Slashdot Mirror
@Home Cuts Newsgroups Due to DMCA Complaints
hobb writes: "This is interesting... According to a post to athome.announce, Excite@Home is deciding to pull a bunch of newsgroups due to DMCA violations. Sure, the group names listed suggest possible violations, but it seems quite sudden. I wonder who might be pressuring them... The posting reads [...]" The posting is reproduced below. We don't have access to athome.* newsgroups from the outside world, so if any readers are @Home subscribers, feel free to comment...
alt.binaries.playgirl
alt.binaries.penthouse
alt.binaries.movies
alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy
alt.binaries.movies.divx
alt.binaries.movies.purity
alt.binaries.movies.shadowrealm
alt.binaries.movies.shadowrealm.repost
alt.binaries.movies.mirage-mrg
Due to violations of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) the Usenet newsgroups listed below are being discontinued from the Excite@Home news feed.
They are being removed from all of the news servers nationally ASAP.
alt.binaries.hustleralt.binaries.playgirl
alt.binaries.penthouse
alt.binaries.movies
alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy
alt.binaries.movies.divx
alt.binaries.movies.purity
alt.binaries.movies.shadowrealm
alt.binaries.movies.shadowrealm.repost
alt.binaries.movies.mirage-mrg
Whose the bad guy? Not my "the bad guy". Must be your "the bad guy".
;-))
(I think you may have meant "who's", but I can't be sure
Um, yeah. There are tons of other cable companies to choose from where I am. There is Cox and uh, Cox. How about you?
The playboy group sees traffic of close to 100MB a day. Almost all are scans from the playboy magazine. These scans are(mostly) not available on other groups. If the binaries groups crossposted significantly it would bring usenet to it's knees. Alt.binaries groups see so much traffic in a day that it will saturate a T3. What is more these groups are poorly carried on most servers.
If you get Web Hosting Magazine, I have an article in the next issue (July) about the DMCA's effects on ISPs and Hosting Services, and how they should handle DMCA complaints.
(No, I can't post a link to the story. It's a *print* magazine, and that issue isn't out yet. Sorry.)
- Robin
Well no.* means that its a norwegian newsgroup. That means that its filled with people writing norwegian at each other. Unfortunately I'm not very good at norwegian, but I believe the name translates to no.society.health.handicaps.misc. In other words its discussions about various handicap related issues, conducted in norwegian.
Some of the @Home franchises are outside the US, e.g. Rogers@Home. Anybody know how these effected, or understand their legal situation? I was under the impression that @Home franchises have their own local news servers.
Yeah, that's true.
Of course, I have noticed that alt.binaries.* usually means pr0n spam, something that isn't illegal (well, the "spam" part probably is, but otherwise, no).
=)
I don't subscribe to any of the alt.binaries.* groups because I'm living behind an ISDN link and downloading 99% of pr0n vs. 1% of actual content is frustrating. However, for the short while I read sfnet.tiedostot (the local binary group), I noticed a lot of people posted legitimate stuff (strange pictures, screenshots about situations discussed in other groups, and so on) and some did post illegal (copyrighted) stuff. Like all other file sharing mechanisms, it can be used for both.
Of course, in this case, the very group names themselves say that stuff that goes there is probably illegal...
As if the posters of the material won't simply move to another group.
I mean, DOH!
Deleted
Now I just hope they don't touch the MP3 newsgroups :-)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
In my experience, @Home doesn't seem to miss a lot
of posts, but its retention is lousy.
My solution? I run leafnode (a truly kickass piece of software, btw) and decide my own retention times, per group.
// I'm damned if I know what's going on in .shadowrealm, .mirage-mrg, or .purity
They're movie distro groups, or at shadowrealm is. They released their own ms-mp4 codec hack to differentiate themselves from the rest of the DivX scene, the SMR nAVI codec. It's basically the same as DivX only they didn't bother to change M$'s four-cc codes that Gej & crew did. And I'm fairly certain I've seen mirage and purity labelled on some DivX's on IRC at one time or another so they're just other groups vieing for l33t status by trying to put out the best DVD rips and theatre screeners first. Yawn.
I just checked that list against the groups I can see, and so far only the hustler group is gone. I'm using Cox@home, so I suppose that by definition the playgirl group will probably remain.
They'll just move to other underused groups, and continue there... Not a big deal.
Pish-pash! Are you going to deny that it's filled with adultery, murder, incest and more?
It's ever so frightening that there are still people who believe that the bible is a "nice" book. One suspects they have never actually read it word-for-word... or if they have, they simply failed to actually *comprehend* what it says.
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--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
By reading the cover?
You mean, like the Bible, which generally has a pretty innocuous cover, but is filled with all sorts of incest, adultery, child-killing, even genocide?
From a promising start ("In the beginning was the Word...") it pretty quickly degenerates into all sorts of nastiness.
Indeed, the bible is an excellent example of a book that not only shouldn't be judged by its cover, but must actually be read carefully in order to determine its true contents.
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--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
And how did you know which groups had kiddie porn in them?
You must have been viewing them.
Which means you were downloading and looking at kiddie porn.
Which is illegal.
Catch-22.
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--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The idea of "blocking a newsgroup" is appealing only to people with a flawed understanding of how the usenet works. @Home's action will only increase copyright violations.
Newsgroups are not like organizations that can be shutdown. They are not meeting spot that can be closed. A newsgroup is a higher level classification of subject than the normal subject line. That is it.
So "blocking a newsgroup" shouldn't be thought of as "shutting a newsgroup down", but rather removing a classification people can identify messages as. Making it so people can't indicate their post of "dog.jpg" is illegal bestiality by posting it to "alt.binaries.pictures.bestiality" means people looking for dog pictures for school in "alt.binaries.pictures" will end up downloading it.
So what does @homes latest actions do? It makes it so people who want to respect copyright laws won't know that a picture from "alt.binaries.erotic.pictures" violates Hustler's copyright. So now porn websites that get their content from the usenet are more likely to accidentally violate Hustler's copyright!
Ben
Copyright makes for some strange bedfellows, no pun intended. It's okay by @Home management to facilitate the distribution of pictures of four-year-olds being raped, but you can't get pirated copies of Photoshop from their news servers. That sounds really backwards to me.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
...but then again, maybe he enjoys "flaunting" the law himself. You know, grabbing a copy of the Federal Register and Black's Law Dictionary and prancing around the neighborhood like a fancy boy, teasing his neighbors with 'em, and such like.
;)
Well, maybe not
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
While it may not be squid, many isps use cache negines (from cisco etc), and lets not forget about nice services like akamai and ibeam who (at least for educational institutions) will give you a local install at your site for free (and at least with Akamai that includes the 20+ machines that do the caching).
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
they use cache ENGINES too.
Its early.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
Go ahead, and let @Home fold like a cheap camera a few more times, bending over backwards and taking it up the ass from MPAA and RIAA. Then, someone's gonna defame someone else on their newsgroup, and @Home will get sued. They'll certainly try to claim that some act that was passed a few years ago (the name escapes me) exempted ISPs from liability for published content. But I think that by instead excersizing editorial control a succesful argument can be made that @Home has assumed the role of a publisher, like Prodigy did. They can't have it both ways: claim that they're an ISP, a passive conduct, and cannot be liable for content carried on their service, but then turn around and excersize editorial control over the same content.
It's just a matter of time before they get nailed on this.
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>If the binaries groups crossposted significantly it would bring usenet to it's knees.
A crossposted article is only sent once and delivered to multiple groups at the server, in most usenet servers it is only stored once with links in the cross posted directories.
As another current user of shaw at home... what the hell is the address of shaw@homes news server? I've been trying to find this out for a couple days, and can't find it written down anywheres.
Its just news. Shaw's DNS should resolve your server for you:
ping news
alternatively try: 24.2.10.79
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I am currently connected via my @Home cable modem, note that I am using Shaw@Home, and as such the Usenet servers may be different:
/. for giving me more p0rn links to peruse...
All the above NG's are currently visible to me with the exception of
alt.binaries.hustler
It does not exist in my avalible list of groups. While this does not impact my personal life much (my favored NG would be alt.2600, not the p0rn binaries ones)Neverthless, I don't like it...
Of course now I must wonder if I should thank
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Binary newsgroups have had their day; they're no longer needed. They were made way back during the Dark Ages, when there was no World Wide Web, no other place where binary files could be posted. But now we've got the Web. We've got Napster (such as it is). We've got Gnutella(/Bearshare/Limewire). We've got IRC bots. We've got Mojo Nation. Soon we'll have Freenet. We've got all these other ways that files can be transferred, without using as much bandwidth or having to worry about losing chunks of the files in transit.
Let's use those methods, let binary groups fade away, and save bandwidth for more important things--like fragging. :)
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Or you could keep using your cable company for passin' the packets, and use someone else's servers for usenet. It's not really technically feasible for the ISP to block transmission of those groups; they're just going to keep them off their server (which happens to be the one most of their users will use by default).
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fair enough, but as Tackhead very well explained, an ISP that makes that choice will probably trade gain disk space at the cost of bandwidth.
Given the cost of hard disks compared to bandwidth, this may be unwise.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Performance increase due to nearby caching.
I wonder why ISPs don't run stuff like Squid, since last I heard, the WWW was a fairly popular part of the Internet.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
DMCA has a lot more in it than the hideous 1201(a). One of the things that it covers is liability for middlemen, it kinda replaces the old-style "common carrier" rules that used to apply to ISPs. It mostly makes sense from a someone-must-be-accountable point of view, but is a bit unpleasant because it has some guilty-until-proven-innocent thinking in it.
Basically (I'm kinda summarizing and talking out of my ass at the same time, you might want to actually look it up), if you think someone is violating your copyright, and there's some kind of server being use by the offender (in this case, NNTP servers, in other cases, it might be web servers, etc), then instead of going after the actual copyright violator, you can go after the server. Once the copyright owner tells the server owner that a violation is taking place, the server owner has to shut down the content, whether or not the act of copyright violation has actually been verified. If they don't act after being notified of the infringement, then they become liable.
Then once the alleged violator realizes that their web page has been taken down, their usenet post cancelled, etc, they can write to the server owner and say, "No, it ain't copyright violation" and then the server can start serving the content again, but now the alleged violator's ass is on the line. (Presumably, this cannot be done anonymously. The idea is that it should always be clear exactly what party is to blame, should it turn out to be actual infringement.)
Probably what happened in this case is that some porno magazine threated the ISP so the ISP pulled those groups. It's not so much a "DMCA violation" as a regular old-fashioned copyright violation, combined with a DMCA "process."
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yup, same here.. I get 2-3 scans on the NNTP port a day from @home. Not sure why they are so interested in looking for news servers?
If you limited the forums to text only someone would write a utility to convert Base64 encoded text out of messages and binaryize them.
:)
Remember Jurassic Park? Nature finds a way.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Technically, blocking those isn't censorship. It's simply following the law.
Since when are law-following and censorship mutually exclusive? In China, for example, failure to censor is illegal. In the US, look up the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to criticize the government. So, again, censorship was following the law.
Even now, censorship is following the law. The Communications Decency Act, when it was in effect, was a legal censor. Legal censorship is not even always "bad": one could argue (correctly, I think) that anti-child-porn statues are a form of censorship, but I'm inclined to agree that preventing the exploitation of children to young to know what they're doing is worth the limits these laws place on freedom of expression.
--
You think that this is an original idea?
If SlashdotLaw.org sounds cool, you should check out OpenLaw. From what I can see, they're doing pretty much the same thing that our friend the Anonymous Slashdot Troll suggested. They've got links to information and discussion boards for conversing on the details of active lawsuits.
ph33r mY 3lit3 l4w sK1llZ!
[Moderators: Think twice about that "Overrated" option, this post is 100% on-topic.]
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
I beg to differ. My Cable ISP throttles their news feed, whereas giganews allows full bandwidth to their servers. It's faster for me to download from them than from my local ISP server!
Also, most news servers archive the newsgroups for longer than ISPs, or so I've noticed..
And I was hoping the removal of these newsgroups might free up enough space so @Home's news servers could retain postings longer. Thanks goodness for deja.com if you can't always keep up with a newsgroup. @Home's newsgroup rentention is the worst I've ever seen from an ISP.
Go to a McDonald's drive thru, there's a sticker on the window that says something along the lines of 'We reserve the right to not serve individuals if we choose', or something to that effect. basicly says if we don't want to sell it to you, we won't. Which, I can say is probably ok - as long as they're basing it on sound reasons (can't think of any *likely* ones...) - but if its just something like not liking your looks, thats no good.. they do of course probably have the no shoes no shirts etc policy in the 'dining area', but that makes some sense at least.
WTF is that?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
In fact, these newsgroups all appear to claim to contain stuff from one particular company (with the exception of a.b.movies*, which I'm willing to bet does not consist of struggling filmmakers posting their own work to make a name for themselves).
If the "Stolen Sony Stuff Swap-meet" were to spring up, Sony would be right to take a dim view of this, and try to shut it down. IMHO this is the same thing.
Duh..@home is a pay service. This isn't about how you would run a news-server. Here's a clue---scant few people could really care less about how you would run any server.
Yipes i've been trolled.
;(
How sad
You keep using the word "theft".
Don't you think that is a tad perjorative?
Why not say "piracy"?
Why not say "pillage, rape, and plunder"?
Have you not been keeping up with the debate over property ownership vs. information ownership?
Been living in a cave for the past 20 years?
Like it or not, this IS an issue that is important to many Slashdot readers, no matter what side of the fence you are when it comes to copyright law.
> Hell, most of the content on those groups is pr0n site advertising anyway. ... Or so I've been told.
After many hours of careful research I can say that, yes, most of the posts to alt.binaries.* are pr0n-spam.
It was nasty work, but someone had to do it. I'm about to launch my newsreader now, to see whether the situation has changed since last night.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Excite@Home is basically taking the path of least resistance here.
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
I must say.. according to DMCA, this makes perfect sense. It's no stretch to imagine (and verify) that alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.penthouse (or whatever it was) contains pictures scanned out of Penthouse magazine... which is a copyright violation, by no stretch of the imagination. If the copyright holder is suggesting that not carrying this group (easy change for the ISP to make) will cut down on some infringement, then so be it.
We all know that usenet will just adapt and use a different group anyway.
Right, and that's your perogative as a consumer.
As for the IRC server, If you look at the efnet news page (www.efnet.org I think) it was pulled due to continuous DOS attacks against it, I believe (might be wrong).
As it was run 'for fun' and not as a serious offering (you won't find it in your contract anywhere as a service they provide) you can't really whine... legally...
But, of course, as a customer, you can and shoudl take your business elsewhere if @Home no longer provides the service you want.
Personally, if they pulled their whole usenet feed, hypothetically, what would you do? Do your other providers provide the groups yout want? or would you just go to newsfeeds.com and get an account? (I wouldn't, they recently, even though you are allowed 1gb per server per day, changed the deal so you can only connect to one at a a time... I want my years subscription back now.)
No, it's not, and that's covered by specific laws relating to tennants rights.
This is not racism, this is not some big conspiracy. A better analogy might be:
You know find out your tennants are not actually living in the house, but have a huge meth lab and pot farm in it. You are within your rights to immediately evict them (and call the police, of course).
If this was just a newsgroup with a name, and it was being pulled by name only, that'd be different.. but it's OBVIOUS and EASY to VERIFY what is in these groups.. copyrighted material belonging to these corporations.
And again, let's remember that this won't stop people from posting these thinsg to usenet.. they'll just use a different group.
*shrug*At least here in Germany I think it's rather common to run and to use web-proxies.
There are many commercial news servers out there which provide all binary groups. If you do a lot of posting, you should ideally try and find one outside the US. EU is a good choice, but if you can find one outside the EU/US/Canada, you're laughing!!!
I personally use ClaraNews
http://www.claranews.com
its damn cheap at £30 Per Year, around 45USD, and retention is pretty good. But its anyones guess how long they can resist "copyright violation" notifications.
Lamer,
how appropriate.
If you have the beginning of the movie, you can use VirtualDub which will reconstruct the index. You can then watch the part you downloaded, but seeking is *extremely* slow, i.e near impossible, so no fast forwarding to your "favourite bits".
Well its worth it if you DL the 600M+ movies to be found on eDonkey, and you are still waiting for the last 10Meg to be "found" on the system.
Check it out:
http://www.edonkey2000.com
This is all well and good for you. Who obvisouly know something about the web. Most customers are not as computer savy as the people that read /. (this is a debate that I don't want to get into). :) ), but if you are a family
, and get an e-mail address for everyone in the family from isp-a, but you have to pay an extra $2.50 or so from isp-b, who are you most likely to go with, remembering that you don't know about all of the free options.
The same is true for webhosting and news servers.
The amount of money that your avg ISP makes on any single customer is very low. You need to pay for bandwidth, modems, routers, etc.. And the big killer helpdesk. Also there is competition in most markets and anything you can do to get customers is worth it. Offering personal webpages and extra e-mail address for free (they don't really add anything to amount you pay (we have the mail and Web servers anyway
As for caching, a lot of isp's uses cache's and transparent proxying. Helps cut down on those bandwidth bills.
Enough out of me, it is early...
-doon
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
Read the law before you go making stupid comments like this one. Your uninformed post is what makes people think /. is stupid.
One of the things that the DMCA provides for is that ISP's have to take notice from copyright holders regarding materials being pirated via their services and take reasonable action to stop it.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Oh, this is garbage thinking. @home is "choosing" to piss off their customers, some number of whom will certainly raise hell and/or switch to other providers. No one would make such a business decision without the threat of legal action. Let's get real.
Ah, but it's a Tragedy Of The Commons type of situation. If you were to avoid the cache while your fellow users made use of it, you would win. But if everyone avoided it, or if the cache didn't exist at all, the result would very likely be slower access for everyone.
Certainly it would be better for business and end users if they would use adequate resources to make the cache fast, though.
Google groups alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
It's a fairly recent group (a year or so) that packages movies from other groups and converts/compresses them into their own little format for easy downloading... What with DivX around, though, they've mostly been trumped. Of course, I only know this from third-hand knowledge... *cough*
First few minutes... suuuuurree....
Although it annoysme too... (I'll have to listen to my friends grumbl. yeah, that's it), I definitely think they have every right.
I don't want to ring the bel on other groups, so I won't name them ... but @Home missed a LOT of other groups that deal with he same topics... Just do a quick search on several of the topics and you'll notice a few more... Why didn't they go after those too? As long as I can keep downloading my MST3k, Duckman, Internet Slutts and other TV episodes (that I honestly can't get from where I live), then I'm happy...
Since when are law-following and censorship mutually exclusive? In China, for example, failure to censor is illegal. In the US, look up the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to criticize the government.
Even though this is over 200 years ago the constitutional loophole would still appear to exist.
Unless the copyright owner places it in public domain. This is particularly true to those works made in the US before 1976, as works had to be registered to obtain copyrighted status at that time.
This could be a pretty dangerous manouver for a provider of high-speed networking. If you eliminate newsgroup porn, many customers may figure out that they no longer need a high-speed, 24-hour/day connection!
Digital Millenium Copyright Act
Best Slashdot Co
And 15 seconds later the following get newgrouped:
alt.binaries.hu5t13r
alt.binaries.p14yg1rl
alt.binaries.p3nth0use
alt.binaries.m0v13s
alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.pl4ydUUd3
alt.binaries.movies.d.i.v.x
alt.binaries.movies.pur1ty
alt.binaries.movies.sh4d0wr3alm
alt.binaries.movies.m1r4g3-mrg
alt.computers.theyll.be.suprised.to.find.it.here
The problem is that if you whack UseNet stuff where you *expect* to see it, it starts popping up where you don't expect to see it. I agree that UseNet has become a forum for sharing pR0n. Perhaps if it was a text only forum, cull MIME, UUencode and anything else that looks like it might be a binary attachment. Cull RTF and HTML formatted posts as well. Hell, at least it'd be easier to spool and read.
Does this mean if I trademark a word, I can ban its use in any online medium?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Cox outsources to Supernews for its Usenet service. Yes, it's pretty decent...retention in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, for instance, currently has 64175 articles going back 2.3 days (I've seen it higher before, but alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 is one of the highest-volume newsgroups, if not the highest). Before I signed up for cable-modem service, I used Supernews with a cheap dial-up ISP to bypass their crappy news server.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
> There is always a copyright. Always.
The original poster is correct. Up until the mid '70s, published works were required to have a copyright notice on them, or they weren't copyright. Two infamous examples of works not being copyright were Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and the early Star Trek episodes.
Martin Luther King's speech was the subject of a long battle by his family. It was apparently determined that, because copies of the text were originally distributed without a copyright notice, it was not copyright.
I don't know if the Star Trek episodes were actually the subject of a court case, but the lack of copyright on the early episodes meant that fans could scam off of thos early episodes without any fear of prosecution. This may be part of the reason for the longevity (and popularity) of the original Startrek.
(Apparently, someone at Paramount didn't think that Star Trek was going to 'fly' and so they didn't worry about putting a copyright on the early episodes. I'm sure that somebody got the cat 'O Nine Tails treatment over that omission many years later. Fans, on the other hand, are eternally grateful (or at least for the next 100 years or so).)
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Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Furthermore, upon deeper examination, this case is almost the complete opposite-- these actions won't have any effect on the white hats or the black hats. The legitimate activity won't be hurt because they can just be moved to another channel, but also similarly for the illegitimate transfers.
So in my book, it's doubly bad. The intent is horrible, and the outcome doesn't at all match the intent.
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My point is... that the argument that these actions are legitimate is correct-- to an extent (so it's a bit seductive). If this sort of action becomes institutionalized, then it's a problem. @Home is NOT someone who's renting out a spare bedroom.
And with regard to religion, race, sex,... these sorts of rulings begin to establish a legal pattern that it's acceptable to be put a whole group of people out just because some of the people that hang out near them(logical proximity, as in similar skin color, sex,...) do illegal things. I don't believe this sort of collateral damage is acceptable on a widespread basis.
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The point is that an individual shouldn't be judged by what a group does, whether or not the perceptions about a group are correct. You'll never see 200 people being the defendant in a suit; their guilt or innocence is determined individually.
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Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
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Well, typically ISP Admin's only allow IP's of their subscribers to read news from their servers. There are services out there that will (for a price) allow you to read news from them, but it'll be no where as fast as getting it from your ISP's network will.
Easynews has average retention of over 14 days in the binaries groups I frequent when accessed via their NNTP servers. They also have a Web-based (yuck, I know) access point which has the pre-decoded binaries (but only binaries, no text) with retention of 7-10 days. I like my NNTP, but for grabbing a file in the 100MB or more range it's nice to just go to their Web server and download it quicker, without the overhead UUencoding adds. Easynews also offers a free 3 day trial to anyone with a verifiable credit card number--to prevent people from subscribing multiple times to the free trial period.
At any rate, fuck @Home. Most people who really care about and use USENET frequently get a premium server anyway. It's only about $10-$15 a month, and it supports the people whose business it is to provide us with USENET feeds. To @Home, USENET is a secondary thing. To Easynews, Supernews, Altopia, and the myriad others, it's their bread and butter. I like to support USENET and its providers, so I have accounts with two providers. If people really want USENET to stay around and stay unexpurgated, they should support real USENET providers.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
A USENET newsgroup is not a Web site. A newsgroup is like a meeting place. Let's say that people who gather at such and such an address IRL are trading copyrighted movie screeners, for instance. Do you go in with a wrecking ball and remove the address because something illegal has happened, or even happens frequently, there? No. You go after the individuals who are doing the illegal thing, not the building they happen to gather in front of.
Let's say that you live in a brownstone on the corner of your street in a city, and crack dealers are hanging out selling drugs right in front. Do you think your house should get torn down because of that, or that the law enforcers should do their job and arrest the guys one by one?
What it boils down to is that the copyright owners are too lazy and don't want to spend the money to enforce their copyrights, by nailing the individual violators. So instead, they've been strong-arming ISPs to "tear down the house" instead of "arresting the crack dealers".
That's how it is, not your pedantic BS. Evidently you studied too much Hegel at University.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Please elucidate.
I can understand losing access due to posting copyrighted material - content-owner sees it, copies headers, fires DMCA complaint to @Home, @Home TOSses user.
But what objection could anyone have about downloading newsgroup headers (as opposed to message bodies)? Is the mere knowledge that someone's posted the latest Britney Spears single also a copyright violation? ;-)
Ah, I gotcha. I was thinking of a game called Shadowrealm, not the movie-releasing group. Thanx for the clue.
> U 1159 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed.reposts
> U 2810 alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime.highspeed
And for those not keeping up...
The Dead have said that trading their music is OK. So alt.binaries.gdead.* aren't in violation of the DMCA. (In the same way that the Beatles said it was not OK, and absmp3.beatles is in violation.)
The old-time-radio is a case where the broadcasts may or may not be copyrighted - but many of the broadcasts were made before the current "hell freezes over before it goes public domain" law - far enough before, that many of the broadcasts probably are in the public domain.
Actually, there's a cheat in Windoze Explorer. Select the .AVI file, then right-click on File -> Properties. Click on "Preview" tab. You can view most partial .AVIs this way, as long as you have the first part of the file.
Pity that Windoze Media Player is too braindead to do the same thing. ("Streaming? Sure, we do streaming. We just don't play incomplete stuff you've downloaded!")
Works for me on Win98SE and Windows Media Player 6.4.somethingorother and the related DLLs. I'll upgrade to 7 or higher shortly after hell freezes over.
Most of the results in Google for "AVI preview incomplete" or "partial AVI preview" are one-message threads from people saying "crap, it doesn't work!", or worse, "it used to work but now it's broken".
Perhaps this is another "feature" the boys in Redmond decided was too useful to permit its continued existence :(
This looks promising, though:
This link says that it's disabled in Win2K Pro, but to re-enable it, you go to:
WinExplorer -> Tools -> Folder_Options -> General tab -> "Enable Web Content in Folders".
(WTF this has to do with it, I don't know, but I'm not running Win2000. It works fine with web content in folders *dis*abled in Win98SE. As always, YMMV.)
Meanwhile, let's hear it for the pr0n-hounds and Google, without whom I'd have never found out about this cheat, and without whom I'd also have never found this potential workaround for Win2K.
Have you tried running mplayer.exe on your box?
I just tried it on my 98SE box from the suggestion in this post, based on the fact that I'm running basically the same system this guy was, but I *do* have the Preview tab.
So it looks like whatever makes the Preview tab go away has nothing to do with my setup or yours, but that the old "mplayer.exe" Media Player, if it exists on your system, will play incomplete AVIs without worrying about all the mucking about with Explorer. Just invoke mplayer.exe from the command line, and drag-and-drop the .AVI onto it.
(Looks like Windows Media Player 6.4 is MPLAYER2.EXE, and the MPLAYER.EXE that the poster is talking about is the old one that came with Win98. On my system, it doesn't even have a version number on Help->About. Far out.)
Reminds me of the time I had to use WINFILE.EXE (Yes, the Windows 3.1 file manager was still included at least as recently as Win98SE, is it still there on Win2000?) to change a file association because my "Open With..." menu option wouldn't come up for some obscure reason. (For historical reference, yeah, that's WINFILE.EXE -> File -> Associate. Far out, it still works. Of course, that tells you just how old the codebase for Win9x really is...)
And yes, it is crap like this that's made me not bother with 2K, and I'll skip XP too. After five years of cheating my way around the OS, I'm sick of it. My next OS upgrade doesn't come from Redmond.
Huh? I think we're in partial agreement, but there are some entries that confuse me.
Most of the newsgroups have copyrighted content: Hustler, Playgirl and Penthouse are copyrighted publications.
I'm damned if I know what's going on in .shadowrealm, .mirage-mrg, or .purity. I have no idea what these are for, so I won't comment.
But .divx and .movies strike me as odd. The fact that someone's encoding stuff with DivX ;-) does not imply a copyright violation. Nor does the fact that someone's posting a "movie". (Whatever happened to alt.binaries.multimedia?)
Basically, my position here is the same as with the .mp3 hierarchy:
absmp3.beatles - removable under DMCA. The owners of the Beatles' music have requested that the music not be swapped via USENET. absmp3.1960s - not removable under DMCA. Just because it was made in the 60s, doesn't mean it was copyrighted. abs.mp3 - not removable under DMCA. Just because it's an MP3 doesn't mean it's copyrighted. (Likewise, just because it's a DivX stream doesn't mean it's copyrighted.)
Personally, I see this as a potentially-good thing at least as far as the MP3 front goes -- a full USENET feed is over 250GB per day, and can saturate an OC-3. Retention at my server seems to be holding up, but propagation is slowly falling apart as transit servers drop articles on the floor. If we can cut down on the volume of 600M files being tossed around, many of which are being posted from @home users, USENET can continue to function for a little while (6-12 months) longer.
IMHO the short-term solution to binary-USENET's "a full feed is too much to manage" problem isn't to drop groups, it's for broadband providers to impose upload caps of 100-200M per day at their own NNTP server on their users. Large files would still be postable - it'd just take a little longer, and retention and propagation could improve immeasurably for everyone else.
But on purely-DMCA grounds, it looks like @home has the right idea on some groups, the wrong idea on others, and may just be confused on a few more.
Problem is, that's still a helluvalotta traffic for your ISP.
Full feed - 250GB per day. Let's assume you have 10000 users downloading 100M per day out of it. That 250G transit gives your users 1 TB (1 million megabytes) of downloads in the aggregate - but the 1TB of traffic is all on your LAN, so you don't have to pay (or otherwise make nicey-nicey with your Tier-1 pier ;-) for it. You eat 250G of transit costs to grab it to your disk farm and serve it locally.
But instead the PHBs tell you to dump your USENET server. Now you've got 10000 users subscribing to a premium USENET service to slurp down the binaries. The whole damn terabyte now comes from outside your network and onto your users' drives. You pay four times as much for transit as you used to in the USENET days.
For some things (MP3s of obscure bands), it may not matter -- you won't typically have all 10000 users downloading the same stuff.
For other things (e.g., this October, when Star Wars gets DivX'ed ;-), it may make a lot of difference - everyone is gonna be after the same 600M binary, so wouldn't you rather pay the transit for it once, rather than for every user who grabs a copy?
The picture makes a lot more sense if you stop thinking of the binary part of USENET as "USENET" and start thinking of it as a very large caching server.
Prediction: Imminent death of USENET predicted within 24 hours of the release of "Star Wars". Film at... er, part of film at October, with reposts of other parts of film through November, December, and probably most of 2002.
I dunno, aviplay does it fine for me...
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Actually ShadowRealm, MrG and Purity are so called "release groups." These groups "release" movies. So thesecorresponding newsgroups are where thier people post thier releases.
:P
Not that I know it myself I overheard it from another cubical.
Same as above. U running some special software or something? I have Win2k for DVE, and there is no such option anywhere for previews.
Actually, I use USENET just about every day. There is still a decent group of users, the spamming has calmed down a bit, since USENET became obscure. It seems to be mostly long-time internet users (from the early 90's that is) and a bit of influx from new people, mostly searching for warez and p0rn.
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
(e.g., this October, when Star Wars gets DivX'ed ;-)
Why wait till October? It's already been done =)
LRJ
They got alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy, but they missed alt.binaries.full.post.verified.playboy :)
Mark Duell
shadowrealm, mirage-mrg, and purity were all newsgroups for posting commercial movies (usually cams or screeners, an occasional dvd) by the various movie groups. divx was for posting movies encoded with the divx codec, and they were, without exception, commercial movies you would see in theaters or rent. movies was the same way, only any codec was allowed (usually the group-specific codec was allowed in the their newsgroup). Just FYI (and not that I ever used them... I heard it... from a.... "friend").
Mark Duell
I couldn't agree with you more. It's gonna be hell for the people that buy Premium accounts.
I am an @Home customer, and I purchased a NewsGuy.com account, and download about 5-10GBytes/month in alt.binaires.* because @Home's NNTPd's are always incomplete.
I use @home and they provide great cable high speed access in my area.... but i've never used their news feed.. personally i've always used deja.com or now groups.google.com for anything i needed.. for that matter i've never even checked my @home email or even know what the account is...
Just two random cents...
Sure they do.
If the long-term benefits to the society outweigh the short-term benefit to you, then society has a perfect "right" to crush your so-called rights like a bug. And it generally does.
Of course, it usually takes a while for "society" to figure out what is in its long-term benefit (read: large scale arguments, protests, riots, etc). Once it has settled on a meme (racial discrimination is bad, for instance), your "rights" don't mean diddly-squat.
And if you didn't get out there and vote -- preferably libertarian or green -- this is partially your fault. I hope you can look your grandchildren in the eye when they ask you where all the freedom went.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
-Legion
alt.moron.who.never.introspected.that.the.law.is.e nforced.by.the.governments.and.that.athome.didnt.j ust.decide.to.remove.the.newsgroups.without.threat .of.application.of.the.law
-no broken link
Damn right, I have long thought that usenet should be reduced to just text filtering out mime and uuencoded messages. Why should the avergae users pay for pr0n and warez for other users?
A full usenet feed with binaries must use a hell of a lot of bandwidth that could go to better uses.
I use @home, and (like many who were modded down before me) I think that they were completely within their rights to restrict access to newsgroups known to be carrying illegal material.
So mod me down too, and continue on in your blissful rant mode.
Got Rhinos?
Never judge a book by its cover.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My ISP won't keep me from uploading the movie I made and want to share, will it? If it does, it's not my ISP.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not true. A more fitting analogy is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Your flaw is in 4. The word "playboy" is part of the popular culture from which it was stollen. To say that anything that could be described as "playboy" blongs to the obnoxious magazine and must be set up to distribute that publication is foolish, but that is what the advocates of trademark would have you believe. Likewise, the other terms may not really refer to publications which you are familiar with.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is only one point where we might agree, and that is that users should not be wasting bandwith exchanging "I Love Lucy" episodes and other mass produced forms of entertainment. When informed of such abuses, ISPs should track down and discontinue service to such people. I knew one person who had programs that continuosly scanned and downloaded all new posts to usenet. It was a total waste, as he did not really care to look at it. His ISP should have noticed this and tossed him off. This way the rest of us can share our original content in peace and speed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just to teach you a lesson I rm -rf *'ed your /home/* directory. I'd post the log of it here, but my files seem to have disappeared. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go see what happened to them!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Fsck alt.binaries.anime! Alt.binaries.anime was NOT registered correctly and it's considered a rogue group, it's all about alt.binaries.MULTIMEDIA.anime. I _HATE_ it when people post exclusively to alt.binaries.anime (except when they're reposts, put as much crap in taht group, i don't give a care).
Anyway, alt.binaries.anime tends to be a place where you dump old anime, crappy anime, or dvd rips, so it's not TOO bad...
watch for my inuyasha posts on abma =] ep 30 is coming provided i can get it early, check tuesday morning.
Wow really? So what i've been using doesn't really exist? News to me.
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/divfix.html
it rebuilds the table (note that the file will NOT BE THE EXACT SAME AS THE ORIGINAL AFTER BUILDING SO RESUMES WILL _NOT_ WORK, my advice is to copy it to another directory and fix it, that way you have an original copy.)
That one seems a bit odd to block - isn't it a game of some sort? If so, what are the movies? The equivalent of saved DOOM, etc. runs?
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
...I don't use their newgroups much. This move by them doesn't really surprise me though, because no matter what they're still a rather large company that's easily targeted by Them. In fact, I thought they'd already removed all the stuff that might be targetable. I mean, we've got http://groups.google.com now, so since I'm not (usually) looking for something of questionable legality (e.g. binaries such as movies, warez, etc - what they're removing) I use Google Groups. In addition to that, I know that Google won't be censoring their stuff (like we all know ISP's have a habit of doing whether they tell you or not).
MPlayer (check freshmeat) plays incomplete AVIs. It plays everything. It can also rebuild the index for fast forward/backward. It's great.
I downloaded tons of movies from alt.binaries.movies...and alt.binaries.movies.divx was only available on some servers, not mine (though I'd get to it on the others). I swear to god if they so much as touch alt.binaries.anime there is gonna be problems.
@Home blocks a metric crapload of the servers already. One of my roommates moved out and got DSL at his new place, and all of a sudden, voila, all the newgroups he'd been looking for before. This is nothing new, although, it is new in the sense that they announced that they were doing it this time...
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
What DHCP script? I have a fixed IP address ;-)
Just because it's an MP3 doesn't mean it's copyrighted. (Likewise, just because it's a DivX stream doesn't mean it's copyrighted.)
Correct, but who's to say Fraunhofer (inventor of MP3) Thomson (U.S. licensing agent for MP3 patents) aren't in bed with the record labels? And who's to say that MPEG LA (licensing agent for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 patents) isn't in bed with the studios? They could have DMCA'd Excite@home (no connection to SETI@home) with added language: "If you do not take down these groups, you are liable not only for contributory copyright infringement but also for contributory infringement on the MPEG patents."
Will I retire or break 10K?
// "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - aldous huxley
I didnt know Huxley was a C++ programmer!
this is slightly disturbing.
:)
not that there's an oligopoly in the cable ISP market or anything...
Last I read, censorship is only when it is done by a government, not by a private party. @home is free to carry any content they choose on their servers. They are not obligated to carry any of them, and I am always suprised by the groups that they do. The market will reward and/or punish their actions accordingly.
And chances are, 95% of their users won't care.
Why is this a big deal?
Wrong. You can play partial Divx's in RealPlayer.... although i do agree that it's a bullshit post.
Of course, that tells you just how old the codebase for Win9x really is...)
All it tells you is that their interfaces are backwardly compatible. Your suspicions may be right, however.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Very observant. Anyone who thinks this action is somehow illegal or unwarranted should read our trademark laws. The names of the groups alone violate those laws. By law a company must defend their trademark against all infringement. If a company is lax in defending their trademark another entity may take that trademark over by arguing that it has been abandoned. At least that's my understanding. I dunno if copyrights have the same requirement or not. But even if they do not, the owner of the copyright has every right to sue someone who violates their copyright. I know this means they should go after the individual violator, but that would take effort, so they hit the distributor as a way of cutting off supply.
@Home is simply picking its battles; and this one it would not win.
As others have stated, philosiphically and politically, this is very shitty; but @Home, as a business, doesn't have much choice. I don't blame them. I blame the best justice system money can buy.
I just checked and I can still get alt.binaries.movies.purity and alt.binaries.movies. I wonder how effectively this will be carried out. Oh well, if this gets too bad, @home users can always use an alternate news server. The @home groups have a habit of not having good retention time anyway. Supernews is pretty good, from what I hear.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Actually @home blocked most of the *highspeed* groups a long time ago. The only ones availible are:
->U 4748 alt.binaries.games.kidstuff.highspeed
U 2227 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed
U 1159 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed.reposts
U 2810 alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime.highspeed
U 197 can.internet.highspeed
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
OK. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is a good thing. Now, before you press page down to get to the next post, let's take this argument through step by step. Once you hit a flaw in the flow of logic, please reply and state the point you disagree with. Any generalizations about my post will be ignored.
1) The alt.* newsgroups are maintained in a hierarchy where the front elements of the hierarchy categorize what you expect to find in the lower parts.
2) The alt.binaries.* hierarchy indicates files that have been encoded in such a manner that they are converted from high-ascii to plaintext while retaining their original data.
Given 1) and 2), we can ascertain that any posting in the alt.binaries.* newsgroups will be of some form of data (read: not discussion) nature. The only exception to this are alt.binaries.*.d newsgroups.
3) @ Home has banned a subset of alt.binaries.* newsgroups, none of which are alt.binaries.*.d
4) Of the newsgroups banned, they are all either geared towards copyrighted magazines, or deal with groups that distribute copyrighted media.
Given 1, 2, 3, 4, we can now conclude that these newsgroups were set up to SOLELY facilitate the distribution of these copyrighted items. (Again, no alt.binaries.*.d group was removed).
Where exactly is the counter-argument? How can you defend yourself against this? Your rights are not at stake when you consider points 1), 2), 3), and 4). Arguing that these groups serve a legitimate purpose is like arguing a booth on a street corner selling pirated CD's is a boon to the community because they sell matches as well.
If this expands to other cable ISPs I will seriously re-evaluate my cable connection. There's a lot of competition in this area, right?
Anyone who's ever tried to pull binaries off of @home is aware that @home censoring out newsgroups isn't anything new...and frankly, @home doesn't have the resources to keep up with the stuff coming off of USEnet, so I can certainly understand in some cases, dropping a few newsgroups in order to lighten some of the load on their servers, in order to make services for those who use the text only services (and isn't that all they should be used for ;) ) that much better.
Of course, all my tests up here in Canada shows that this is the usual UseNET bullcrap, as I'm downloading headers from a few of those newsgroups now....the posting only says nationally, so who knows, maybe Canada has escaped the evil arm once again...
As far as I can surmise, this is just @home's attempt to try and improve service from their newsgroup servers. It's a constant complaint from anyone who uses them (for example, the less than 6 hour retention of headers in some newsgroups in some locations. Screw the DMCA. Why all of the sudden are we seeing this? There's a lot of crap going on about a lot of people losing access due to posting, or downloading of newsgroup headers....I'll believe that when the mounties stroll up to my door.
"Life ain't interesting till you blow something up" --Anonymous
What does Nintendo have to do with any of this?
Is that copyright extension retroactive to things which had already expired?
Which Windows? I just tried it on WinMe and there is is no Preview tab, just General and Sumamry. No preview option that I could see. Would be nice.
- If we've learned anything fom the Internet, it's that people will always find alternate paths around censorship. Some new USENET groups will inevitably pop up to replace the need of the former groups. For example, alt.binaries.penthouse could find a new home in alt.religion.kibology.priestess. Other distribution formats (eg: cache pre-population of encrypted content) could eventually replace USENET binary distribution.
- If Excite@Home had a spine, they might have phrased it like this...
Here's a post I made a long time ago that tells you a little bit about how alt.* newsgroups work... ALT FAQ- Due to our lack of operating capital and the fact that we really don't have the staff and resources to the administer stupid content that some of our users like to download, we're discontinuing support for the following newsgroups:
...etc...
Were they smart and also had some balls, they'd stop supporting USENET, period. Instead, they'd give each customer of both @Home and GigaNews a $5/month credit to use GigaNews. In return, GigaNews could pay @Home $XX,000/month for better bandwidth to the @Home user base. @Home would additionally free up expensive storage/servers/staff resources and be done with any liability with USENET.You can go somewhere like Giganews if you really see value in it.
Disclaimers: I'm a former Excite@Home employee. For that, you can label this post as a Troll. The advice, though, about USENET outsourcing is applicable to many ISPs. I have no affiliation at all with GigaNews.
Commercial news providers provide higher reliability, more groups and better retention. While I am content using AT&T Broadband's news services, when it comes to binaries I chose Supernews. The retention is a lot better and there are less lost posts. Commercial news providers are less likely to remove groups - I don't know how they satisfy DMCA requests, but I doubt they will destroy popular binary groups that give them customers. Just thought I'd share that.. sorry if it sounds like a commercial.
-Pat
Freenet is a perfect delivery system for the starwars DivX.. Local caching will reduce the bandwidth requirements
Naturally, I am not a lawyer.
alt.idiot.doesn't.know.first_ammendment.applies.to .government.only.not.companies.or.individuals
For $10 a month you get 60,000+ newsgroups and fast downloads. I've used it and the only complaint anyone might have is the 500MB per-day cap. But, of course, the more you pay the higher the cap.
They come up, blank look.
Ask dumb question about disk drive.
Told, they will return.
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
The DMCA is a lot nicer get out than saying "Sorry, the service you signed up for is costing us too much were taking some of it away". Telstra in Oz did this and there users are not happy. This way @home gets to say "hey, it's not us who passed the law".
I guess some of the other high bandwidth groups will be hit next. I wonder what knock on effects this could have on commercial news providors though? I though news was regarded as distributed anyway and hence news was treated just like the postal service or a telephone carrier.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
In the USA, all artists, musicians, writers, etc. have instant copyright to their work. It is inherent in the act of creation. it is ALWAYS there. Thus you have to deal with legal nicities of works for hire, etc.
There is always a copyright. Always.
Who owns it is something else. When it expires is something else.
Right now, the drop dead date on copyright items like songs, etc is sometime just after World War ONE
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
aviplay does (comes with the avifile library)
--
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
No fear compadres, I just started alt.binaries.ustlerhay, alt.binaries.oviesmay, and alt.binaries.movies.ivxday. Down with the man!
Via: 1.0 pr-netcache-2 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1)
My ISP does, and it's a right pain. The only reason I want them to do caching is to speed up my service; in practice the opposite happens.
The advantage an ISP gets from providing a cache is to reduce traffic. It has no interest in making sure that the cache isn't getting overloaded with requests, which it appears to be.
I'm pretty sure that I now get a slower service than without my ISP caching, especially with dynamic content, such as slashdot. I'm switching my ISP in a few weeks.
But if everyone avoided it, or if the cache didn't exist at all, the result would very likely be slower access for everyone.
Except that (due to the widespread incompetence of web "designers" everywhere) the vast majority of the sites to which the vast majority of (l)users frequent is not cacheable.
A quick count shows that only 4 of the 10 newsgroups listed would've had a potential trademark conflict. The other 6 were either completely generic (alt.binaries.movies), named after a standard multimedia fileformat (alt.binaries.movies.divx; I'm sure the DivX people don't object to people using their name to describe files that are, in fact, encoded in DivX), or named after a pirate group that releases movies (all the ones toward the bottom of the list; I'm basing this last one on another Slashdot post and not first-hand knowledge). Besides, I don't see anyone going after, say, the comp.os.ms-windows.* hierarchy or the comp.sys.ibm.* hierarchy. Overall, I suspect that group content played a much, much larger role than any trademarks issues with the name.
ISP's are allowed to carry stuff like this, are legally protected to be able to carry stuff like this because they are defined as an enhanced service provider(same thing as a common carrier). Bur now that one has bowed to pressure, the precentdent is set to make them all bow...well usenet has been declining, this could be the killer.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Don't like the stories on Slashot? Don't read them. Simple as that. Why is it that people keep coming back even though they complain their asses off?
This is the problem with usage of microsoft products also: "Microsoft sucks!!!!!!!! Windows crashes sooooo often!!!!!!!" Well, stop fucking using the software. "But what choice do I have?????!!!! I have to play Baldur's Gate!!!!!!!"
For fucks sake! stop complaing and do the only thing you can: boycott. (Applies to slashdot in your case, and to microsoft otherwise.)
Regards,
Hoarycripple
--
Check out crippl3.net.
Booyah
Technically, blocking those isn't censorship. It's simply following the law.
For the flamers out there (!gay "flamers) who think that so and so, or this and that need to "make a stand against the DMCA!!" Think about this...
A company, or individual who flaunts the law has a harder time enforcing their rights BY LAW. It's been proven. It goes something like this: if these guys had said "screw that, were not going to block it, despite the legalities of it" they may, or may not have had to go to court to defend their right. But, when/if they DID have to go to court for something else, their not wanting to follow along with the law's intent would show.
And, if by going to court, they were FORCED to pull those groups, that would set a legal precedent for EVERY ISP across the nation, and they would be forced to pull them too. It is seldom that a recent ruling is set aside for an individual.
If you want to fight the DMCA, or this, write your congressmen. Don't sit there and lament when this happens. It's not their fault, it's the fault of the American Voter, period. Use your rights. Don't expect a company to fight YOUR good fight.
krystal_blade "I want my karma back!"
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
And then alt.flame.spelling :)
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitute for caffeine.
I guess you can't kill censorship hey. It always comeback wanting more and more. If you're looking for world domination and assimilation, try censorship.
There is only one system that protects copyrights. The legal system. Technical systems only restrict duplication or use.
I do not have a signature
server capacity. Let the users who really want to exchange Divx's go to a pay service.
sulli
RTFJ.
They'll monitor packets and traffic. Is it so hard to imagine a utility that searches the Gnutella network, gathers IP addresses and cross-checks them against a known set of IP addresses? No, it is trivial and your ISP could do it today.
When there is only 1 or 2 broadband providers in a market, and you convince or threaten them into blocking Napster, Gnutella, etc., the game is over.
Sure you can go back to 56k dialup, but that pretty much eliminated movie sharing and makes MP3 unbearably slow.
Are there any ISP's that won't knuckle under?
I've thought for a long time ISPs have no business providing add-on services like usenet, e-mail, or website hosting. There are dozens, if not hundreds of alternative places to find those services.
All I want out of my ISP is to give me a connection. It pains me when I think of how much of my monthly fee is paying for those resources at my ISP that I never use. 5 free e-mail addresses? I'll have a new ISP in 12 months...I'll stick with the emails I've had for the last seven years. Free 'personal' webpage? I'll go to geocities or at least pay a few bucks. Usenet? I'm sure there are plenty of services out there.
My point is, what business does the ISP have in providing news service anyways? I'm just pissed that @home is doing it because Industry nazis are on their back, instead of doing it because it's not really their job.
The Internet is generally stupid
*WAH* THe DMCA and MPAA suck so badly that I will -NEVER- buy a DVD. Tha'ts right, Flash. Deprive yourself of a great medium that gives you superior picture and sound, and doesnt degrade every time you play it, all because you find some of the policies of the MPAA odious. Well, so do I. But at least I am watching Crouching TIget Hidden Dragon in glorious widescreen with 5.1 suround...unlike you who will watch it as a crappy DIVX taken by some dude with a video camera. So while you are enjoying that amazing video quality and the guy in front of the cameraman eating his popcorn...I'll be enjoying my DVD.
Yes. THis is a flame, and maybe even a troll. I am just tired of sanctimonious warez d00ds trying to justify their thefts by talking about how evil the MPAA is. They arent saints, they are greedy. But hey, who isnt?
Hahahahah. I was waiting for someone to point that one out. That's even better. I dont like DVD, but I'll use a DVD rip. Greeeeat. Ah well.
Actually, there was some pretty nasty stuff on the owners computer ;) Yeah..he went in and verified it. Most of us didnt have the desire or stomach for it. Basically if a newsgroup with an obvious name had one randomly chosen binary that was kiddie porn, the NG got the axe. That left a lot of non KP ng's for the pr0n addicts to get their fix on.
Yes..you could make a point that it was illegal to take a look to verify content. But at least we were certain, and a quick delete erased the noxious jpg's
In the mid 90's I worked at an ISP here in British COlumbia. We were contacted by the RCMP and told that we had to police Usenet for alt.* groups that were obvioiously child porn. We happily complied, and removed any binary groups that had kiddie porn in them. We were not threatened with legal action, it was just a friendly request that we were happy to comply with. @Home chosing to block newsgroups that pretty much flagrantly distribute copyrighted materials is not censorship. IT's @home trying to forestall legal action.
Funny thing is, I see some of the newsgroups we blocked in 95 are available on the @home news server. Havent looked to see if there is anything there..but..shudder..Yeck.
Stupid Local Monopolies....
hehe - I remember writing a (basic) news server for coursework back at university.
Articles are referenced by a unique ID - generated by the originating server. It is this that links the article to a group. Only one copy of an article goes anywhere - the actual entries in a given group are always references to that article by its ID.
(somewhat comparable to hard linking as opposed to the vague comparison with symbolic linking that comes to mind with the way it was explained by james_shoemaker)
Why is it that everytime someone is critical of slashdot stories, they get modded as "Funny"; or is it the truth makes one laugh at one's feebleness?
I read the original comment as sarcasm, I know that american humor is very different to brittish though - so you probably took it as face value. He was saying if its ok to take groups down that may contain illegal material (in your eyes, not in the eyes of a jury), surely its ok to not rent to people who may commit crimes. OTOH AFAIK its legal (in the UK) to choose who to rent your [whatever]. A person might perfectly legally insist that you must be a non-smoker for example, even if they live 50 miles from the house.
"it may make a lot of difference - everyone is gonna be after the same 600M binary, so wouldn't you rather pay the transit for it once, rather than for every user who grabs a copy?"
This is a good argument and it is very valid, however and I believe that @home will shoot itself in the foot with this one. I have a couple of friends who subscribe to premium usenet service through third party providers because @home does not carry the groups they usually download from. Instead of caching the GB's of info locally like you said, the same info will come in from the outside several times over and surely drive up the cost.
@home needs to consider the types of people who use usenet. The average Joe does not use usenet. Most people I mention usenet to don't even know that it exists. Die hard usenetters are going to get their binaries whether it's from inside the @home network or from outside. It would be in @home's best interest financially to keep the groups. @home would have more internal traffic, but they will not have to deal with TB's of premium service usenet data flowing in from the outside and eating up their bandwidth quota's and driving up costs. Then again, a big lawsuit from the MPAA would not be good financially either.
Final thought - could @home not just open up another data channel? It should be possible then to gain another 30mps by opening another 6 MHz channel for data. I mean, they probably still have unused channels. This would definately increase the bandwidth and provide a form of segmentation. If anyone knows more about this, I'd appreciate the input.
Cheers
Everyone saw it coming. But what does this do to other newsgroups? Is this an invitation for law suits? It just makes you think..
In light of this /. Article here are some questions to ponder before people berate ISP's for newsgroup culling. It is fairly obvious as seen by other posters that removing selected alt.binaries.* groups not only appeases the worlds various recording and motion picture associations but it also reduces the cost of the data transfer for said ISP's.
Was Usenet designed, perhaps a better word would be conceived, for file sharing?
Are there better systems and protocols available for file sharing?
Should you be allowed to download a copyrighted movie or mp3 from a newsgroup when the copyright holder has not given consent?
Is it censorship when the police raid a car-boot sale and remove any trader selling a bootlegged copy of some music or a video?
Is it censorship when the police or other legal body remove access to a newsgroup that is notorious for "dealing" in bootlegged material?
Could Usenet improve if there was more control over the content it contained?
Note that these questions do not necessarily reflect my views and I am as guilty as the next person for listening to "illegal" mp3's however they are intended as discussion points.
Now I know the newsgroups to go visit
I don't think that the names suggest anything wrong. But if you look at the contenet it might be another deal. :-)
Anyway so you will have to sign up with another one of those companies that does nothing but provide news feeds to you.
I know one or two that provide a lot better service than any ISP, such as long retention time and good links so there is very few missing files.
So there might be coming more money their way soon.
--------
I thought the DMCA was solely for preventing unauthorized access. Newgroups doesn't fall under unauthorized. Now, I can see pulling the groups due to criminal files, and huge amounts of bandwidth usage.
Furthermore, I personally don't consider it much of news anyways, since most free news servers don't carry ANY alt.binaries.*
The only reason it made it onto \. is because of the four magical letters: DMCA.
Now if this really has something to do with the DMCA, would somebody kindly explain that here.
_Flaunts_ the law? _Flaunts_ it? Do you even know what the word "flaunt" means?
hyacinthus.
w00t juarez at 700Kb/sec+ @home newsgroups are probably the worse for this, there is a good 3-4 vcds that get posted everyday, at least 10 various isos for different games and apps. This is a start for many things to come.
Smev
I have been hating on them for a while, due to general slowness and retention issues, plus capping my upload (can everybody say, "luxury problems"?) But I don't really think you can pin this on them; rather I believe the blame lies with Bill Clinton, who gave life to the DMCA and gave the entertainment industry the power to destroy anyone who steps on their toes.
Don't read this!
I just got on Time Warner RoadRunner... Am I missing something here? What keeps me from using a different news server?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
At least alt.binaries.movies is still there.
I was expecting something like this. I got most of my MP3s from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, not from Napster, even when there was a lot of stuff on it. Download speed from news.home.com is way better than from crAAAAAA-a.home.com.
@home is not my ISP, but I would like to thank them for pointing out where I can find the good stuff.
When VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws have VPNs.
Now this is something I take very seriously. Liability has gotten in the way too many times. @Home has no liability. It does, however, have a responsibility toward its userbase. Users of @Home doing such illegal activies have, no doubt, been taken care of since the ISP came into existance.
So why is this such a big deal now? The cable ISP has absolutely no responsibility for what someone else posts, whether or not they impose some sort of editorial actions on their own users or not. In fact, those "editorial actions" everyone is referring to are not true editorial actions. Yes, @Home can pick and choose which newsgroups they want to host and which ones they don't. Now, if an ISP's users detest to choices made, then the ISP better recognize that or they will loose users. This is one of the foundations of our economy. An ISP should have set policies for handling this type of situation. @Home has such a policy. Its users are prohibited from illegal activity according to the @Home AUP. Why is @Home getting so much criticism for following their policies?
And, if I recall correctly, the DMCA was more for "circumvention devices" and other infringement techniques. Relaying messages posted by other people on USENET is not an infringement technique, it is common courtesy provided it is within the charter (if there is one) of the newsgroup.
An ISP should not be responsible for content posted that is beyond their control. An ISP should, at most, be responsible for the actions of their own users, not of users from other ISPs. There is already a hierarchy of responsibility within the law, and there has always been such a hierarchy amongst our society. The hierarchy worked fine then, and it is certainly the correct approach now. It may not work well given the lightning fast technologies we have today, but sometimes a goverment must make sacrifices for the private sector. Certainly, the private sector should sacrifice for the government, unless the leading body of the government requests it (in the USA, that would be the people).
The majority of people I know who understand it are against the DMCA. Some of congress is against it, too. Why are we sitting here dead in the water? We have plenty of feul; start the fucking engine already. If you're going to complain, the least you could do is complain to the right people and actually do something.
The DMCA does not say that they have to prevent access to it, it just says that it has to remove specific infringing items from their systems. It's easy to say that the whole area is bad. What's next, blocking access to IRC or FTP in general because of all the piracy on there?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I was still surfing around alt.bin.dmca.violating.pr0n
I hope I can still wheeze some more!
Computational Madness in a round package.
Well, with napster down, the next target is usenet.
/. article on a crackdown on all of the mp3 groups. Enjoy it while it lasts. And remember, one lucky person gets to be an example!
My prediction: in 6 months, there will be a
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Everything is still going to be there, only in another groups with another names, like it always have been with everything that is somehow filtered or censored, be it on cyberspace or not. I really don't know what is worse. Pretending we follow these kind of rules, while they pretend they are really filtering "bad, harmful, illegal, whatever" content, or making a real stand about one's right, causing a lot of noise, and making them think more about it and take it more seriously.
Personally I am on Rogers At home cable Internet in the grater Toronto area. I have had friends send me the address to news groups that they frequently visit. Because of Rogers filters, I am not able to even view them. So Excite@Home is not the first guy to do this.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
Cummon people!
It's like saying "they shut napster down, why?"
I'm not for or against this action, but my common sense tells me that this type of thing would happen.
alt.binaries.* usually means piracy - and it is illegal. Sorry kids. It's not like they cut alt.legalization.pot - they cut clear violators.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Use PAN! You wouldn't have this problem.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I doubt that someone is going to do all that to watch five minutes of a cammed movie.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Nice try, but the divx codec doesn't let you watch incomplete downloads.
Get your Unix fortune now!
What's the big deal? the alt.binaries.* hierarchy is huge and anything that can be found on those groups can be found on any other group. Hell, most of the content on those groups is pr0n site advertising anyway.
Or so I've been told.
Dancin Santa
Very interesting.
I no longer do tier 1 tech support for them. Well, in fairness, AT&T Broadband laid me off. ANYWAYS! Look at the newsgroup they are no longer providing. I can imagine those are the larger news generating ones that waste the most bandwidth. Bandwidth=money. And beyond that, those groups are a liability. pr0n, full movies, those could get @home in trouble. So just go find your warez another way. Like IRC! :-)
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Do yourself a favour and check your facts before shooting your mouth off. I think you need to take some time and read up on the Fair Housing Act (US Title code 42, chapter 45). It explicitly prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, nationality, religon, sex, maritial status, and disabilities. The only real exemptions are private, owner occupied buildings. So for example if you are renting a spare room in your house, you may discriminate on whatever basis you like, however if you own an apartment you may not. The full text of the law can be found here.
I hope they don't find alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica If I can't get a gig of pr0n per day I'm just not myself.
If you want to read hustler, (and I can imagine that for plenty of slashdotters this will be their only source of releif, ESR's tips notwithstanding) go the fuck out to the fucking shop and BUY a fucking copy. DONT expect me to think of you as a latter-day Nelson Mandela simply because you STOLE it via @home.
For FUCK'S SAKE, PLEASE STOP POSTING THESE BOGUS STORIES TO SLASHDOT. MOST OF US ARE LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS. WE DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT PORN, OR WAREZ, OR ANYTHING ELSE LIKE THAT. NOW, HOW ABOUT SOME STORIES FOR NERDS. SURELY THERE MUST BE A NEW POINT RELEASE OF G++ COMING SOON ????
Well I DONT like it. I am sick of whinging white middle class so-called 'nerds' crying whenever their inalienable rights to free porn and warez are called into question, while meanwhile elsewhere there are serious problems in the world.
Slashdots moronic readership should take time out away from their computers and find out what is going on in the real world
John Lee Hooker, yes, he died recently, but...
Hell, the goate.cx posts make more sense than these.
Or if you don't like gnutella, then use a different nntp server, there are many websites that have lists of free nntp servers.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
All these newsgroups are still on my @home server, with the exception of the Hustler newsgroup which apparently has never been on my local server.
what sort of binaries would you find in alt.binaries.second_ammendment? Roms for you luger?
Reboot macht Frei.
alt.binaries.first_ammendment
alt.binaries.second_ammendment
alt.binaries.fourth_ammendment
....
Besides if this is about "stopping piracy", why aren't the obvious alt.binaries.warez.* groups there? They were generic enough to include .movies and .divx. .warez.* groups a long time ago. Its too bad too cuz when downloading from the news server on @home I get between 4-9 meg transfer speeds...
Thats because they stopped carrying
Don't Tread on Me
So what? People can simply post illegal content to other newsgroups just as easily.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Being an @home customer that uses newsgroups, I was proud of the fact that I had access to some of those groups. Not exactly being a huster fan, but I enjoyed d/led the first few minutes to movies as a preview type of way. This realy doesn't make me happy.
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Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
Of course, anyone who has a cablemodem should not be using their cablemodem provider's USENET servers...they are of poor quality. An account with a commercial news provider is well worth the price asked, especially if the user does not want alt.binaries access and actually wants to participate in discussions, instead of just using USENET to download porn and warez.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
@home's newsgroups have always sucked! they have never carried warez, and their retention is worse than their content!
jwcaldw!