Public Address Goodies

John Holley, on Public Address, blogs about how Xtra is terminating access to Usenet, or Internet Newsgroups. It’s a good read.

Xtra, in a massive fit of no clue, spammed the message they are terminating access to all 54,000 newsgroups. Good God you e-mail your own customers with this info, not spam all of Usenet.

My early years on the Internet were mainly in Usenet. Blogs have tended to draw off a lot of the participants with the ability to moderate debates, but for many years Usenet was where all the fun debates happened. I even helped create around half of the nz.* groups and am a moderator for nz.net.announce.

Nowadays I only pop in around once a month to see if anything is being said about me behind my back 🙂

But for a company which turns over billions of dollars it seems very sad to be cutting several hundred of your own customers off from a service which costs not much to maintain (A NNTP server and some admin time).

Also Deborah Hill-Cone makes a second appearance on Public Address (it may be in danger of losing its ‘left’ classification if they keep this up) to talk about reaction to her blog on the freelancing conference.

And finally Tze Ming Mok walks a fine line between “respectful disagreement” with the SST, and “no bagging” it as she criticises their story on crimes by foreigners.