{OT} Google is bad bad bad

[Guest]

As a frequent poster thru google I've noticed a few "odd" things:

1. Google is slow when either posting new topics or replying to topics.

2. When I post thru google, my email address is more harvested by
spambots (esp. those that contain viruses) than when I post thru my ISP.

3. Google doesn't seem to keep track of "all" posts and / or threads
(either posted thru my ISP or posted thru Google).

Am I the only one that noticed this?

If anyone else is interested, I found another way to post thru acf:

http://www.talkaboutshareware.com/group/alt.comp.freeware/

Thats where I am posting this msg. Posts that I've posted thru Google
already showed up here but haven't shown up thru Google as of this
posting. So far it also seems to hide my email address (we'll see). Only
problem is, their privacy policy which states "We may share the results of
our analysis with advertisers in order to feature the products that will
best serve your needs, but we will not share any of your personally
identifiable information without your prior consent. By registering you
agree that we may occasionally send you promotional materials and site
updates" But then goes on to state "We will not share your registration
information with any third parties. We do not want to waste your time or
annoy you." WHOA!

I'm curious, though, are there any other html / web based usenet servers
(like this or google) ? So far the ones I've come across either require
payment, don't offer a full range of newsgroups (like google) or have a
poor privacy policy (like this site where I am posting from)?

 

[Bob Adkins]

As a frequent poster thru google I've noticed a few "odd" things:

1. Google is slow when either posting new topics or replying to topics.

2. When I post thru google, my email address is more harvested by
spambots (esp. those that contain viruses) than when I post thru my ISP.

3. Google doesn't seem to keep track of "all" posts and / or threads
(either posted thru my ISP or posted thru Google).

Google is not a good way to post to Usenet. Get a good free news reader and
all your woes will disappear. I've never used a web-based news reader, but
it must be painfully slow and weak on features.

My favorite is a virtual tie between 40tude Dialog and Forte' Free Agent.

Bob

Remove "kins" from address to reply.

 

[crapattack]

Google is not a good way to post to Usenet. Get a good free news
reader and all your woes will disappear. I've never used a
web-based news reader, but it must be painfully slow and weak on
features.

My favorite is a virtual tie between 40tude Dialog and Forte' Free
Agent.

Xnews rules.

 

[Meow Mix]

Xnews rules.

I've tried all of the above and found Xnews the best for my needs. 40tude
does have the advantage of being Unicode-enabled, if that matters to you.

BTW, Crappie, charming x-face.

--Mike

 

[Trey Hunner]

Meow Mix said the following on 4/23/2004 4:18 PM:

I've tried all of the above and found Xnews the best for my needs. 40tude
does have the advantage of being Unicode-enabled, if that matters to you.

BTW, Crappie, charming x-face.

You can usually also use an existing mail client (if you use one). I
have been using Mozilla Mail and it has been working fine.

 

[Bob Adkins]

You can usually also use an existing mail client (if you use one). I
have been using Mozilla Mail and it has been working fine.

Agreed. Mozilla is under rated as a news reader.

Bob

Remove "kins" from address to reply.

 

[Phred]

Xnews rules.

Not quite. It may be the heir, but News Xpress is not yet dead! ;-)


Cheers, Phred.

 

[howard schwartz]

Not quite. It may be the heir, but News Xpress is not yet dead! ;-)

Here, here - I still find News Xpress most confortable for me: it can be
configured to easily toggle back and forth between full screen views of article
content, list of articles, and lists of groups --- reminding me of the oldie
goldie days of command line Unix and newsreaders like tin and trn.

As I recall, the author of Xnews was explicit about the features being to his
personal taste, and not to expect a newer better news express.

Alas, my problem is using ANY newsreader with the growing 10s of thousands of
news groups and tendencies of ISPs: Mine subscribes to a commercial outfit
called newsfeeds.com that is supposed to have the disk space to carry ALL the
stuff. My ISP then attempts `batch uploads' from this service for the newgroups
is customers are interested in. Does not work very well, since the post
numbering schemes keep getting messed up between my local ISPs news server and
newsfeeds.com.

Google on the other hand, does not easily allow the basic nice thing most news
readers permit: following a set of `subscribed' newsgroups by keeping track of
what you read and what is new to you, by syncing post ID numbers with a
`newsrc' file.

Are there any news readers that can somehow access the volume of a Google and
still provide this tracking function of a newsrc file? I thought there were
some developments in this direction.

The alternate is to use a mix of public news servers with the groups one wants

 

[MLC]

martedì 27/apr/2004 _howard schwartz_ ha scritto:

Are there any news readers that can somehow access the volume of a Google and
still provide this tracking function of a newsrc file? I thought there were
some developments in this direction.

Maybe it isn't the same thing, but inside Dialog there is a "search in
Google" function, where you have the first eight searching fields as in
Google advanced search page.

Then with the Manager of Message-ID you can import the messages of your
interest into Dialog and apply to them your scoring and actions rules...

 

[Phred]

Not quite. It may be the heir, but News Xpress is not yet dead! ;-)

Here, here - I still find News Xpress most confortable for me: it can be
configured to easily toggle back and forth between full screen views of article
content, list of articles, and lists of groups --- reminding me of the oldie
goldie days of command line Unix and newsreaders like tin and trn.[/QUOTE]

I actually went rn to nn back in Unix days before being obliged to
confront Windows. So, yes, I found/find News Xpress qreat! (The only
downside is that I can't seem to configure it to access more than one
server at a time. I thought I could "fool" it into doing that at one
stage, but it was smarter than me and wiped out my settings for the
original server!

As I recall, the author of Xnews was explicit about the features being to his
personal taste, and not to expect a newer better news express.

Yeah. I was also led to believe that Ken Ng wrote it largely as a Uni
project for his degree over a period of a couple(?) of years. I'm
continually amazed at how one bloke managed to get so much "just
right" and pretty much bug-free in that time. Once he got a job he
moved on and NX was orphaned, or so local legend has it.

Alas, my problem is using ANY newsreader with the growing 10s of thousands of
news groups and tendencies of ISPs: Mine subscribes to a commercial outfit
called newsfeeds.com that is supposed to have the disk space to carry ALL the
stuff. My ISP then attempts `batch uploads' from this service for the newgroups
is customers are interested in. Does not work very well, since the post
numbering schemes keep getting messed up between my local ISPs news server and
newsfeeds.com.

Have you tried the ubiquitous "German server" that so many use these
days? <http://news.individual.net/> It's excellent. Mind you, you
do have to register with them to get access and you have to post with
a valid e-mail address. Also, I'm told they don't carry binary
groups but that isn't of interest to me, so I can't confirm or deny
that aspect.

Google on the other hand, does not easily allow the basic nice thing most news
readers permit: following a set of `subscribed' newsgroups by keeping track of
what you read and what is new to you, by syncing post ID numbers with a
`newsrc' file.

Google is supreme for archival lookups, but it's a real PITA to use
for current "interaction".

Are there any news readers that can somehow access the volume of a Google and
still provide this tracking function of a newsrc file? I thought there were
some developments in this direction.

The alternate is to use a mix of public news servers with the groups one wants

Cheers, Phred.

 

[Sweet Andy Licious]

I actually went rn to nn back in Unix days before being obliged to
confront Windows. So, yes, I found/find News Xpress qreat! (The only
downside is that I can't seem to configure it to access more than one
server at a time. I thought I could "fool" it into doing that at one
stage, but it was smarter than me and wiped out my settings for the
original server!


Yeah. I was also led to believe that Ken Ng wrote it largely as a Uni
project for his degree over a period of a couple(?) of years. I'm
continually amazed at how one bloke managed to get so much "just
right" and pretty much bug-free in that time. Once he got a job he
moved on and NX was orphaned, or so local legend has it.


Have you tried the ubiquitous "German server" that so many use these
days? <http://news.individual.net/> It's excellent. Mind you, you
do have to register with them to get access and you have to post with
a valid e-mail address. Also, I'm told they don't carry binary
groups but that isn't of interest to me, so I can't confirm or deny
that aspect.


Google is supreme for archival lookups, but it's a real PITA to use
for current "interaction".



Cheers, Phred.

news.individual.net is what I'm using. I'd like a link to News Express if I
may, it sounds like something I'd enjoy. Also this Mozilla you're talking
about wouldn't be Thunderbird, would it? Thanks

 

[derelict]

Have you tried the ubiquitous "German server" that so many use these
days? <http://news.individual.net/> It's excellent. Mind you, you
do have to register with them to get access and you have to post with
a valid e-mail address. Also, I'm told they don't carry binary
groups but that isn't of interest to me, so I can't confirm or deny
that aspect.

You can't upload binaries at biggulp but you can download them for free.
The homepage is at <http://www.readfreenews.com/>. Pay special attention
to the ports that each server can use.

Biggulp, the one that carries binaries, is slow and occasionally flaky.
I use it ONLY for binaries. If you're willing to send the guy a little
money (not much, I think it's under $10 for a year) he allows you more
connections and I hear it gets much faster. Since biggulp is so slow I
go to <http://www.usenetbinaries.com> to see what's worth downloading.
That's a pay site, but you can view the image thumbnails for free.

The other two servers - readfreenews and allnews - are text-only,
read-only, and quite snappy. Readfreenews has very good coverage and
retention for the text groups.

I'm in a weird situation at the moment where I have access to an ISP but
not email or news services. Email's no problem, I just use a web-based
service. However individual.net won't let me use my web-based email
address to sign up for news service. So, I use the remailer system to
post. Just for fun I turned this into a Linux programming project, but
there are already some good remailer applications for saner users. Being
a Linux user I've never used any of these myself so I can't say much
about them, but for Windows users there's Private Idaho, Potato, Jack B
Nymble, and Mixmaster. If the pricelessware.org website doesn't have
these, you can find Private Idaho at
<http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/pi.html>. Mixmaster you can easily find
via Google. Potato and Jack B. Nymble can be downloaded at
<http://frogadmin.yi.org/MyDownLoad.html>.

The downside of using remailers is:

- Depending on how many remailers you chain and how fast they are, it
can take up to a day for a post to appear. However it's possible to
trim this to about 3 hours by using only two carefully-chosen
remailers.

- Average reliability is around 85%. However, there are ways to improve
this almost to 100% by posting through multiple paths.

- Trolls and other destructive troublemakers abuse the remailer system
to hide their identities, so some people automatically killfile all
posts coming from remailers.

- remailers are only for posting text messages. Large binaries will be
rejected.

You can also post through mail2news gateways for free using email.
Nowadays many remailers are also mail2news gateways. However, many of
those won't accept incomping mail that isn't encrypted. Also different
ones have different policies on revealing your email address in your
Usenet headers and on allowing you to specify your own From: line. By
using remailers I guarantee that the mail2news gateway doesn't have my
email address in the first place. That way I don't have to worry that a
sudden change of policy will suddenly put it out there for the
spambots.

Being on a Linux system and having written my own remailer scripts, I
couldn't begin to explain how to use the automated Windows tools.
However it's bound to be a whole lot easier to use those tools if you
understand what it is they're doing. If anyone's interested just say
the word and I'll be happy to explain some of the lower-level details.

 

[Tim Weaver]

You can also post through mail2news gateways for free using email.
Nowadays many remailers are also mail2news gateways. However, many
of those won't accept incomping mail that isn't encrypted. Also
different ones have different policies on revealing your email
address in your Usenet headers and on allowing you to specify your
own From: line. By using remailers I guarantee that the mail2news
gateway doesn't have my email address in the first place. That way
I don't have to worry that a sudden change of policy will suddenly
put it out there for the spambots.

You can use Hamster and ArGoSoft Mail Server (both free) to post
directly to mail2news gateways, several at once to ensure the post is
delivered, without having to use remailers to make anon posts.
Technically, this is pseudonymous posting, but the law would have to
move Hell and high water to find out who you are. If you're
interested, I'll try to dig up the page that explains the
configuration.

 

[Phred]

news.individual.net is what I'm using. I'd like a link to News Express if I
may, it sounds like something I'd enjoy. Also this Mozilla you're talking
about wouldn't be Thunderbird, would it? Thanks

I don't know about Mozilla, but for News Xpress go to:
<http://www.malch.com/nxfaq.html>
where you'll find the FAQ and a link to an FTP download for the last
version of NX (v2.01).

There's also a link to a manual, but it's not quite clear to me
whether that's only for the original v1.0 or for the later version.
(Given that web page layout, it certainly looks like it applies
specifically to 1.0.)


Cheers, Phred.