From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 27 10:50:04 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DCFD43C2 for ; Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:50:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from quartz@sneakertech.com) Received: from relay03.pair.com (relay03.pair.com [209.68.5.17]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 85F0CE55 for ; Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:50:04 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 84116 invoked by uid 0); 27 Mar 2013 10:49:57 -0000 Received: from 173.48.104.62 (HELO ?10.2.2.1?) (173.48.104.62) by relay03.pair.com with SMTP; 27 Mar 2013 10:49:57 -0000 X-pair-Authenticated: 173.48.104.62 Message-ID: <5152CED5.20005@sneakertech.com> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 06:49:57 -0400 From: Quartz User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Matthias Apitz Subject: Re: OT: The future of USENET? References: <20130327094925.GA2867@tinyCurrent> In-Reply-To: <20130327094925.GA2867@tinyCurrent> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:50:04 -0000 >Is USENET coming to its end? Yes, for better or worse. It's been a slow downward spiral since the late 90's. I can't speak for other countries, but in the US the majority of ISPs started dropping access as a cost cutting measure since your average layman didn't really understand or use it. Younger generations in turn never knew it existed and ended up reinventing most of the functionality with web forums. Not helping matters is that, due to a couple isolated cases, the news media ignorantly view usenet as a haven for child porn and pirate movies, so there's increasing clamor to shut it down. There were a few 3rd party companies here and there that offered dedicated access, but most of them have closed up shop by this point due to social/political pressure. ______________________________________ it has a certain smooth-brained appeal