Over a decade after
The Year September Never Ended,
AOL cuts off USENET access for its users. Don't hold your breath waiting for the blighted ecosystem to recover, though; pretty much everyone who values signal-to-noise ratios and not receiving megatons of spam has moved to mailing lists, blogs and web-based forums, leaving only marauding gangs of spammers and a hard core of freaky insane radioactive mutant porn pirates too far gone to be saved. Eleven years after September began, a "newsreader" has more to do with RSS feeds than NNTP, and in this cynical, spam-infested interweb, the USENET of the small, polite academic network of old is far too naïve to survive.