[GNC] Net News

[John Ralls]

The ISP's view of NNTP is just port 119. Does yours really block it? Try this in Terminal:
  nc -z news.gmane.io 119
It should respond
  Connection to news.gmane.io port 119 [tcp/nntp] succeeded!

Provided that works you should be able to find a news reader program -- Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client used to work for that -- and connect to gmane.

Once upon a time News operated as a store-and-forward service like email and in the early days of the commercial internet (soon after the US Department of Defense handed control over to the Department of Commerce in 1992) and internet service providers became a thing it was common for ISPs to set up News servers alongside their mail servers to participate in that. It didn't take long for the news to be centralized and it was no longer necessary for ISPs to provide it. By the turn of the century the web had taken over the mind share and News withered. Many of the old newsgroups live on as Google Groups, e.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.C and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork

*and*
nc -z -u groups.google.com 119
Connection to groups.google.com port 119 [udp/nntp] succeeded!

So if you want to go full retro, you still can.

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Jul 7, 2020, at 9:11 AM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> 
> I followed the Gmane rabbit hole a bit.
> 
> It seems whomever is the admin is setting up a new server @ news.gmane.io
> 
> They claim they were going to have it up by January, but still no go best I can tell.
> 
> However, it is an NNTP server - a.k.a. Usenet newsgroups.
> 
> Many ISPs have dropped support for NNTP entirely. I know I can’t get it anymore from any local ISP. So it might be up, but I just can’t access it even to see that it is up.
> 
> I’m not sure if it will still somehow interact with mailman or if it is entirely separate.
> 
> Therefore, I won’t remove the reference, but if someone else thinks it best to do so, I certainly won’t complain.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
>> On Jul 7, 2020 w28d189, at 9:54 AM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jul 7, 2020 w28d189, at 9:34 AM, Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> You could always try clicking on the link. You get a pretty clear message 
>>> to the effect that the address blog.gmane.org doesn't resolve.
>>> 
>>> Trying to visit gmane.org gets me (eventually) an error message from 
>>> Cloudflare. www.gmane.org ditto.
>>> 
>>> If Wikipedia is to be believed, the whole shebang was moved to gmane.io 
>>> but is currently newsreader-only access, hence not useful for anyone 
>>> looking for a "web forum" interface. I suggest removing mention of Gmane, 
>>> or at least adding a warning.
>> 
>> Good point. I hadn’t clicked it in some time, and maybe even then it didn’t resolve. I don’t recall.
>> 
>> If it is dead, we should remove the reference.
> 
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