Happy New Year!

Google Groups is ending support for Usenet to combat spam – BleepingComputer

I signed up for a free Usenet service a while back with the intention of accessing it with Mozilla Thunderbird and see if newsgroups were still useful as a communications medium. After an hour of viewing what has become of Usenet, at least the alt newsgroups, I can very much understand why Google Groups made this decision (strangely enough I thought they stopped supporting Usenet a long time ago but I digress).

Usenet has many of the same problems that email does, with the added bonus of being even more distributed in a “one to many” way of message flow, by design if you think of it as a forum (it is). Usenet’s cracks are too big to patch and smell of rotten spam. There’s better ways to have discussions on the internet now anyway and I just don’t think there’s reason to go back unless everyone wants to content with an overhauled system when they might as well use something like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Firefish, etc).

Usenet was a springboard in the early Internet, but like Gopher, FTP, etc, we’ve evolved passed it.

AI is capable of running entire companies call center scams now.

The source of the image above is here, and yes this is a fax/call center scam site: https://webenvy.io/?page_id=2808

Remember when Mozilla made a web browser? – jwz

I see a possible future where our interaction with data on the internet is through language models exclusively. You will have no choice because your browser will require it and all the open source browsers with poor market share will also not work very well with the new web standards. “WebAI” (let’s just call it that) is on the horizon and right now its looking outright dystopian.

Mozilla pivoting to AI and possibly ditching Firefox? Firefox already has usable forks but what does that really mean for the future whenever everyone is using Chrome (Google) and Edge (Microsoft), content and ad delivery systems with baked in tracking and AI disguised as web browsers?

I think the answer is be aware of this and keep pushing for open source that isn’t tied to a major corporate name.