Usenet Quotes

If I may, I’d like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg’s parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn’t exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him.

The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums. It became known as “Usenet,” and the categories of postings on it were called “newsgroups.

Mensagem postada na Usenet, 21 de agosto de 1994:   Start-up com bom capital busca programadores de C/C++/Unix muito talentosos para projeto pioneiro de comércio pela internet. É necessário ter experiência em projetar e desenvolver sistemas grandes e complexos (que possam ser atualizados) e ser capaz de fazer isso em um terço do tempo considerado possível. Exigimos bacharelado, mestrado ou Ph.D. em ciência da computação ou formação equivalente. Grande facilidade de comunicação é essencial. É desejável, mas não imprescindível, ter familiaridade com servidores de Web e HTML. Esperamos trabalhar com pessoas talentosas, motivadas, apaixonadas e interessantes que tenham disponibilidade para se mudar para Seattle (ajudaremos com os custos da mudança). Oferecemos uma participação significativa nas ações da empresa. Enviar currículo e carta de apresentação para Jeff Bezos. Endereço: Cadabra Inc. 10.704 N.E. 28th St., Bellevue, WA 98004 Oferecemos as mesmas oportunidades para todos.

Usenet bulletin-board posting, August 21, 1994: Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary. Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers. Must be willing to relocate to the Seattle area (we will help cover moving costs). Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. Send resume and cover letter to Jeff Bezos.

In its quest to organize the world’s information, Google has scoured vast troves of data to amass the greatest accumulation of information assets on the planet, including the billions of search queries on google.com and YouTube and the billions of interactions on Android, the dominant operating system for most mobile devices. Google also controls an ever-growing index of the world’s websites and the browsing history of more than 2 billion users, three types of maps of the Earth’s surface and traffic patterns, a real-time list of trending topics, the largest archive of discussions in Usenet groups, the entire contents of 20 million books, a huge collection of photographs, the largest collection of video on the planet, the largest online email repository, even the largest archive of DNA data.

alt.sex.stories The newsgroup quickly became one of the most popular text-based newsgroups (i.e. not intended for posting binary files) on Usenet. Amateur writers of all sorts began posting fictional “erotic stories” and finding a worldwide audience for their work. However, because of the very nature of unmoderated newsgroups, alt.sex.stories soon found itself a repository for a great number of poorly-written, sometimes barely coherent “stroke” stories consisting of a few sentences or paragraphs. The average quality of the stories posted to the newsgroup seemed somewhat lower and more crude than the stories seen in pornographic magazines and books, and this state of affairs continues to the current day.[citation needed] Yes, the “stroke” stories certainly undermined the credibility of the newsgroup that had produced stories such as “Balling Lil’ Sis,” “Showtime - Part 6 Featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt and a Vanna White Lookalike,” and “Alex and Brian,” which features the immortal sentence “‘Shhhhhhh, if you do as i say you wont get this!’ he said as he pulled out a 12 inch dildo with the name ‘MegaMan’ on it.

In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet.

The entire life cycle of Usenet’s rise and fall serves as a cautionary tale for when networked products hit scale—they suffer from the combined anti-network effects of spam, trolling and other bad behaviors, and most important, context collapse. These provide a strong natural counterbalance to the viral growth and engagement loops that make the network stronger, ultimately canceling these positive forces out. Given enough time, and left untreated, they can collapse the network entirely.

For all intents and purposes, Tor is like a cloak of invisibility that shields you from the sight of all onlookers, unless you have accidentally ripped a hole in the cloak (i.e. turned on javascript). If you are thinking, "Wow, it might be cool to run BitTorrent through Tor so I won't get sued". A nice goal, except BitTorrent devs aren't falling over themselves to implement this feature with Tor, and the Tor network can't really handle the bandwidth anyway. You'll just make everyone else miserable by downloading those 720p Blu-Ray rips you can easily get from Usenet (and with SSL, you're not likely to get sued.)

To be clear, 83 per cent of images in the porn image section of Usenet were pornographic. That means 17 per cent of the images in the porn groups were not pornographic, and I’m sorry, that is far more intriguing. What were they? Cats? Birthday cakes?