These

May 3, 2001 9:08 PM

These are the coolest people ever. I have been using them for newsreading for about a year now; today my pc got fried, got a new hd and all, I've lost my login/pass, asked them again and got a prompt reply. The service is really good, the severs are fast, faster than att's @home, stuff shows up in matter of minutes. It's things such as these that make you remember, if for a second, that not everything's a part of some big corporate whore-machine.
posted by tiaka (11 comments total)

Btw, to promote further discussion, I use usenet for

alt.movies.kubrick
rec.arts.movies.international
alt.tv.frasier
alt.tv.simpsons
alt.sports.baseball.chicago-cubs

Anyway, the ones I post or read the most, the others ones I just lurk around. You?
posted by tiaka at 9:18 PM on May 3, 2001

Remember when we were told not to use *.de sites for Usenet because it was bad netiquette to waste precious transatlantic bandwidth?
posted by aaron at 9:45 PM on May 3, 2001

alt.thebird (keeps me up on the tin-foil hat crowd)
misc.consumer.frugal-living (useful/extreme)
rec.audio.tubes (more than just EL84's and 12AX7's)
alt.fan.swear-words (my favorite NG, even though traffic is thin)
posted by dfowler at 9:46 PM on May 3, 2001

Did they ever resolve the problem with spam in Usenet? That's what killed it for me.
posted by ZachsMind at 9:57 PM on May 3, 2001

tiaka! Where were your backups? I am glad they were helpful to you, but what happened to people backing up their hard drives?

I would also like to request you save your files with alarming regularity. You can crash at anytime.
posted by thirteen at 10:17 PM on May 3, 2001

Lots of servers have effective spam-cancellation. Depends on whom you use (e.g. some large commercial-type ISPs -- like telcos -- let it all through). If your ISP gets a clean feed, there's very little spam at all. Also, there's tons more spam in alt.* in any event. Most of the groups I frequent:

alt.fan.james-bond
alt.folklore.urban
sci.space.shuttle
sci.space.station

are pretty much spam-free. (Though AFU was under attack by some alt.syntax.tactical morons for a couple of recent weeks, that was remedied by finally getting the news server they were abusing re-secured.)
posted by dhartung at 10:20 PM on May 3, 2001

There's a name from the past...

ULs about humane ways to kill your cat, by any chance?
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 10:42 PM on May 3, 2001

I remember when the alt.syntax.tactical folks attacked the-group-that-shall-not-be-named. I had never seen anything quite so ugly happen online before. "jerks"!
posted by sudama at 1:14 AM on May 4, 2001

aaron: Remember when we were told not to use *.de sites for Usenet because it was bad netiquette to waste precious transatlantic bandwidth?

Some of us still have to worry. The University of Cambridge pays per Mb for its transatlantic traffic, so us students are all sternly warned to keep usage down, schedule downloads for off-peak hours, use local web-caches, etc.
But of course, *.de is practically local rate for me! :-) Thanks, tiaka!
posted by chrismear at 4:47 AM on May 4, 2001

Same in Oxford, where the glorious routing policy (one transatlantic line with TeleGlobe) also means that London-based Exodus servers are reached via the US. Oh, glorious proxies.

It's basically the German presence on tech newsgroups that keeps them sane these days.
posted by holgate at 7:27 AM on May 4, 2001

No binaries?!?! How will I be able to view alt.sex.pictures.goats?
posted by starvingartist at 7:33 AM on May 4, 2001