Some things don't change

[yendi]

So, on a whim, I decided to configure an NNTP client today. After discovering that MT-Newswatcher died with Mavericks, I loaded up Thunderbird. There's still an active and free Usenet feed at Eternal September, and I subscribed to a few of the groups I'd frequented twenty years ago.

The aging of Usenet's obvious all over the place, from the general lack of content to the fact that the newest rec.arts.sf.tv group I can find is for Jeremiah. But I did subscribe to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5. Where the most recent thread is from October of last year, talks about Michael O'Hare's death the year before, and (of course) devolves into a flame war by the second of the four messages. Involving curse words and insults about penis size.

On the plus side, hey, spam doesn't seem to be a big thing in Usenet any more.

Comments

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

You know, if you wanted to discuss something in secret, you could probably do so in some obscure Usenet group. In plain text even..[well, plain text ignoring all the geeky references.]

[yendi]

True. Unlike World of Warcraft, the NSA probably isn't wasting resources there.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I still think that was some intelligence analyst's excuse when he got caught playing WoW on company time, and it got out of hand. [sort of how one woman's excuse for a pregnancy out of wedlock spawned Christianity.]

Come to think of it, most of the current generation of computer users probably don't even know Usenet still exists, if they even know what it is.

[yendi]

Yep. I'm reasonably sure that my daughter has no clue what it is.