[sf-lug] Suspicious email from LinuxMafia

[Todd Hawley]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:58 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

>
> While I'm here anyway:
>
> Usenet is a globally distributed large collection of public discussion
> forums ('newsgroups' or 'groups').  The predominant transport technology
> (NNTP) is related to that used by e-mail and thus mailing lists (SMTP),
> except in broad terms it works a lot better on a technical level.
> Postings are en-masse referred to as 'netnews' or 'news' (or, er,
> Usenet).  Any individual posting is called an 'article'.
>
> To participate on Usenet, you need an NNTP newsreader client program,
> analogous to your SMTP e-mail client program except written to operate
> over NNTP rather than for SMTP/IMAP/POP3.  Those are easy to find.  What
> is probably more difficult in 2016 is to find a specific accessible
> NNTP netnews _server_ you are permitted to use and that doesn't utterly
> suck.
>

Very true. My ISP had one of those servers and eventually dumped it because
apparently I was one of their very few users still reading NetNews. I used
to look forward every day to reading various newsgroups. GoogleGroups does
carry most of the non-binary groups, or at least did last time I looked. I
quit reading NetNews because it can be a PITA to read them via Google.

>
> > Mention Usenet in this decade, and one very often sets off someone
> > firing off a tired old, not-very-accurate antiUsenet talking point.
>
> Usually, the troll's go-to objection is 'You can't be serious.  Usenet's
> been unusable since 1985 [or pick some other 20th C year, more or less
> at random] because it got overwhelmed by spam and died.'
>
> I seriously doubt such a person has actual epiphenomenal knowledge;
> it's just a look-at-me noise talking point that's supposed to impress
> people and prove that the first speaker cannot be trusted, and the
> speaker expects to get a rise out of the first speaker.  _Some_
> newsgroups appear all-spam because real people stopped using them for
> unrelated reasons, and the slow trickle of spam since that happened
> years ago creates the illusion that spam destroyed the group.
> Additionally, some news _servers_ are bad about rejecting spam articles
> as a side-effect of them being terrible servers in all other ways, too.
> (Cheap and easy to find sometimes precludes good.)
>

Which is what happened to several groups I used to read, especially any
that were part of the alt. hierarchy.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that knows about USENET.

-th
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/attachments/20160310/26afc548/attachment.html>