[ih] distributed network control: Usenet

[John Levine]

It appears that Dan Cross via Internet-history <crossd at gmail.com> said:
>It's still there, still works, and perhaps amazingly, still has some
>traffic.

Yup.  If you post something to comp.compilers, I'm still the moderator.  There's
a fair number of groups with interesting traffic like comp.arch (computer architecture)
and uk.railway (train spotter anoraks.)


>The spammers have not entirely vacated the place, but have been greatly
>attenuated; one suspects largely because it's no longer as tempting a
>target as when it was in its prime.

The structure of usenet has changed a lot.  Now there is a handful of extremely
large usenet nodes like Giganews that carry everything, and a lot of small nodes
like mine that only carry the newsgroups of interest to the users at the site.
The vast majority of traffic at the large nodes is in alt.binaries.* which is
what you'd expect it to be.

R's,
John