2008-03-06: Usenet provider Giganews Inc. has acquired Usenet provider Supernews from Critical Path Inc.
(press release).
2008-01-29:
A German court denies a music company's (EMI Music Germany) request to make Usenet providers
responsible for the content they distribute:
OLG Düsseldorf verneint Störerhaftung von Usenet-Anbietern.
The court considers the server a "cache provider" which can't check all of the data it stores.
2007-09-12:
Google Groups again has some hiccups, "forgetting" messages:
Google Groups übersieht Neuigkeiten.
According to someone in the comments section of that news item,
articles that were previously removed from public display (via the manual remove option)
are also showing up again.
That person also claims to have replies to his removed Usenet articles deleted as well.
2007-07-13:
An appeals court in Pennsylvania affirms a dismissal
of a lawsuit of Gordon Roy Parker against Google.
2007-06-28:
German provider Individual announces a change in its
handling of cancel and supersede
control messages. Only those control messages coming from either people on a whitelist or
containing a cancel lock header line will be processed on Individual's server.
2007-02-01:
German news magazine Focus has an article in its Focus Online column
about the legal trouble some German Usenet providers are getting into because
of binary groups.
Peter Glaser: Der Kampf um das Usenet.
2007-01-25:
Munich-based German company Aviteo has legal trouble because of German performance rights organization GEMA.
Aviteo's UseNeXT service is a reseller of News-service.com's binary Usenet access.
GEMA claims that Aviteo heavily advertises anonymous access to copyrighted music, software and videos.
Aviteo replies that it always removes content which infringes copyrights once the articles in question are pointed out to them
and that UseNeXT is merely a provider and therefore cannot be made responsible for abuse.
Heise has some background on this (in German):
UseNeXT will Verfügung wegen Urheberrechtsverletzungen nicht hinnehmen [2007-01-25],
GEMA erwirkt einstweilige Verfügung gegen UseNeXT [2007-01-24]
(Engl. translation).
2007-01-23:
Google Groups has updated its Web interface.
The changes were accessible via groups-beta for a while and have now gone live on the main Groups domain as well.
2005-10-02
Sunsite.dk a.k.a. dotsrc.org will reduce its free service providing news access to
newsgroups which are somewhat related to Open Source Software starting October 15th, 2005.
2005-02-14
Das Usenet, der Todesstoß für die Musikindustrie?
„Das Weblog für die DJ und Dance Music Szene“ has learnt about
binary newsgroups and the copyrighted material which is available there.
They struggled with the decision to make this explosive
piece of news available to the general public and finally opted to go for it.
After all, the public has a right to know.
Let's wait and see what gems this investigative journalism blog will come up with next.
My money is on a report about PCs and how they can be used to create perfect copies of
audio CDs.
Yeah, it's scary to live on the bleeding edge.
2005-01-25
AOL Pulls Plug on Newsgroup Service.
AOL, who was deemed responsible by many for the decreased signal-to-noise-ratio on Usenet, has decided to stop
providing a news server.
2000-02-23
Jim Hu: MSN drops newsgroup support.
MSN shuts down its newsgroups and replaces them with message boards.
Supposedly, those boards a "better communication vehicle" than newsgroups.
Archival issues (mostly Google Groups and Deja News)
2001-02-26
Culture clash by Ronda Hauben.
The Google Purchase of the 1995-2001 Usenet Archive And the Online Community.
German version: Fragwürdige Transaktion.
2001-02-12
Discussion in alt.sysadmin.recovery about
Google buying some of Deja's assets. Some people discuss ways to create a public
Usenet archive.
Subject: $*&!ing Deja/Google/Assmonkeys.
Message-ID: xkfofw7lsro.fsf@valdemar.cos.agilent.com.
1997-12-08
Deja News joins antispam war
Deja News adds filters that will remove spam articles and disallow spam to be posted from their site.
External links
Statistics
Google Groups 2 (beta) —
go to one of the newsgroup pages, then click on the more » link next to About:.
You will get statistics on the number of postings per month over the years.