On Thu, 26 Jun 2008, Michael Black wrote:

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, A wrote:



On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Allodoxaphobia wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:39:43 -0400, A wrote:

Did any of you guys look at http://groups.google.com to see if what you
want is there? There are lots of ways to connect to NG servers that are
outside of your network (unless they disable nntp protocols).

Ya, but... Post from Google and a Great Portion of the usenet
population will never see your postings:

I have access to three non-Google ISPs and in recent months, the posts have
been getting out to all of them just as fast as I can log onto them by
telnet and check for myself. They have improved over, say, a year ago.

You miss the point, though I'm tired of seeing all this off-topic discussion
in every newsgroup as the clueless post about it rather
than know what's happening and finding the right place to post.

Lets look at all of the original post that I responded to while you
deleted what the issue was about. Here it is:
******************************
From Tue Jun 24 16:39:43 2008


Did any of you guys look at http://groups.google.com to see if what you want
is there? There are lots of ways to connect to NG servers that are outside
of your network (unless they disable nntp protocols).

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Highland Ham wrote:

ken scharf wrote:
Right now I am using AT&T (bellsouth) DSL. If they drop the news groups
and Comcast doesn't, I think bellsouth will lose both my phone and
internet business. It's nice to have TWO providers of the same service
competing with each other!
=======================================
Agreed, this is rather OT ,but if you have a (A)DSL connection with a
provider in the USA , do you have to 'sit out' a say 12 months contract
before you can switch or can you switch at any time ?

Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

*******************************

He's saying that many will filter out posts from google.

As a guy who is presenting himself as: i) non-clueless, ii) complaining
about OT posts and everyone else who is clueless, I think your own
knowledge leaves much to be desired, and iii) your habit of deleting
relevant other material from another poster has the effect of quoting
out of context. You also deleted this part that I authored:

*****************
From Wed Jun 25 23:57:59 2008

Whether your post gets "out" far onto the net depends at least to some
degree on where on the net your ISP is located and what kind of traffic
flows there. I've had experience with about a dozen UNIX shell account ISPs
over the last 15 years and in the past there were quite a few that did _not_
have good connectivity with other ISPs through the nntp protocol. I'm not
overly happy with Google for NG access, but if anyone is unhappy with their
own ISP's NG server (they can subscribe or block whatever NGs they feel
like) then certainly they should try Google. And, you can even use Google
(and other "portals") to find other NG accesses.

***************************

Too much
spam, but too much cluelessness. People posting from google without
any awareness of where they are. People posting from google without
quoting what they are replying to. People posting from google and
being clueless about how others see the newsgroup,

As I tried to explain, nntp is not like email. A post goes out in all
directions to neighbor ISPs. It is supposed to be relayed to the next
nodes, and re-relayed from their. Many years ago I could watch a post
start from a point of origination and start appearing at farther out ISPs
sometimes hours later. If the local ISP does not _subscribe_ to that
newsgroup, then you won't get any posts. If posts don't appear within
some upper limit in time, then those posts will never appear period. I am
not aware that any ISPs sellectively reject a few or all nntp posts from
any source, but many will reject emails based on domains of origin because
of spam. ISPs out on remote branches of their network connectivity are the
ones that have the poorest "capture" ability and one of my ISPs had such
a poor connectivity until they upgraded.

so they think
doing things like replying to spam with an empty message but a different
subject header will "fix things";

ISPs can handle thread content based on the subject line or the reference
in the header to the original post that the author is responding to.

the rest of the world sees an empty
message that requires effort to figure out what the post is about since
we don't see it all on one webpage.

This is your best comment. However, certain newsreaders will group
response posts, whether it included some text from the prior post or not,
in its proper place in the thread subject (eg. Free Agent). PINE (a Unix
newsreader) does not keep response posts in a thread so changing the
subject has no effect. Google puts the response post in the same thread
and _sometimes) mentions that the subject was changed that the original
post was made under. Also, what you see with Google depends on what kind
of web browser you use.

However, there are a lot of people who don't follow the courtesy of
quoting what they are responding to. Usually these people don't have
anything important or significant to say, anyway.

Google has made it too easy
for people to post to Usenet, so they can post without giving any
thought to what already exists.

Such as the relevant material I wrote that you deleted. For a free
service, Google does a lot for people. The problem is that people are
either not knowing what they are doing or refuse to use good operating
practices when trying to carry on dialog. My observation that most
conversations are neither informative or cooperative seems to indicate a
fairly widespread deficiency in human intelligence.

They too often think a newsgroup
is a hangout,

This is a description of the reality about newsgroups rather than any
error on the part of NG posters and lurkers. NGs really are hangouts, just
like bars.

where anything goes

This is also a description of reality (unless you want to belong to a
moderated NG or a website chatroom where you can get censored by the
owner/manager, and be exposed to advertising, malicious code being
downloaded on your box, and your logins going into a database).

so long as everyone shares the
common interest of the newsgroup.

There is very little "common interest". Spamers come to spam. Bloggers
come to harvest people off NGs to go to their blog. Everyone else has
their own agenda. I know what some of the agendas are and skip over those
and go to the next ones.

SO rather than find a newsgroup
where a post is on-topic, they post where their "buddies" are.

And, I think this is just fine. If a guy doesn't like some post, he can't
say anyone forced him to read it. Ultimate freedom of speech.

With each little bit, the newsgroups degrade just a little bit more.

Trouble is, there are also a lot of guys out there who are self-appointed
judges of what is on-topic or off-topic, what is right and wrong, and they
constantly bitch about everyone else while they play the roll of NG-cop
and say everyone but themselves is doing it all wrong.

Drive out the ones who know what they are doing, and then the clueless
can do whatever they like.

You can also start your own group or mailing list, and invite all of the
people that you find acceptable and play the game called "snob," too.

Michael VE2BVW

In article q6f6k.61015$Ni1.7141@trnddc01, Al wrote:
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

They're not really denying you access; they're just no longer running a
USENET server as part of their ISP business any more. You can still get
to those groups ... you'll just have to pay someone else for usenet
access. (Or get it for free from, say, aioe.org, or use google's lame web
interface, etc.)

As such I don't think this is something for the law to be involved in.
Verizon's decided to drop part of their service, but there's room in
the world for crappy ISPs alongside the good ones.

If Verizon decided to start blocking access to other companies' news
servers, or forge reset packets, etc., the way Comcast (allegedly?)
does, then you'd have something to write your representatives about.

You might be able to get out of any contract you have with them, on
the basis they've changed the service without renegotiating...
people seem to do that for cell-phone contracts a lot.
--
Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Wim Lewis wrote:

In article q6f6k.61015$Ni1.7141@trnddc01, Al wrote:
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

They're not really denying you access; they're just no longer running a
USENET server as part of their ISP business any more. You can still get
to those groups ... you'll just have to pay someone else for usenet
access. (Or get it for free from, say, aioe.org, or use google's lame web
interface, etc.)

As such I don't think this is something for the law to be involved in.
Verizon's decided to drop part of their service, but there's room in
the world for crappy ISPs alongside the good ones.

If Verizon decided to start blocking access to other companies' news
servers, or forge reset packets, etc., the way Comcast (allegedly?)
does, then you'd have something to write your representatives about.

You might be able to get out of any contract you have with them, on
the basis they've changed the service without renegotiating...
people seem to do that for cell-phone contracts a lot.

He'd better review all the fine print in his contracts, updates,
references to disclaimers, and consider that those high powered lawyers
have an interpretation somewhere that lets them do this and almost
anything else without recourse to the user.

--
Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1