On Sun, 05 Oct 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, in article
<t9-dnVfu-f9bOXTVnZ2dnUVZ_t2dnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, brigid nelson wrote:
>Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>> Don Freeman <freemand@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> danny burstein wrote:
>>>> (RCN killed internal usenet this week with no warning)
>>> Can that be considered a breach of contract?
>>
>> I'm not sure if it meets the technical definition. Probably the
>> fine print on the contract says they can shut of any and all services
>> at any time and you'd still owe them money for the remainder of the
>> year. But judges and juries tend not to like that kind of one-sided
>> contract.
>>
>> It's probably not worth taking anyone to court,
I suspect this is the case - none the less, you could file a complaint
or comment with your state public utilities commission (or equal)
which has oversight over these providers.
>I'm glad you mention this point. As a comcast customer I am very upset
>that they are offerring fewer services for the same amount of cash. I
>was thinking about giving them a call to see if they were thinking of
>lowering the cost of their service to reflect the decreased amount of
>service.
I also suspect that ISPs like comcast, "at&t", or rcn are expecting
that there won't be enough complaints to matter.
>I've been looking into different ways to access usenet, and both
>Panix and the Giganews 'super-duper special' offer for Comcast
>customers would add about $8 to the internet bill per month. I'm
>thinking that would be a place to start.
You may want to look at an on-going thread in the Usenet newsgroup
news.software.readers with the subject "Need New Newsreader?" which
was started by another comcast subscriber on Friday - go back about
70 articles from "now". The thread has several posts from 'Mike Easter'
and 'Blinky the Shark' ragging each-other, but they list a number of
alternatives - some free, some with minimal costs, as well as a few
other pointers. Another link to look at is
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Usenet/Public_News_Servers/
A lot depends on what you are looking for in Usenet. The "official"
Big-Eight list of newsgroups is actually quite small (from a monthly
posting to news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, news.lists.misc,
there were just 2291 groups in the "Big Eight" hierarchies [comp.*,
humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*]), and
most servers carry far more than that (comcast, which is now using
giganews, carries 4696 groups in those hierarchies), never mind the
alternative hierarchies and everything else (giganews carries 109154
groups last I counted). Are you only interested in 'text' newsgroups?
Do you need 'binary' groups as well? How much traffic? Are there any
special/unusual groups you follow?
>My biggest concern now is how far will this go. Is there some way in
>which 'they' can completely cripple usenet - and how worried should I
>be about this idea.
$ISP says "death of usenet, film at 11" Some think that the days of
Usenet are coming to a close, citing the reduction or elimination of
the "free" service from "your" ISP. Some feel that this is due to
reduced use (ten years ago, two of the groups I was reading each had
more posts than the total of the eighty-one groups I'm now scanning
every day). The agreements of several ISPs and the State Attorney
General of New York may have provided a convenient excuse for some
_other_ ISPs to drop this service which they'll probably suggest is
under-utilized by, or unknown to their customers anyway.
Old guy
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