Reminder: USENET abatement 12/31/08

Hi:

This is a reminder that the campus USENET service will be terminated on
(or shortly after) December 31, 2008. Please read the message below for
more information. If you have already read the message, you may want to
re-read it for entertainment/insomnia-mitigating purposes.

michael

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: USENET abatement 12/31/08
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:27:01 -0700
To: Micronet-UCB microcomputer support user group
<micronet-list_at_lists.berkeley.edu>

Hi,

As a preface for this email, please note that I was hired by then
Communication and Network Services 9 years ago to manage the USENET
service. It is therefore with mixed feelings that I announce its
proposed abatement on December 31, 2008.

Over the last several years, usage of USENET has been sharply reduced,
both on campus and in the general Internet. Many Universities similar
to UCB have retired their USENET services, including such former USENET
stalwarts as the Univeristy of Oregon, University of Michigan, and most
recently, the University of Washington. Perhaps most tellingly, Duke
University, one of the inventors of USENET, is in the process of abating
its service. There are many others as well.

At UCB, USENET usage recently been largely serving the ucb.class.*
groups, particularly in the EECS division. I have already been in
discussions with the EECS Instructional group about alternatives, such
as bSpace. Other groups can now be accessed using a free service, such
as Google Groups or a fee-based service, such as Supernews
(http://supernews.com).

As readership has declined and alternatives have become available, the
resources devoted to USENET administration have necessarily declined.
The hardware running the service is getting old, especially for a
service that requires constant disk activity. A complete hardware
refresh of the current system, including labor and materials, would cost
well into the 5-figure range, and ongoing maintenance costs would have
to be factored in. Given current readership load, it is not fiscally
smart to move ahead with a refresh.

In addition, recent actions by state attorneys general, most notably in
New York, have prompted a number of large ISPs to shut down their USENET
services due to concerns over child pornography/exploitation-related
postings. The California Attorney General has also asked ISPs and
entities doing business in California to follow similar rules. Although
it is possible to run a USENET service while taking steps to prevent
such illegal postings, it presents additional costs for running the service.

At UCB, we will continue to operate the USENET service on a best effort
basis until December 31, 2008. No abatement date is ever really set in
stone, but I would like to shut down the system at some time very close
to that date. There will be some minor maintenance done to the system
in the coming weeks to ensure that it can reliably work through the
semester.

USENET is one of the oldest protocols on the Internet, predating the
development of the Internet Protocol. (It originally ran over UUCP.)
With the linking of AOL to USENET in 1993, a massive influx of new users
changed USENET (for better or worse, depending on your viewpoint).
Ironically, AOL was one of the first major service providers to abandon
USENET, in 2005. It's not easy to say goodbye to a venerable
institution, but it is unfortunately time that we did so.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

michael

 
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Received on Thu Dec 18 2008 - 16:37:23 PST