Neither approach sounds likely. Supernews, our brightest hope, wasn't
able to survive financially.

A UDP will not work against Google.

I don't think removing spam is sufficient to reverse that trend.

So what do you propose?

ITYM - Killfiles are your friend.

Google does not care...contrary to what certain Google shills will
tell you.

A UDP will not work against Google.

Usenet is dying, and one of the reasons for that is spam.

I believe that it's necessary to stop the spam in order for
Usenet to survive much longer. Some of the groups that I
read have been almost completely overrun by Google-sourced
spam.

K. A. Cannon <kcannon@insurgent.orgy> writes:

A UDP will not work against Google.

If giganews no longer accepts peer NNTP connections from google, that
will slow down spam. If they block all posts with a googlegroups, it
will help even more.

And if more peers do the same, it will make a difference. In theory.

On the otherside, giganews just bought supernews (wich excellent spam
filtering), and rumor has it that they fired all of the people from
supernews. So "supernews" service is going downhill. It's sad. I don't
expect giganews to respond to user concerns. They need to see their
income impacted.

Perhaps there is a market for a USENET providor that blocks spam, and
the simplist way is to block posts with a googlegroups message ID.

Perhaps people would support such a service with their checkbook.
On the other hand, it's trivial for an end user to do the same thing.

So for UDP to work, we would either need to get the NNTP peers to take
action (the only admin I recall who was active in public forums is
Andrew from Supernews.) Or to motivate the NNTP peers with money for
superior service.

Neither approach sounds likely. Supernews, our brightest hope, wasn't
able to survive financially.

I see...so punish all the alginate Google Gropes users because a few
idiot spammers are abusing the Google systems.

In article<86prsozox8.fsf@localhost.localdomain>,
Maxwell Lol<nospam@com.invalid> wrote:

Neither approach sounds likely. Supernews, our brightest hope, wasn't
able to survive financially.

I think this may be an interesting chicken-and-egg problem.

Usenet is dying, and one of the reasons for that is spam.
I believe that it's necessary to stop the spam in order for
Usenet to survive much longer. Some of the groups that I
read have been almost completely overrun by Google-sourced
spam.

K. A. Cannon <kcannon@insurgent.orgy> writes:

A UDP will not work against Google.

If giganews no longer accepts peer NNTP connections from google, that
will slow down spam. If they block all posts with a googlegroups, it
will help even more.

And if more peers do the same, it will make a difference. In theory.

On the otherside, giganews just bought supernews (wich excellent spam
filtering), and rumor has it that they fired all of the people from
supernews. So "supernews" service is going downhill. It's sad. I don't
expect giganews to respond to user concerns. They need to see their
income impacted.

Perhaps there is a market for a USENET providor that blocks spam, and
the simplist way is to block posts with a googlegroups message ID.

Perhaps people would support such a service with their checkbook.
On the other hand, it's trivial for an end user to do the same thing.

- Google won't do anything to stop its spam

- We will continue to have both content and spam from Google

Unfortunately, spam is often defined on a per-newsgroup basis
these days rather than being scattershot. My off-the-cuff
line of thinking right now is an admin-sanctioned cancelbot
that learns based on the feedback it gets from users.
Let's say, for example, that you could forward spam to
rec-gambling-poker@example.net, and the cancelbot would use
that for learning what is and isn't spam on rec.gambling.poker.

Insert lots of handwaving here, since I admittedly don't know
what technology already exists and I haven't really thought this
through. Plus, it's before noon and my brain doesn't work well
in the morning.

I see...so punish all the alginate Google Gropes users because a few
idiot spammers are abusing the Google systems.

Spammers abuse anything they can get away with.

An alternative view is:
... because google isn't doing enough to prevent spam
from their systems.

Patti Beadles wrote:

- Google won't do anything to stop its spam

That's not really true. Google does take action on spam complaints.
You could argue that they don't do _enough_ but for them it's a business
decision. The more they do, the more it costs.

- We will continue to have both content and spam from Google

Yes, and there are at least two reasons for this.

By the nature of its design, Google is an anonymous service. It's easy
to get a Google account, and thus it's easy to use it in inappropriate
ways. The alternative is to make it difficult to get a Google account.

This changes the nature of the offering in a very basic way. Lots of
people take advantage of the ability to easily get a Google email
address, use it for a specific purpose, and discard it when no longer
needed. Some of those people cause problems, but to punish them, one
must punish the legitimate users too.