Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c

by gslin • 3 years ago

112 75 3 years ago

groups.google.com

baz00• 3 years ago

Google stewardship in action.

Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?

stefanos82• 3 years ago

Oh how I wish this to become true!

tgv• 3 years ago

Technically it's simple, but I don't think anyone is willing to pay for the required infrastructure. Nor is it going to be used a lot.

Y_Y• 3 years ago

I'd like to hear someone explain how simple and how expensive. I think there would be quite a lot of interest, at the right price point.

davikr• 3 years ago

Usenet is still pretty alive for warez, and people pay providers for access.

praptak• 3 years ago

No. I mean technically yes but this wouldn't solve the actual problem: mass human communication at scale.

Usenet was a decent shot at this problem but it lost to other solutions. Yes, all the current solutions are pretty bad but they aren't worse than Usenet. In particular Usenet had zero spam protection, Google stewardship or not.

fmajid2• 3 years ago

I’m old enough to remember the original Canter and Siegel spam, and yes, it was on Usenet. What amazes me is that in 2023 people still launch social networks where spam prevention is not at the center.

BruceEel• 3 years ago

Please yes. And while we are it, bring back Deja News too!

jk_i_am_a_robot• 3 years ago

"Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?"

No. Any group that doesn't have some kind of pre-post vetting idiom is going to have spam and abuse problems.

This wasn't always the case and I can't pinpoint exactly when the change happened or what it was.

jghn• 3 years ago

I'd suggest Canter & Siegel in 1994.

NelsonMinar2• 3 years ago

The "Usenet" you remember has been gone for years. Usenet to most people now means a place to download unlicensed videos with a remarkably byzantine and inefficient encoding and obfuscation system.

jmclnx3• 3 years ago

Google Groups is not USENET, it is irrelevant as far as USENET goes. Google Groups only access USENET.

Do a search for Free USENET and many will come up with instructions how to access without Google Groups.

dkjaudyeqooe• 3 years ago

Did something go wrong here? This spam doesn't look hard to filter.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

I think it's more that they let it through. Google doesn't care. This is just a cost center for them.

dimitrios1• 3 years ago

Google cares in as much as it helps facilitate free labor for open source projects they heavily use themselves. I would venture to guess if its critical software to google that google group is going to be nice and tidy and free of spam.

PhasmaFelis2• 3 years ago

I honestly didn't know anyone still actively used Usenet. I thought Google Groups was quite valuable as a tool for reading historical data from decades past, now that most ISPs don't include Usenet access. I wouldn't have expected spam blocking.

bsima• 3 years ago

Hasn’t this been the case for years? Or did something change with Usenet/Google groups recently?

Sharlin• 3 years ago

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason there was eg. comp.lang.c++.moderated already like twenty years ago.

bingemaker2• 3 years ago

Agreed

bingemaker2• 3 years ago

Moderated ones are just a bit better

DamonHD2• 3 years ago

I note that comp.lang.java and comp.arch (which I used to follow avidly back in dialup/uucp days) that I tried at random seem largely to be fine at a glance.

Edit: the good old days: some of these nodes were mine! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/c/NxwZMYqBUjw/m/T...

taviso• 3 years ago

The group selection the spammers target seems really strange, alt.comp.freeware is another example.

Not sure I understand what they're trying to achieve.

(I tried to raise the issue internally, fwiw).

bombcar• 3 years ago

Spammers make more sense when you realize that professional spammers sell their services to idiots who don’t know or care what actually gets sent out.

deodar• 3 years ago

This may be due to moderator inaction.

I moderate an Apache project mailing list and the amount of spam it receives on on some days is silly. However thanks to the good work done by the ASF infra team it takes very little effort from ML moderators to keep the spam from reaching subscribers.

skrause• 3 years ago

Usenet works differently.

Moderated groups are their own category and quite rare. Every post to them has to be pre-approved.

The large majority of groups (including comp.lang.c) are unmoderated. "Moderator inaction" isn't a thing here because moderation isn't even technically possible.

folmar• 3 years ago

A few groups will run a cancel-bot on most blatant spam though, which is a slightly practical solution although not quite in the spirit of Usenet. And acceptance of cancel messages downstream will vary a lot.

PhasmaFelis2• 3 years ago

Now full of spam? Hasn't Usenet been thoroughly clogged for 20 years?

DamonHD2• 3 years ago

Nearer 30 years!

jmclnx3• 3 years ago

But if you are using a real newsreader, it is rather easy to avoid the spam from google groups. Google is the source of 99+% of the spam.

NelsonMinar2• 3 years ago

Every year Google Groups still exists as a product I'm a little more astonished. It's been years and years since the company cared enough about it to put any effort into it. The data degrades every year, it gets spammed, the Usenet portion of it makes no sense vs. the mailing list portion. And yet it persists.

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

I've read somewhere that Google extensively uses mailing lists internally. They’re probably using the same codebase for their internal mailing lists, and the storage costs effectively nothing to them.

n0zmer• 3 years ago

Googler here. You are correct. Internally google groups are the easiest way to create adhoc project groups and support / announce lists. We have everything from music related lists, to stuff like vim/emacs user groups

placesalt• 3 years ago

A piece of software I use has google groups as the main interaction point among users & between users and the dev. It works quite well.

rewmie• 3 years ago

And yet it persists.

That's a great point, and I would add that when Google launched Google Groups, there was this widespread concern that Google would abuse it to kill Usenet and force users to switch to its own walled garden.

Since then, Google already tried and failed to launch a couple of social networks, but Usenet is still around.

tlarkworthy• 3 years ago

Google groups works fine for internal groups. It's used to group users for gsuite and Google cloud administration. Its an essential IAM building block.

Public groups is just one aspect google groups, probably not the most important use case.

jmclnx3• 3 years ago

If using tin, just add this to file "~/.tin/filter". That turns off all posts from google-groups.

No blank lines, I added blank lines to avoid HN line wrap.

group=*

case=0

score=kill

msgid_last=*<*@googlegroups.com>*

Izkata• 3 years ago

Blank lines separate paragraphs, they don't create blank lines. But also, indent with 2 spaces for code formatting: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Etheryte• 3 years ago

The sad thing is, clearly Google already has the tools to solve this problem, they deal with spam on a massive scale in Gmail and using the same approaches here should be fairly straightforward.

passion__desire• 3 years ago

For that to happen, someone inside Google has to care.

magicalhippo2• 3 years ago

I really, really miss newsgroups.

HN has some of the flavor of discussing technical stuff with experts and amateurs chiming in. But everything here is geared towards news, so the longer, deeper discussions are missing.

Perhaps I'm just getting old though.

nunodonato• 3 years ago

I think newsgroups would struggle to survive and be useful if they would get a massive wide adoption like social networks do. It would just be impossible to filter out useful stuff and avoid spam. They worked ages ago because the internet was a smaller place, and they still work today because the number of people who use them has not increased by much (sorry, no source to back that up)

demondemidi2• 3 years ago

It’s not that much different. I was on Usenet from the late 80s till the web ate it. It was more like stack exchange and Reddit. But with far far fewer people involved. abpe was the best place for porn. Slash fiction was coming of age. Memes didn’t quite exist yet because posting images was not a thing. It the egos and attitudes were the same.

magicalhippo2• 3 years ago

A big difference was that everyone got everything on a group, and it was much more async than current alternatives.

You could spend a day working on a reply, and people would get it next time they downloaded messages.

Everything now seems to focus on "the now", incentivizing fast replies and new content.

Though, as the other responder mentions, it certainly would struggle with "web scale" amount of participants.

sn_master• 3 years ago

Probably because it's a good way to avoid spam filters in emails I guess, since the group posts would come straight from Google?

fnfjfk• 3 years ago

A lot of the spam is trying to sell really illegal drugs like LSD, I went to their website (won't link but obviously you can find it easily) and their checkout process for buying a bunch of LSD takes PayPal and Google Pay. They also have a $150 minimum, lol...

...is this "legit", besides the whole illegal drugs thing? Selling drugs with PayPal, on a .com? I remember people doing it with Bitcoin and Tor but this is very in the open. They do also take Bitcoin.

or is this entirely a scam? But if so why would they take PayPal which has buyer protection, although I don't know how PayPal responds to someone complaining "they scammed me and didn't send my illegal drugs".

w1nst0nsm1th• 3 years ago

It's not a scam.

No way Paypal or GooglePay would allow such a thing longer than a few hours, just enough for their own crawling engine, intented to automate verification of compliance to their policies, to ring the alarm bell on the screen of a human operator.

No way also a scammer would be dumb enough to use such services which require extensive verification process, with ID, proof of incorporation and so on...

It's just FBI, DEA or whatever, 'sting' operations. Like the kind of website where you can buy Red Sulfurous from somewhere in eastern europe countries(for example bellarus), but when you make a Whois of the website, it leads straight to an obscure hosting company located in... California.

The reason they asking minimum $150 (or even more on some website) order is because they want to use it as an argument in court to prove your intentions were to resell it, no matter if it's true or not, in order to force you to take a plea deal and send you in jail for 3-10 years and ruin your life forever.

Why do they do such thing when there is so much real real shit, in every sense of the word, going through mexican border ? Because it allows them to improve their stats on the back of idiots or naive young people who don't know were else to go.

There is a shitload of reports of orther similar false flag operations from US LE regarding 'terrorists', 'sexual predators', and on and on.

Just take a look at https://www.sugardaddy.com/ for example... This site promotes with no other possible interpretation prostitution, while presenting it as something else than prostitution, and while prostitution, to my knowledge, is forbidden everywhere in America. This site has been up for years (I know about it because Bill Maher made a joke about it years ago). The worse is you export your methods to other parts of the world (look at the bottom of the page) (UK, Australia, Canada, where prostitution is forbidden). But funnily enough (do I dare say?) New Zeeland, one of the rare country (if not the only one) were prostition is legal and regulated, is not represented at the bottom of the site.

A few days ago, there was a post here about an article regarding 'testilying' from police officers in court.

It's no wonder so much american people don't trust their government and accumulate tons of gun to defend themself from it... just in case.

There is something rotten in the Kingdom of the United State of America.

uni_rule• 3 years ago

Prostitution is legal in the State of Nevada but is outlawed again specifically for Las Vegas on a local level.

shrubble• 3 years ago

Google doesn't even properly handle emails sent by Google Groups subscribers to a Google Group! I have seen many cases where Gmail spam-tags a post to a group, when the list is closed for posting to any but subscribers...

playingalong• 3 years ago

Separate services which don't propagate information.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

There's something symbolic and fitting about one of the groups that helped build the Internet being eaten by the Internet.

2devnull• 3 years ago

Deja news did so much better than google. It was the first and only lesson I needed about google. Good software is not the business they’re in.

bawolff• 3 years ago

Didn't deja delete a bunch of archives that are now permenantly lost? I think google wins by default here for not destroying history.

Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

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