On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, K9SQG wrote:

Date: 26 Jan 2005 03:32:37 GMT
From: K9SQG
Newsgroups: rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors
Subject: why is AOL eliminating newsgroups

Anybody have the rationale?


There is a fundamental business principle involved. Since the mid 1990s
the big push has been to get people to go to _websites_ and participate in
chatrooms and blogs where four things are important: i) your
contributions can be (and often are) censored (your post will not be seen
if they don't like you and this can be automated), and ii) if you go to a
website, then the advertising will be _in your face_ and that makes them
money, and iii) they own and control everything on that website, and iv)
they can put cookies, tracking cookies, spyware, and even trojans
(directly or indirectly) on your computer.

On newsgroups, the whole mechanism of propagation, posting, reading is
_free_ and very difficult to _control_ (unless the NG is moderated, or
hacked) or monitor. Viewing and/or reading newsgroups: nobody can put a
cookie on your box, you can lurk anytime you want and you can't get a
virus (etc) unless you deliberately and voluntarily download an attached
file on a post (eg. in the binary NGs) or an encrypted part of the text
of the post (eg. warez NGs).

There is enough commercial incentive to "encourage" people to spend less
time on NGs and more on chatroom/blogspace because they can track you,
advertise to you, and collect more information on your behavior (so it
goes into databases and that information is sold and traded in commericial
environments. The govt "spys on" us, too.

AOL is like George Orwell's "Big Brother" (read the book "1984"). You have
to get to (maybe) google.groups.com but even they don't have them all and
sometimes the messages are not propagated as well.

Best is getting a shell unix account and learning half a dozen
unix commands. Its not that hard. I stumbled onto this all about 15 years
ago.

If you are interested, go to http://godos.freeshell.org for more
information on shell accounts. And, links to ISPs and URLs for shell
accounts. Some are free, some are very low cost, some cost much more. I
pay $32.50 per month for mine (I'm not posting from it now, but telnetting
to this domain from my panix shell account) and its worth every penny of
that. A good shell account is a very powerful access to the internet and you
can run executables on their machine. www.panix.com also has terminal
dialup; hackers can't get on your box if you live in an area where you
can use their terminal dialup instead of ppp dialup (or cable, dsl, etc).

You can also go to http://freeshell.org or http://sdf.lonestar.org and
learn more about SDF's ISP capability. They have their own national dialup
now.

w4pon