Scoop’s Views

When last Wednesday, October 1, rolled around, online life changed for me. It was the day that Comcast began capping bandwidth at a maximum of 250 gigs per month for each account. While it sounds like a lot, it can be used up very quickly if you buy and download software online, especially large programs, such as office suites, commercial photo and video editing packages, and if you’re involved in beta testing a product with an aggressive patch-and-update policy.

The next morning I woke up, did my normal morning routine, and when my eyes were finally caffeinated and ready to deal with life in the ether, I fired up my computer, downloaded my email, and the first email that caught my eye in the batch of 200 that I downloaded was one from Comcast. It caught my eye because the word “newsgroups” – as in Usenet newsgroups – was in the subject – and said the communications company was delivering a doubly-whammy to customers in October.

On October 1, 2008, Comcast began capping customers’ bandwidth to no more than 250 gigs. This comes about a month or two after Comcast jacked up prices by a few dollars. Charming, huh?

The email Comcast sent on October 2, though, was the double-insult from Comcast. The email indicated the Philadelphia-based company would be dropping Usenet newsgroup access, which allowed a whopping one gig of downloads per month, as of October 25, but even with yet another reduction in overall service, Comcast will not be lowering the price customers pay each month. In fact, two people in the company have told me to expect yet another price hike to be announced after January 1, 2009.

Yes, I love newsgroups. I wrote a column for a newsgroup provided, Newsguy.com, for a few years, called The Political Scoop. I use it regularly, and though I didn’t use Comcrap’s Usenet access for much – what can you really do with one gig of monthly transfer – it was a feature that “added” some kind of value to the outrageous price the company provides.

Why did the word newsgroups catch my eye? It’s not a word that Comcast used very often. In fact, until a year or so ago, if you did a search on the Comcast.net site, it was a term that didn’t return many hits, not even for information about Comcast’s news server login information. In fact, Comcast did so little promotion – or mention – of Usenet newsgroups as a benefit of its monthly pirating of user bank accounts, I doubt that more than 20 percent of Comcast’s customers even knew – before the email sent on October 2, 2008, what newsgroups were, let alone that there a beast known as Usenet lived in the nether regions of the Internet.

Newsgroups are part of Usenet, one of the original components of what evolved from the early 1980s into what we now call the Internet. Usenet is still around but is virtually unknown to many Internet users. If you want to check out the newsgroups – the name given for discussion groups — on Usenet is by using a service, such as Google Groups, AIOE.org, among other free and pay-for-use servers. Doing a search on the newsgroup server will show a listing of all groups related to your search, and a good news server will have at least 60,000 newsgroups in its collection.

There is one important detail to understand when “chatting” in a Usenet newsgroup, as with any other online venue: since you can’t see the other person’s facial expression or the tone of their voice while reading a message, you should use “emoticons” to help others understand when you are joking. A simple misunderstanding may result in a nasty flaming ceremony, which means you’re the recipient of hundreds – or more – of particularly nasty or harsh (or both!) email messages or messages posted to the newsgroup.

On that note, let’s burst the bubble of the younger generation of users on the Internet who believes it’s created the online chat language and shorthand spellings used in texting. The first mention of “emoticons” goes back a long time, all the way to the dark ages (circa November 1982). Read here for more details about the first suggested use of emoticons. A more up-to-date list, which has evolved over the past two decades, can be found at this site. As for shorthand, texting spellings, or whatever you want to call the abbreviated spelling of words, that goes back to the news industry, particularly those fine members of the mainstream media who communicated with their peers in remote locations using old teletype machines. Instead of spelling every word out in-full, they’d abbreviate words, such as L8R when sending the word later.