[sf-lug] Suspicious email from LinuxMafia

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 03/10/2016 12:07 PM, Todd Hawley wrote:
> 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.
>>

     Well it text only groups satisfy your interest search on 
eternal-september.news.
     If you want binary posting as well I believe you will have to pay.
     There are some news servers out there where the cost is a modest 
fee per year
and others where the same amount of money paid every month will get you 
binary
service.

> 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

     I have been reading Usenet newsgroups for a long time.
     I used to read about the Amiga when the engineers were posting
and the best information was available.

     I used Usenet news clilents on the Amiga and since then
Thunderbird which is a bit top heavy but usable.

     Bobbie