Sad news. News.Individual.NET will discontinue service from September 2027

I don't know if you noticed, but in some commentariats there are expressions of recognition of what USENET offered, compared to what exists now in social media. This means there are still some people out there, who recognize the concept and keep the idea of it alive.

There is one guy, running a USENET server in his moms basement. It is read-only though. That's just to give you some idea what the lowest form of pond life is, in the USENET chaos-net. Apparently, AIOE (a server that did not require an account to post), it started in a basement, before it moved to a rental COLO.

And USENET has also had a selection of "bridging efforts", where USENET messages appear on web pages.

And even lower forms of pond life existed. One guy running a dialup BBS, wrote software to bridge into USENET. It created a message loop, messages were getting unnecessarily duplicated, and either his peer(s) disconnected him, or he disconnected himself. (A server like E-S might have 60 peers and internet connections from its physical server in Finland.)

The message here, is to some extent USENET is organic. Who knows what it will evolve into.

Extraordinary efforts from some people, keep it alive. There might be one person working on the INN source code. That sort of thing. There is more than one flavour of server, but that's an important flavour. One guy provides "occasional maintenance" for an unmaintained USENET client program. He is retired and doesn't have the energy for constant development work. This is what keeps it alive.

Paul

"The reports of my death are greatly accelerated," To misquote Twain.

We had a bottle of fizzy wine in the fridge for ages, I haven't seen it lately, so I wonder...

On 30 Sep 2025, No mail wrote

I've used eternal-september

It's free, but you have to register with them (can be done online).

Doesn't do binaries -- text groups only.

All three of them, unfortunately along with everyone else could vanish within minutes at quite short notice.

I'm not particularly concerned about simply vanishing in a nuclear holocaust. I'm far more concerned about surviving the initial phase.

I live 8 miles from Aldermaston and 10 from Burghfield, come and join me

The problem with anything free that doesn't get revenue from adverts is that it can disappear with little notice.

Most news services are paid monthly, here is an anomaly:

Block plans have one-off payments which do not expire i.e. you pay again once you have used the allowance. Currently the cheapest is 3USD for 10GB, which goes a long way with text-only groups. Prices have fallen, I last paid £8-ish about three years ago, I think for 10GB. I normally use ES, but during its occasional glitches, I use this account.

Oh, I think you are unduly pessimistic.

TACO, PACO, SACO

Well since nuclear holocausts only exist in the minds of Hollywood and Russian agitators you will probably be OK.

Sorry, typo, 10USD/10GB.

E-S does accept donations ...

Same applies for services *with* adverts, like IMDb's discussion groups. (Fortunately MovieChat [

There have been several occasions in the past when it *nearly* happened for real.

No., it didn't. At best an exchange of nuclear weapons. No such thing as a 'holocaust is really possible...

I use E-S for text groups. It does have the occasional glitch (mainly failing to deliver bodies for headers) and they get sorted out within a day or two.

I use newsdemon for binaries (I collect music from the 1940s and earlier). When I was looking round for a binaries service, newsdemon was promising to better any competitive quote, and if I applied for 1tb of data I could get it very cheaply. That was about 4 years ago and I still have plenty of my 1tb remaining.

It doesn't have as good a completeness percentage as dearer ones, though if I had gone for a dearer one I would by now have paid more for their service than I paid newsdemon, so effectively I see newsdemon as free from now on. Also, the music contributors are very helpful. If I tell them what tracks didn't come through completely they will normally repost them. I have no idea what the other binaries groups are like.

Jim

But is there any succession planning in place?

No need for all that.

A 300kt weapon detonating at 100 miles altitude over the centre of the North Sea will wipe out most of the electronics in the UK, NW Europe, and parts of Scandinavia, especially if the weapon is designed for EMP.

With no electricity, mains water, food, or functioning authority, the subsequent panic and anarchy will do the rest, leaving the infrastructure largely intact.

Bombing airfields is so…1940s…