. Not happy.
Upon an attempt to log in at a service (using a phone with a companion app), a nonce signed accompanied by a certificate signed by the government root CA gets signed by the private key on card, and that as well as the signed personal data gets provided to the requesting service.
No accounts without government ID, no connectivity without it either, open access points illegal, and so on."
Or we see the rise of social networks that require a personal invite. In the extreme variant, with a personal meetup requirement. Probably both, with government ID accounts being the standard for the mainstream, while all the interesting stuff will be invite only.
All you need is something that implements a mix of a reputation system and a web of trust and you're good to go. Technically pseudonymous, not anonymous, but it would give you basically all of the benefits of tying online activity to real identities without any of the downsides. It would also be completely decentralized, which would prevent large players from manipulating the political landscape on a mass level.
Usenet was a decent shot at this problem but it lost to other solutions. Yes, all the current solutions are pretty bad but they aren't worse than Usenet. In particular Usenet had zero spam protection, Google stewardship or not.
Having said that, they must have been right, because spam has never dwindled away like Usenet News did. That may very well have been their fault, too.
No. Any group that doesn't have some kind of pre-post vetting idiom is going to have spam and abuse problems.
This wasn't always the case and I can't pinpoint exactly when the change happened or what it was.
Do a search for Free USENET and many will come up with instructions how to access without Google Groups.
I moderate an Apache project mailing list and the amount of spam it receives on on some days is silly. However thanks to the good work done by the ASF infra team it takes very little effort from ML moderators to keep the spam from reaching subscribers.
Moderated groups are their own category and quite rare. Every post to them has to be pre-approved.
The large majority of groups (including comp.lang.c) are unmoderated. "Moderator inaction" isn't a thing here because moderation isn't even technically possible.
Edit: the good old days: some of these nodes were mine! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/c/NxwZMYqBUjw/m/T...
Not sure I understand what they're trying to achieve.
(I tried to raise the issue internally, fwiw).
No blank lines, I added blank lines to avoid HN line wrap.
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