Usenet
[3][4] A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider.
However, unlike BBSes and web forums, the dispersed nature of Usenet usually permits users who are interested in receiving some content to access it simply by choosing to connect to news servers that carry the feeds they want.
Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", "sockpuppet", and "spam".
[5] In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via FidoNet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.
[12] Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs, mailing lists and social media.
Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and the alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data.
Newsgroup enthusiasts often criticized these as inferior to standalone newsreaders that made correct use of Usenet protocols, standards and conventions.
Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one application and no Usenet NNTP server account.
The RFD is required to have the following information: newsgroup name, checkgroups file entry, and moderated or unmoderated status.
[25][26][27] Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among a readership which is potentially widely distributed.
The major set of worldwide newsgroups is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming.
Companies and projects administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support, such as the historical gnu.
Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow the traffic.
Without sufficient retention time, a reader will be unable to download all parts of the binary before it is flushed out of the group's storage allocation.
Modern Usenet news servers have enough capacity to archive years of binary content even when flooded with new data at the maximum daily speed available.
In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet is also used by individual users to store backup data.
However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source.
[46] UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections.
Widespread use of Usenet by the BBS community was facilitated by the introduction of UUCP feeds made possible by MS-DOS implementations of UUCP, such as UFGATE (UUCP to FidoNet Gateway), FSUUCP and UUPC.
Matt Glickman and Horton at Berkeley produced an improved version called B News that could handle the rising traffic (about 50 articles a day as of late 1983).
In the early 1990s, InterNetNews by Rich Salz was developed to take advantage of the continuous message flow made possible by NNTP versus the batched store-and-forward design of UUCP.
[57][58] On February 4, 2011, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was retired after 32 years.
[citation needed] In response, John Biggs of TechCrunch said "As long as there are folks who think a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on".
A small sampling of the change (measured in feed size per day) follows: In 2008, Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel signed an agreement with Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo to shut down access to sources of child pornography.
David DeJean of PC World said that some worry that the ISPs used Cuomo's campaign as an excuse to end portions of Usenet access, as it is costly for the Internet service providers and not in high demand by customers.
[67] AOL announced that it would discontinue its integrated Usenet service in early 2005, citing the growing popularity of weblogs, chat forums and on-line conferencing.
[74][75] Some ISPs did not include pressure from Cuomo's campaign against child pornography as one of their reasons for dropping Usenet feeds as part of their services.
The first system, called keepnews, by Mark M. Swenson of the University of Arizona, was described as "a program that attempts to provide a sane way of extracting and keeping information that comes over Usenet."
Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today.An explanatory page adds:[102] In addition, Google’s Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP servers.
This change will not impact any non-Usenet content on Google Groups, including all user and organization-created groups.Usenet had administrators on a server-by-server basis, not as a whole.
Notably, clients never connect with each other, but still have access to each other's posts even when they also never connect to the same server.
