Tuesday, June 26, 2007

the end of an era

since i'm generally known for being blunt anyways i'll get right to the point - comp.virus is gone...

of course, in any practical sense comp.virus has been gone for a good long time, but even after all this time i've kept my newsreader subscribed to the group hoping it would eventually come back... it's finally time to remove the subscription - the group itself was slated for removal on june 25 2007...

i have fond memories of the group - back before i even got on the internet i read comp.virus thanks to an internet<->fidonet gateway... what i found was a place with a lot of knowledgeable people talking about exactly the kind of thing i wanted to read about - viruses... oh sure, there was the fido VIRUS and VIRUS_INFO echos (in fact those still exist, though they're mostly unused now-a-days) but i wanted more...

of course it wasn't long after i found comp.virus that it fell out of use (for reasons that nick fitzgerald has probably explained too many times already) and alt.comp.virus was used as a substitute (which proved interesting for all sorts of reasons)... alt.comp.virus (and the more recent alt.comp.anti-virus) are unmoderated, however, and without that control over the quality of the content most of those knowledgeable folks i was introduced to first in comp.virus and then in alt.comp.virus eventually moved on to less noisy pursuits...

i guess the good old days have been gone for a long time, but the removal of comp.virus is like going back to your old neighborhood and discovering one of your favourite spots has been turned into a parking lot...

oh well, we still have the FAQ i guess...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.anti-malware.info/weblog/2007/06/compvirus-is-officially-dead.html

kurt wismer said...

ummm, yeah... i actually saw that before and considered making a remark about it but frankly, i'm not sure what eddy is up to there... it's pretty clear he copied my text (with some minor but noticeable modifications) since my characteristic misuse of ellipses was left intact, but i can't imagine why...