Sony cyber shot digital cameras – The pioneers in technology

Bob Larter a écrit :
Jeez, what is it with the amount of spam these days? I've never seen so
much spam in the rec.* & sci.* hierarchies as we've been getting lately.

You should use a server with Cleanfeed and NoCeM installed, the amount
of spam would be really anecdotal.

The real issue here is the lack of action from google groups (previously
dejanews -- a time when abuses where handled correctly) which is more
and more annoying (the spam volume is something around 100,000 spams per
month now)

Peter J Ross a écrit :
Bob is a former news admin, and I'm sure he's capable of using filters
if he wants to. But he wants to solve the problem for other people,
not only for himself, which I suppose is why we're all posting and
reading here.

Well, yes, unfortunately (too) biggest news servers admins never write
(nor probably read) in nanau.

Who cares ? Usenet is just a way to download pirates movies and p0rn for
many ISP - some of them seems to be unaware that _text_ groups also exist.

Binaries are not a problem IMHO (not a problem "as such"), except when
they are the _only_ reason some providers are interested in Usenet:
their admins are then just not interested by preventing spam from their
customers (after all, a spammer _is_ a customer) not to filter anything
(after all, the binary news client just don't care about spams)

ISTM to be an established fact that Google deserves a UDP. But only
small Usenet providers would be interested enough to enforce it.

What is a "big" usenet provider, after all ? "Biggest" news servers are
only anecdotal for text traffic (even if they share petabytes of binaries)

My vision of Usenet's future involves the small Usenet providers
ganging up to exclude the spam-tolerant big providers.

Peter J Ross a écrit :
Stop being so depressed about it.

Not depressed, realistic. OTOH, being realistic over these "binary
providers" can help to find a solution to the problem: what would happen
if those bad servers were banned ?

Usenet is a place where people like you and me can have conversations
not only with each other but also with total strangers who wish to
join in.

Sure, agree. No one has even nearly half of this freedom on online web
forums. Not to mention an important point: online forums (/blogs/..)
disappear very quickly -- usenet is probably there for a century again.

Binaries (and binaries newsgroups) aren't a problem, I agree - unless
one makes the mistake of treating the binaries groups as if they were
an integral part of Usenet, instead of a mere disposable extra.

Yep. On an idealistic world of usenet, binary groups could have been the
support for a "enriched" (excuse the bad English) content ; for example
"attaching" an image to an usenet post that could be optionnally
downloaded, without overloading text-only servers/clients. Well,
probably not for tomorrow

A "big" provider, IMO, is one that offers binaries groups to its
users. But there are plenty of text-only providers (Motzarella,
Albasani and AIOE to name but three) who are kind enough to facilitate
discussion instead of theft.

Well, and they also probable have much more (text) traffic that many
"BIG" commercial ISP, OTOH.

Peter J Ross wrote:
[]
I've been saying for about two years that the small text-only Usenet
providers (such as Motzarella, Albasani, AIOE and Individual.Net)
ought to cut themselves off from the binaries providers and offer only
*real* Usenet, unpolluted by morons, instead.

I think if you /had/ to pay for a text-only news service, it would be the
final blow, and would do nothing to discourage morons.

I think that you /should/ have to pay for a binary service.

David

Bob Larter wrote:
Xavier Roche wrote:
Peter J Ross a écrit :
Stop being so depressed about it.

Not depressed, realistic. OTOH, being realistic over these "binary
providers" can help to find a solution to the problem: what would happen
if those bad servers were banned ?

Or just banned from the text-only newsgroups, which is a much more
achievable proposition.

I'm doing that now with a certain heirarchy that they are spamming
the **** out of. Turns out they were the only ones using it.

#
if ($gr{adult}) {
if ($hdr{Path} =~ /$reject_xpath/) {
$cnt_xpath++;
return reject("Reject X: Path ($&) tm:$run_tm tl:$cnt_xpath
From: $hdr{From} $hdr{Newsgroups} Subject: $hdr{Subject}",
"Reject xpath"); };
};
#

Peter J Ross a écrit :
Not depressed, realistic. OTOH, being realistic over these "binary
providers" can help to find a solution to the problem: what would happen
if those bad servers were banned ?
You and I would no longer have to read posts sent from such servers.

Well, I meant that those servers were not so big, considering their text
part. Unplugging them would probably be totally unnoticeable.

Ugh. Let's not do that.
Usenet is for TEXT ONLY.

Well, otoh you could consider the binary part as optional - a service
that would allow to include binaries within _text_ article

Okay, this is definitely not a mature idea, but who knows ..

I foresee a future where you and I will be running a slimmer, faster,
eaasier version of INN on our desktop machines.

Humm, INN2 can run on very small servers, actually - the only "heavy"
part is the new.daily process, which can take some time depending on the
storage system used.

And the bandwidth required is something like 5KB/s, something that
probably many people can afford.

will be a topic for oldbies to discuss nostalgically, but
news.xavier.cc and news.pjr.bz will be two of the thousands of Usenet
providers who can't easily be shut down by The Man.

Well, why not news.xavier and news.pjr ? Considering the ICANN recent
bad practices, it's only a matter of time to get TLD names without any
restrictions

And spammers won't have a ****ing hope on *our* servers.

Well, yes, but what to do for all newbies using bad servers (and/or
using a famous web interface) ?

Usenet was not intended for newbies only, after all (yes, I remember the
eternal september)

Bob Larter a écrit :
Ditto. It costs serious money to run a full-binaries news server. Any
hobbyist with a clue & a fast connection can run a text-only news server.

Agree - peering requirements for binary servers are generally totally
crazy (latency ping within few milliseconds on selected datacenters,
huge bandwidth, balanced peering required, and so on..)

Bob Larter a écrit :
Or just banned from the text-only newsgroups, which is a much more
achievable proposition.

Humm, if only this could be achieved..

Bob Larter a écrit :
The biggest issue is that _many_ people are using google groups -
Too bad for them. Mostly, people posting to technical groups from Google
are either spammers or idiots.

Well, OTOH, people posting to -say- a cooking group are not necessarily
technical folks (and they shouldn't be - at least on the computing side)
; that's too bad that the most "accessible" interface (ie. the famous
web one) is so terrible.

Run some stats on a newsfeed. Google isn't that big a deal, much as
they'd like you to think otherwise.

On my side, during the last 168 hours,
google groups 15% (111265 articles, 4240 spams)
giganews 2%
teranews 0%
newshosting 0%
newsfeeds 0%
(and many unknown)

That's 15% -- not something you can just ignore. Yes, too bad users can
not use a better service, I agree at 100.00%

Xavier Roche wrote:
Bob Larter a écrit :
The biggest issue is that _many_ people are using google groups -
Too bad for them. Mostly, people posting to technical groups from Google
are either spammers or idiots.

Well, OTOH, people posting to -say- a cooking group are not necessarily
technical folks (and they shouldn't be - at least on the computing side)
; that's too bad that the most "accessible" interface (ie. the famous
web one) is so terrible.

Run some stats on a newsfeed. Google isn't that big a deal, much as
they'd like you to think otherwise.

On my side, during the last 168 hours,
google groups 15% (111265 articles, 4240 spams)
giganews 2%
teranews 0%
newshosting 0%
newsfeeds 0%
(and many unknown)

That's 15% -- not something you can just ignore. Yes, too bad users can
not use a better service, I agree at 100.00%

How is "spam" defined here? EMP, NoCeM cancels or what? And what are
you using to do this? It would be nice if cleanfeed could output
stats like that.