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posted by martyb on Friday July 29 2016, @05:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-anybody-'list'en? dept.

Gmane is in danger of disappearing. It's an important gateway between mailing lists and usenet. The Gmane sysadmin is apparently getting too many threats, and it has made him ill. Here's his announcement and ensuing discussion.

Is there anyone that could help gmane stay alive?

-- hendrik

Wikipedia summarizes Gmane as follows:

Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.

Alexa reports Gmane has a global rank of 12,037 (up 280).

[At the time of accepting this story, I am getting a 523 error when attempting to reach http://gmane.org/ --Ed.]


Original Submission

Related Stories

Google Groups Ending Support for Usenet in February 2024 11 comments

Google is announcing the end of support for its Usenet client and servers in February 2024. This is a significant turning point because Usenet predates the Internet. Much of the Internet and, later, the WWW, was designed and built around Usenet discussions. That includes Linus Torvalds' now famous announcement about his then hobby, which he asserted at the time would not be big and professional like GNU:

What do I need to do?

If you don't actively engage with Usenet content, you don't need to do anything. Current Usenet users will need to do two things before February 22, 2024 if they want to continue engaging with Usenet content:

  1. Find a new Usenet client. Several free and paid alternatives are available, both web-based and application-based. To find a client, do a web search for "how do I find a usenet text client"
  2. Find a new public Usenet server. The new client you choose will likely have a default server or a set of curated options for you. If not, to find a server, do a web search for "public NNTP servers."

Because Usenet is a distributed system, you do not need to migrate data. All of the Usenet content you can access today on Google Groups should already be synced to the new server you choose. After you select a new client and server, you can reselect the groups you're interested in.

For the time being, you will be able to continue to view and search for the many decades of historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 which Google acquired itself combined with the vast, historically important archives from Deja News.

Usenet remains a distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging network. The news readers contact an NNTP server in a client-server relation but the NNTP servers themselves communicated as peers. One thorn in the side for the powers which be is that it is essentially uncensorable. In the old days it was sufficient to get a floppy or two across the border to complete the circuit via sneakernet. One downside, sometimes humorous, was that propagation delays resulting from the distributed, decentralized nature of the peer-to-peer network meant that sometimes one saw a response hours or days before the original message showed up.

Previously:
(2016) Gmane is Under Threat


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 29 2016, @05:36PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday July 29 2016, @05:36PM (#381624) Journal

    The link in the article goes to comments about the announcement and it wasn't incredibly obvious how to get to the announcement itself.
     
    So, direct link to the announcement here. [ingebrigtsen.no]
     
    The threats appear to be legal, and an ongoing DDOS, if you were wondering like I was.

    • (Score: 2) by n1 on Friday July 29 2016, @05:54PM

      by n1 (993) on Friday July 29 2016, @05:54PM (#381633) Journal

      Noticed that too... I have updated TFS now.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday July 29 2016, @06:21PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Friday July 29 2016, @06:21PM (#381651)

    Why?

    It's an important gateway between mailing lists and usenet.

    I grew up on usenet. Loved it to death. Good people who were actually helpful and didn't call you a newb all the time. I loved cutting and pasting binaries back together to see other people's photos in the days before there were other ways to do it. Got into flamewars on which newsreader was "the best one." (slrn!) Good memories.

    And yet, I ask "why bother?" What's the utility of putting information into usenet anymore? Almost all the interesting features of usenet are performed somewhere else, and generally better. Mailing lists are dying too.

    I don't have a problem recommending we save an archive of the information of a bygone time, but trying to maintain a tool that links one outdated tech to another in a cool way feels like trying to restart a business that made reel to reel tape drive parts for PDP-11's.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Friday July 29 2016, @06:58PM

      by Francis (5544) on Friday July 29 2016, @06:58PM (#381666)

      I think one of the big issues with it now is that it seems like the only access to the usenet these days is through paid directories. Granted, I didn't get online until the late '90s, but I don't think there's much awareness that it exists or what's actually on there and the lack of accessible indexes is a bit of an issue.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Friday July 29 2016, @07:22PM

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Friday July 29 2016, @07:22PM (#381680)

      If it means that such data is kept in a format that works on my old devices, and is in text format, and has figures or pictures that don't take up 80% of the page, and has no native advertising -- or "mobile first" nonsense -- then I'd donate money to keep it.

      Have you tried visiting any tech vendor's help section lately? The ones that have 'modernized' have become challenging to use -- instead of a high page density of information, it's all airy and light with over sized icons instead of actual details. With an integrated search feature that suggests "did you mean -- run the initial setup wizard?" Or ones that show "HOT! Trending topics" for... a KB support library? What? Just give me a searchable index. I dont want the tags or the social integration, I just want to access the fricking manual that wasnt included in the box.

      It may be that gmane dies not because people do not recognize the value as you stated and see no reason for it to continue its existence, but that because the value it has is recognized by those that wish it to be gone for a variety of reasons. DDOS anything enough and it takes someone with good funding to keep it online. People that use it clearly are not complying to the narrative. Knowing how stuff works... that's hacker stuff!

      I am the type that still has Cisco UniverCDs copied onto a file share because it is faster to look through those sometimes... and that Cisco's site is not immune to having links to their own documentation that have since been removed.

      To that extent, I imagine there is real value in a resource like gmane probably could help fund itself if they provided a searchable database of archived threads. It is always valuable for a network engineer like myself to have off-line material, because when you are in a metal vault underground, you might not be able to just 'go online'. Then anyone wanting to help support a client with some far out elderly stuff may have another avenue to pursue to helping fix the problem... or just because it can be cool to read through and see how far we've come.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Friday July 29 2016, @07:30PM

      by Bot (3902) on Friday July 29 2016, @07:30PM (#381686) Journal

      Why USENET? my question is, Why web2.0?

      USENET was based on a clean protocol, which means I could pick the client I liked more, and automate tasks to my liking. No need to beg for API keys, no need to curse when sites alter the user interface, remove features, and so on, no need to execute obfuscated code from 14 sources to load a 1MB page for a 300 word article.
      USENET was distributed and kind of content addressed.
      USENET was almost intentionally snuffed, instead of dying of mere obsolescence. No improvement on the protocol, few ISP maintained decent servers, unimaginative trolls, smelling like the paid kind (one of them was traced down to a telecom company, in one of my fave groups), and the association with illegal material (in fact we all see how snuffing USENET effectively made illegal material unavailable, right? right?) killed it. Dejanews, the archive, went to google, which does not miss a comma on web yet cannot seem to make old usenet articles entirely available), and now Gmane seems actively fought. I guess that for good ol internet experience we need to go gnunet, or ipfs or i2p.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 4, Informative) by number11 on Friday July 29 2016, @08:25PM

        by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 29 2016, @08:25PM (#381710)

        No need to use the past tense. USENET is still there. Some of it is swamped with spam and idiots, but some of it is in remarkable good condition, including a number of computer-related groups. You can get free server access at eternal-september [eternal-september.org] for text groups. Binaries you'll probably have to pay to get access to (I use blocknews [blocknews.net], but there are other vendors.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @09:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @09:47PM (#381756)

        IE6 saved the old internet for the longest time, with it gone you'll have to welcome your Web 2.0 overlords :D

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30 2016, @01:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30 2016, @01:30AM (#381831)

      helpful and didn't call you a newb all the time
      What usenet were you using?! I must have been in very different groups than you.

      What killed it was the eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 29 2016, @06:45PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Friday July 29 2016, @06:45PM (#381660)

    On the one hand, if it is getting threats, I guess it is important. On the other hand, if I have never heard of this technology before, how important is it? It's not like shutting down the DNS system or backbone, or declaring that APIs have copyright protection.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @08:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @08:38PM (#381714)

      > if I have never heard of this technology before, how important is it?

      Do you know the names of every medicine that your older friends and relatives take? What Maraviroc and Elvitegravir are? No? Let me assure you - some of those medicines are VERY important to the people taking them!

      PizzaRollPlinkett you should read this http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm [utep.edu]

  • (Score: 2) by fishybell on Friday July 29 2016, @06:47PM

    by fishybell (3156) on Friday July 29 2016, @06:47PM (#381661)

    Over my dead body

    • (Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Friday July 29 2016, @07:10PM

      by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Friday July 29 2016, @07:10PM (#381673) Journal

      There is a certain symmetry here. The Gnu people insist on pronouncing the 'G' (whereas it is silent in the word gnu), and Gmain claims their 'G' is silent, although by a normal reading in English it should be voiced.

      • (Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:19PM

        by gidds (589) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:19PM (#383210)

        Although the English word 'gnu' was originally pronounced with a silent 'g', I believe that's been changing over the last 60 years — initially under influence from Flanders & Swann's eponymous song [wikipedia.org], and later from the GNU Project.

        --
        [sig redacted]
  • (Score: 2) by pgc on Saturday July 30 2016, @06:22AM

    by pgc (1600) on Saturday July 30 2016, @06:22AM (#381893)

    Why is he getting threats?