Important notice for users of Google Groups

[Anton Shepelev]

Hello, all

The corporation of evil continues its crusade
against all good things, including free social me-
dia. It has started banning Usenet groups wholesale
due to the presence of SPAM and other illegal con-
tent. This, of course, is contrary to the very phi-
losophy of Usenet, where each individual decides
what posts and posters to ignore, by adding them to
the proverbial kill-file. Together with the bans,
the huge Usenet archive, owned by Google, is now in
danger. I thought that all I write on Usenet was
there to stay, but no longer. I will be archiving
interesting Usenet posts.

The sensible thing for Google to do would be to ban
individual spammers, based on the numerous (and ap-
paprently ignored) illegal-content reports submitted
though their web-interface or to their (appearently
unchecked) e-mail for complaints. It is a shame they
should employ their superb AI-systems for marketing
purposes instead of detecting SPAM, that it may be
removed like a tumor. But Google prefer to kill the
patient.

Users of Google groups are hereby encouraged to in-
stall a free newsreader and set it up to connect to
Usenet via a free Usenet provider. Free newsreaders
are many and easily findable for all OSes, including
iOS and Android, so I will only mention guidelines
for selecting a quality newsreader:

The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160417105503/http://www.gnksa.org/gnksa.txt

Whereas free servers are somewhat fewer, and I will
mention two of them:

https://www.aioe.org/ (anonymous)
http://www.eternal-september.org/ (with authentification)

For help with installing and configuring a newsread-
er, post to news.software.readers .

See also:

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google:
https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/

Some Usenet groups suspended in Goggle Groups:
https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913?hl=en

An alternative Usenet archive:
https://www.usenetarchives.com

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