Usenet, qu'est-ce que c'est?

What is that thing? I keep hearing about it, but I've never seen it. It seems like it was a very active thing as late as 2002. What about now? How does one get in? How does it work?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Usenet.

Wow.

That was actually where I did most of my internetting in the early days. I was active in the alt.atheism community, and various video game communities. (There was a very active fighting game community even back then)

Usenet is basically more commonly called Newsgroups. Think of a big open bulletin board system that anybody can post to (well for the most part). As well, there was a lot of files sent there as well, and some people use it for mostly that (I never figured out how to do that).

If you want to check it out, you can just go to groups.google.com which provides Usenet access.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

The Wikipedia article is a good start on the basics.

The TLDR summary version: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

(former lurker in alt.usenet.kooks, where all the entertaining trolls used to be)

edited 24th Dec '12 7:24:41 AM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Usenet is basically the ancestor of todays internet forums, operating similar to mailing lists.

Of course as the internet became more accessible and multimedia-friendly it largely fell into obscurity. It's still "out there" though and probably will stick around as long as there are die-hard users, people with nostalgia about it or just those who use it for its quirkiness.

Pretty simple actually: Split a file into parts, convert those parts into binary/hex/whatever code and just post that code as text. The person who wants to "download" the file just has to do these steps in reverse and reconstruct the file.

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.

... That's insane.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Usenet was basically email forums. Instead of emailing people you used something very similar to an email client to browse forums that worked very much like web forums and to send messages to forums instead of to people.

Attaching files was done but generally people didn't bother and just told you where to find the file, as in go to ftp.thing.com and it's in /pub/otherthing/wibble.gif and you'd find it yourself.

You can still find a lot of usenet archives yourself, Google has one. Here is a link to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5

Oh yes, and that was how they were named. Category.subcategory.more.specific.after.each.dot

I've begun exploring usenet through Google Groups.

That place is a mess. There's the occasional beautiful intelligent nugget, but trolls and spammers have waaaaay too much power.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

This is why it fell out of use. Spammers became more prevalent and web forums became easier to police.

On the flip side, Fast Eddie could consign every post on this forum to oblivion in a moment. Usenet is pretty much immortal.

And sice there are fewer users, there is less incentive for spam; an equilibrium is reached.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Well, in comparison to today's file sharing and cloud storage possibilities it's unorthodox and not exactly viable for a large number of files, but back then it was an option.

Also a similar idea is still in use today: Many e-mail services encode the text, images and attachments into strings of text to send them without platform dependency.

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.

I suppose it was. Then again, when it comes to file sharing, I tend to think in terms of "movie", not 200x200 bmp at 256 colors. Oh God. The nostalgiargh...

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Yeah, I was a big Usenet denizen back in the day, but its distributed nature made it hugely vulnerable to spammers and that pretty much killed it for most people.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Until the Deepweb came along, anyway.

I don't know about that, Barkey. I mean, yeah, /b/ and the like probably can top it in outright disgustingness (so to speak), but beyond "gross out" value I find them kind of lacking in batshit insanity compared to the freakshow cast you could regularly find in alt.usenet.kooks when usenet was at its... erm, prime. *cough*

edited 26th Dec '12 1:45:05 AM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

~looks up deep web~ Huh...that's pretty disturbing. O_o; Never heard of it.

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

No, I mean the Deep Web. /b/ is laughable after you've hung out in the deep long enough.

edited 26th Dec '12 1:52:41 AM by Barkey

A sign it's time to go to bed: you read "Deep" as "Derp".

In other words:

Emily Litella: Never mind.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Derp Web wouldn't be inaccurate either, something is broken upstairs on a lot of the folks there, if some of the things people deal there are any indication.

But that's what is kind of cool about it, there are no taboos, no restrictions, no policing. If you can imagine it, it's there, somewhere. Terrorists, governments, drug dealers, human trafficking, software piracy, hitmen, crazy rants about illuminati and the pyramids, you name it.

We do, however, have a strict no-brony policy. That shit is too gross for the deep web.

edited 26th Dec '12 2:11:35 AM by Barkey

W-w-w-well we don't need you anyway! We're quite fine as surface-dwellers, th-th-th-thank you very much... (makes a dignified exit)◊

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

/b/ is even laughable if you've hung out in /b/ long enough.

Tempting...

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.

^^

You can't make a dignified exit stuttering and derping.

Dat's da jowke.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

It's like Troper Tales; we speak of it only in hushed whisper, under cover of shadow, because These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

Yes, but that's more because it attracted and sustained the attention of psychopathic obsessive libellers screaming from the top of their soapboxes than because it was actually, you know, evil, unlike the Deep Internet. You certainly couldn't hire hitmen or download child porn or bomb-making recipes from Troper Tales. The worst it got was people saying they were lovers with their parents or siblings, which, to be honest, makes me shrug. If you want Troper-Tales-As-A-Story, just read Its Not My Fault Im Not Popular.

edited 27th Dec '12 6:07:53 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

/b/ is just laughable in general if you've been an internet denizen for more than 20 minutes. Or if you're over the age of 15.

edited 28th Dec '12 4:50:44 PM by 0dd1

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.