• Re: Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions.

    From llp@21:1/5 to All on Fri Feb 23 20:30:40 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    gof-cut-this-news@cut-this-chmurka.net.invalid (Adam W.) composa la prose suivante:

    In news.admin.peering Indira <indira@ghandi.net> wrote:

    The question to iron out in this thread would be what are the alternative
    web-based no-account Usenet-only search engines for general use which
    are updated and which provide a unique pointer to any given message post?

    Polish part of the Usenet has been archived (not by me) at:

    https://usenet.nereid.pl/

    It's not searchable and not being updated in the real time, but it's
    easily downloadable.

    If my server (news.chmurka.net) knows an article, you can display it by >entering a Message-ID here:

    http://news.chmurka.net/mid.php

    For example:

    http://news.chmurka.net/mid.php?mid=ur8tvu$2kvca$1@paganini.bofh.team

    Nice !

    An other server to display it by Message-Id here:

    http://usenet.ovh/index.php?article=ual

    For example:

    http://usenet.ovh/index.php?article=ual&msgid=ur8tvu$2kvca$1@paganini.bofh.team

    --

    Arrêt du support usenet de GOOGLE GROUPS: utilisez un autre serveur. https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538

    Liste de serveurs offrant un accès gratuit à usenet: http://usenet.ovh/?article=faq_serveur_gratuit

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Indira@21:1/5 to llp on Sat Feb 24 23:56:33 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    llp wrote:

    A valuable search engine that allows you to find out
    if a message is nocemized and to consult the nocem *and* the message.

    Thank you for that valuable addition of Message-ID searches.
    <http://al.howardknight.net/>
    <http://news.chmurka.net/mid.php>
    <http://usenet.ovh/index.php?article=ual>
    <https://www.novabbs.com/SEARCH/search_nocem.php>

    Which adds to the list of message generic web-based searches.
    <https://groups.google.com/g/news.admin.peering> deprecated 22Nov24
    <https://news.admin.peering.narkive.com/>
    <https://pi-dach.dorfdsl.de/rocksolid/search.php>
    <https://www.novabbs.com/computers/thread.php?group=news.admin.peering>
    <https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical>
    <https://usenetarchives.com/>

    And where the additional search you suggested is specific to "NoCeM"
    <Search NoCeM messages for Message-ID>

    Of course, I have absolutely no idea what a "no see em" is, so let me look
    it up so that I can seem like I knew it all along (which I simply do not).
    <https://metager.org/meta/meta.ger3?eingabe=what%20is%20a%20NoCeM%20usenet%20message-id>

    Which resulted in the No See Em FAQ:
    <http://cm.org/faq.html>

    Wow. It's complicated for a mere user. I suspect this is for the admins.
    Is it an A2A (admin to admin) way of removing suspected spams?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Indira@21:1/5 to Scott Dorsey on Sun Feb 25 09:15:09 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    Scott Dorsey wrote:

    You don't have to be an admin to issue nocems, you just have to have admins trust you.

    Your description was so perfectly written that _it_ should be in the FAQ!

    One question, related only to that sentence above (and assuming I had all
    the PGP stuff and the admin trust all set up beforehand)...

    What _software_ is used to send that "nocem cancel request" to all the
    server admins? Is it a simple email? Or a special usenet post. Or what?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Harnden@21:1/5 to Scott Dorsey on Sun Feb 25 17:01:49 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    On 25/02/2024 14:14, Scott Dorsey wrote:
    In article <urelti$tv6$1@rasp.pasdenom.info>,
    Gelato <gelato@.is.invalid> wrote:
    On Sat, 24 Feb 2024 20:33:23 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:

    1995 is not only before Google Groups, it's before Google existed at all. >>> Google the company was founded in 1998. Deja News wasn't acquired by
    Google until 2001. The original spam problems on Usenet didn't have
    anything to do with Google.

    What is hard to understand is the nntp news admins who required a login &
    password were apparently able to control spammers, so why couldn't Google?

    Because Google didn't have actual admins as far as I could tell. I know hundreds of people who have worked for Google and always asked them if they had ever met anyone working for Google Groups and nobody had. The groups-abuse@google.com address seemed to be unmanned.

    Emails to abuse@googlegroups.com bounced with something like 'this group doesn't exist, but if you'd like to create it ...'.

    I think the system
    was just running perhaps with some occasional upkeep of the software but without any actual administration.

    This is Google's SRE in action. You automate away any and all human involvement - because the enigneer's time is better spent elsewhere. If
    the system is stuggling under the load, then automatically spin up extra ressouces - which, for course, is perfect for serving spam.

    And why they didn't change that is
    likely because there wasn't any money in it.
    --scott

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Harry S Robins@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sun Feb 25 22:10:53 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    On Sun, 25 Feb 2024 21:28:00 -0600, Grant Taylor wrote:

    It may very well be management. Google management had a love hate relationship with system administrators, as in they love to hate system administrators. Google got rid of system administrators multiple times.
    Each time they realized the folly of their action and hired systems administrators again. It's a pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth.

    I wouldn't blame Google so much as the spammers themselves, where it may
    have been a single "spam king" for all we know, where I never understood
    what the purpose was since the English-language spam was nearly incomprehensible.

    Is there evidence for it being one small set of spammers software doing
    most of the exponential increase in spam that escalated only a few months
    prior to Google shutting the whole thing down?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Frankie@21:1/5 to noel on Sun Feb 25 22:19:19 2024
    On 25/2/2024, noel wrote:

    Yes, in the last six months, a group of one or two users increased the
    spam volume more than 10,000 times.

    Last month, spam rejects here averaged about thirty thousand a day, for
    past several days since google pulled the plug, spam rejects now average
    only nine hundred a day.

    Thank you for that information which is enlightening because it proves circumstantially that most of the spam was going through Google's servers.

    (we outright blocked googlegroups a long time ago, so the 30K value will likely contain legitimate poster collateral damage, but I doubt that
    number would be in the thousands)

    One time one of those Indian "Hello this is Microsoft Support" calls came
    to me and I played with the guy for a half hour where he even thought I was such a good mark that he was livid when he finally figured it out, saying unprintable words about me and what he was going to do to me (and my
    family).

    I was surprised he was so upset, given what he was trying to do to me.

    With that in mind, I wonder out loud what the mindset is of the one or two spammers who were originating all that spam for reasons unknown, who also
    must have spent a lot of their time & money to get around Google filters.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From immibis@21:1/5 to Nigel Reed on Mon Feb 26 15:47:14 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    On 23/02/24 03:10, Nigel Reed wrote:
    On Fri, 23 Feb 2024 07:26:14 +0530
    Indira <indira@ghandi.net> wrote:

    No longer can you "search before you post" at this URL for this
    newsgroup <https://groups.google.com/g/news.admin.peering>

    "Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions.
    Historical content remains viewable."
    <https://i.postimg.cc/RZkhn6bj/googlegroups.jpg>

    The question to iron out in this thread would be what are the
    alternative web-based no-account Usenet-only search engines for
    general use which are updated and which provide a unique pointer to
    any given message post?


    And the dozen or so remaining news admins breathe a sigh of relief.

    To answer your question, if I had oodles of disk space to create such a service, then I would lol. I can't imagine how much you would need to
    index it all, but since each article has a unique article-id anyway (or should) have, it should be easy to generate a unique pointer to a given message.

    I'm hearing that non-binary Usenet volume is on the order of megabytes
    per day, and some of that is spam you can delete without archiving.
    That's on the order of gigabytes per year. I expect that one of my spare
    hard drives could hold the entire archive since the beginning of time.

    *Binary* Usenet volume might be more like a gigabytes per *minute*. I
    looked at a couple providers' peering requirements; they want you to
    acquire a 10Gbit or 100Gbit dedicated cross-connect in their data
    center. Most providers just resell other providers with a cache layer in
    front, because they don't want to deal with the storage requirements. Internet-based peering is right out.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Wolf Greenblatt@21:1/5 to immibis on Fri Mar 1 00:02:52 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:28:31 +0100, immibis wrote:

    All this actually means is that Google will wait at least 2 weeks before deleting their search archive.

    What I wish Google had done was keep the search archive active, which means adding all the new posts to the search engine, but just disable posting.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Nomen Nescio@21:1/5 to All on Fri Mar 1 10:30:53 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    On 29 Feb 2024, Wolf Greenblatt <wolf@greenblatt.net> posted some news:urrnhs$3mt6d$1@news.samoylyk.net:

    On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:28:31 +0100, immibis wrote:

    All this actually means is that Google will wait at least 2 weeks
    before deleting their search archive.

    What I wish Google had done was keep the search archive active, which
    means adding all the new posts to the search engine, but just disable posting.

    It's not too late to make that suggestion to them.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to wolf@greenblatt.net on Sat Mar 2 22:00:38 2024
    XPost: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, news.software.nntp

    Wolf Greenblatt <wolf@greenblatt.net> wrote:
    People, like you, with a bad attitude, are terrible netizens because they >never think to search for an answer before they post their questions, or >they'd wrongly recommend a bad answer having never ever searched first.

    I'd agree with you only if Google had killed the posting ability, but if >Google kept the incoming feeds being fed into their updated search engine.

    The loss of a good (well, OK) search engine, is something to be sad about.

    It was a useless and totally broken search engine. Nearly a decade ago
    they broke the indices so that you couldn't search effectively by text
    in the body or by author, making it nearly useless. You needed to know
    the message-ID to find any message. Then they broke THAT and you couldn't search by message-ID. Then it was totally useless.

    After the indices were broken, the "advanced groups search page" suddenly disappeared with no explanation, and that's about the point where it
    became clear that they weren't ever going to fix anything.
    --scott

    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)