|
Where newsgroups live. Usenet is
home to over 40,000 of these discussion groups, each dedicated to a specific
topic and each containing a bewildering range of conversations. all of human
life can be found on Usenet, which attracts and repels potential visitors in
more or less equal measure.
Usenet is in effect a vast, distributed
bulletin board system, running mainly on unix machines that
communicate with each other through standard internet protocols, First
devised at the end of the 1970s as a way for computer enthusiasts to share
information, Usenet's early growth was completely independent of the word
wide web, which it predated by over a decade. In recent years, most of
the traffic in the newsgroups has been generated by people with a dial-up
internet connection, who regard it as just another internet service.
This greatly annoys hardcore Usenetters.
Usenet is probably the largest widely available information source
in existence, an extraordinary and daunting resource, but it is in danger of
becoming unusable. The volume of traffic generated by its millions of users,
now measured in multiple gigabytes every day across all the groups,
inevitably includes a high proportion of noise. Spammers proliferate,
often posting their messages to hundreds of groups at a time, and the
quality of debate is reckoned to have declined dramatically. The second big
threat is censorship. although several well-publicised attempts to
remove newsgroups from the feeds of some isps have failed, other have
succeeded because they have been made covertly. Many universities and
colleges now routinely ban some newsgroups, and others are sure to follow. |
