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SBC/Pacbell To Filter 90% Of alt.binaries Groups
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I received an email from PacBell.net (Pacific Bell's ISP), stating that they're transitioning their usenet services to Prodigy. They're making a few changes along the way."
He excerpts from the email: "In addition, after evaluating possible copyright infringement issues,
newsgroup usage and the cost of providing newsgroup access, we will no
longer offer some alt.binary newsgroups. For a list of alt.binaries that will no longer be offered, please refer to our FAQ at http://global.pacbell.net/usenet_update.html.' Note that the link currently doesn't go to the right place. After telephoning SBC, I was informed that upwards of 90% of the alt.binaries.* groups are going to be blocked."
we had to do the same thing at our University connection simply becuase the newsfeeed was using a ton of our bandwidth trying to keep up with the alt.binaries.* group. Sucks that upstreams are doing the same thing though.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
However, a good alternative for newsgroup access I have used for a while is:
uncensored-news
The upgrade regularly and I have never had problems accessing them or finding a group. And now they have a special server just for multimedia and binaries...
Just a thought for any of you who want a solution other than an uphill battle with your ISP...
Josh
Although I agree that a big, fat news server does make an ISP more attractive...
when I buy internet service, I want IP routing, PERIOD. I don't *want* to pay for whatever wierd services they think they need to run. I'll do my own mail, dns, everything else.
If tehy don't want to waste resources (legal or technical) in carrying some newsgroups.. fine. I guess it sucks for their customers who like it....
but I've been paying for access to news-servers separately for years now. It just makes sense. They are far less likely to change policies and rip you off when it's their sole business.
The idea of filtering based on content is what is important here. I was under the impression that as long as the ISP "only provided the lines" - that is, was merely a conduit to the Great Big Internet - they were allowed to get away with lots of illegal stuff going on; but as soon as they began to make value judgments based on legality, they were responsible for all further illegal activity. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I was under (sounds reasonable to me, to be honest.)
Filtering based on bandwidth isn't a new thing - this is why we have such a proliferation of Usenet Providers. Lots of ISPs filter to keep down the cost for such a relatively small 'payback' in user satisfaction/use.
But, again, I'm curious - does this make them liable for the illegal content that does get through, since they are now officialy filtering based on legality?
What, me worry?
If PacBell were filtering newsgroups ten years ago, I would be upset, and cry "Censorship", but sadly, in more recent times, the quality of content in newsgroups has gone straight down the crapper. The only content you'll find nowadays is Get Rich Quick spam, bomb recipes, and pr0n. There's no worthwhile content to protect.
I say, let it die peacefully. The intelligent people left newsgroups a long time ago and the only remaining denizens are the pornographers and anarchists who don't deserve a voice in the first place.
"Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or dead." -Kurt Cobain
Comcast@home already censors USENET, both binary and non-binary groups, removing those which they deem inappropriate. I imagine other ISPs are doing the same. It doesn't really surprise me that they would expand this.
... they just don't offer the service anymore. Please consider that offering the alt.binaries newsgroups costs a lot of money: it's a lot of data, which has to be stored, and there's a lot of possible legal implications, which costs a lot of money too, in the US of A.
As far as I see it, everybody is free to go to another news server, with all the binaries you could want. They're not about to block that. They just won't offer it anymore.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Anybody know if Time-Warner Cable puts any restrictions on their ISP customers that your average dial-up $20 a month all you can eat ISP doesn't?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Of course the alt.binaries groups contain a lot of warez/pr0n and gernally questionably legal material. However, there is the occasional alt.binaries.calc-ti, but even google doesn't have the alt.binaries.* hierarchy. This is probably because of it's massive size yet thorough lack of textual information.
While cutting down on their news server costs considerably, this move could backfire on them. If a significant number of their customers actually like and use the alt.binaries groups on their news server, they'll go elsewhere for news service.
The problem with this is that since the news is no longer kept within their own network, that all that traffic is going to have to pass through their mian connection to the internet. They could end up having to spend quite a bit more on bigger pipes as a result of this.
Should be interesting to watch.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
This is an ugly trend...and (hopefully) may help pave the way for alternate ISPs and grassroots movements such as Guerilla Nets and FreeNets.
They are not FILTERING anything. They are just not offering some high-resource-using binary newsgroups any more.
If they were really filtering alt.binaries.* newsgroups, you would not be able to access them from other 3rd party usenet providers.
"And like that
Exec #1: Watch it.. posts on alt.binaries might violate the DCMA...
Exec #2: Well... what if we just dont let them read the groups at all?
Exec #1: Sure... why not... if we stop next to all access then we'll be safe..
Exec #2: Its not like anyone actually reads or posts there anymore...
Exec #1: Exactly.... So whats next on the ajenda?
Exec #2: Hookers?
Exec #1: Lets go..
Is it just me or is this similar to implimenting manditory removal of the human voicebox so that we cant potentially SAY anything bad... *sigh* DCMA...
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
Heathen.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Well, I'm glad you do. And when you can provide an airtight definition of what "the act of entering this site" means, and some explanation of how users can agree to something they haven't seen, then maybe I'll think about agreeing too... or not.
By the way, your reading this post constitutes your agreement to immediately pay $100 into the TomatoMan Gets A New G4 fund. Thank you for your contribution.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Though they have ulterior motives, I applaud the move. Anything that rids Usenet of the binaries is inherently good.
...)
A full newsfeed is 200 to 250 *GBytes* a day, of which only around 5% is text-based discussion. Just by dropping binaries and keeping the same amount of disk space, a news provider increases retention time for *real* discussions immensely. If I had to decide whether I want my ISP to serve incomplete binaries to alt.fan.britney-spears.blow-job or have six months retention for comp.lang.*, I'd prefer the latter (others might have different preferences, though
Get used to it: If you want binaries, pay for it. It's not that bad: 10 bucks a month, and you're in business. Go to Newsguy, Giganews, Supernews, uncensored-news.com, newsfeeds.com but don't expect your ISP to provide everything.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
My ISP (Cablecom/Swissonline, a Swiss cable ISP) stopped carrying ALL binary groups a while ago, since they taking up too much bandwidth. AFAIK all the text ones are available including practically all of the national and supranational heirarchies - uk.* de.* fr.* it.* ch.* at.* africa.* , and some specific heirarchies, like gnu.*, as well as some commercial ones too, like microsoft.*, intel.*, corel.* . I'd guess their newsfeed is pretty large - not all of these groups are really that relevent. In fact, most of them are filled with spam, which sadly seems to have been the fate of Usenet.
I dumped SBC* services months ago explicitly because of usenet service.
.. this was the one I never used.
.. there was a lot of activity in the swbell support newsgroups about this .. most along the lines of talking about class action lawsuits stemming from a rate cap on a service that was explicitly guaranteed at 384k for DSL service
.. even though with the rate caps I had to start downloading stuff before work and finish up when I got home
.. all of the indexs were corrupted and no usenet service for several days. Tech support knows nothing about usenet
.. 45K upstream .. around 2 meg down and a usenet service that is usable enough to follow discussions and follow binaries without spamming groups with repost request.
.. everyone I know who is still on SBC moved on to commercial usenet providers a long time ago.
.. and Time Warner KC / RR jacked they're prices up to $45 .. now that SBC has backed off a bit from advertising they're service.
.. my SBC DSL connection has been disconnected since March .. but when I turn the DSL modem on I still get ATM / DSL link contenuity .. must not be to awful busy if they can left former customers still take a port on the DSLAM>
And it wasn't because of alt.bin* style groups. Just plain discussion groups were affected to.
Here is a short timeline of SBC / PACBELL usenet service.
Once upon a time SBC operated several usable usenet servers.
Each one had acceptable retention times and a good varity of groups to see.
news.swbell.net
news.pacbell.net
news.flash.net
There was also a server in prodigy-land that had a horrible retention rate and skipped articles left and right
Than SBC instituted rate capping at 128K down
SBC than noticed that customers were leap frogging from server to server. In order to pull together each and every single piece of a multipart binary this was required sometimes.
Up until this point the service was still relativly stable
Than there was some large crash
After his point there was barely a single multipart article that came across properly.
So they're service became unusable and at that point I left as soon as my contract expired.
Now I'm using RR in Kansas City
This cut of content is just par for the course for SBC. Although I don't think it will affect many people though
oh
funny thing
Satsuke
i can see dropping binaries, simply because 90% of it is illegal and it's taking 90% of the bandwidth ...just like the "5% of society own 95% of the wealth"
However, of the actual discussions, newsgroups are still very useful. I've used various alt.comp.lang.*, microsoft.vc.public.language, to help fix problems in my code
i've used rec.skydiving and rec.aviation.hang-gliding to find information on both sports (r.s gets at least a hundred ON-TOPIC posts a day)
and i've used various other discussion groups to get a quick answer to something that i couldn't google.
newsgroups -are- still useful. Sure, 90% of it is crap; there's a lot of spam going through them. Just take about ten minutes of your day, and apply a few kill-filters.
And the discussion groups that I regularly visit get very little to no spam at all.
To: deleted@swbell.net
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 11:20 AM
Subject: Attention Usenet Newsgroup Users - Important Information
Dear Southwestern Bell Internet Services Usenet Newsgroup Member,
If you are currently using Southwestern Bell Internet Services Usenet
Newsgroups, we have very important information for you. As you may know,
Southwestern Bell Internet Services has teamed with Prodigy®, a leading
national Internet service provider, as the Southwestern Bell Internet
Services preferred source of Usenet Newsgroups and other Internet related
services.
On July 25, 2001, your newsgroup server, which is currently hosted by
Southwestern Bell Internet Services, will begin a transition to Prodigy. To
continue using Usenet Newsgroups after the final transition date of August
25, you must update your newsgroup software with new server information.
For instructions on how to change your Usenet software, please visit
http://global.swbell.net/usenet_update.html. After August 19, your current
settings will no longer be available.
In addition, after evaluating possible copyright infringement issues,
newsgroup usage and the cost of providing newsgroup access, we will no
longer offer some alt.binary newsgroups. For a list of alt.binaries that
will no longer be offered, please refer to our FAQ at
http://global.swbell.net/usenet_update.html.
For Southwestern Bell Internet Services customer support regarding Usenet,
please call:
* 1-800-NET-HELP for Dial-up Access Customers
* 1-877-SBC-DSL5 for DSL Internet Customers
Thank you for using our service and for your attention to this matter. See
you on your new Usenet Newsgroup service!
Sincerely,
The Southwestern Bell Internet Services Team
Copyright 2001 Southwestern Bell Internet Services, Inc All rights
reserved. Southwestern Bell and Southwestern Bell Internet Services, Inc.
are registered trademarks of SBC Communications Inc. or its subsidiaries.
Prodigy is a registered trademark of Prodigy Communications L.P. Other names
may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I Agree!
Let's also trash out all the Xerox Copiers, since they can be used for Copyright Violation. Better yet, let's destroy all tape recorders since they can be used for Music piracy! Oh god! The VCRs! We almost forgot them! Let's destroy them too! Oh yes, no CDRs will be allowed of course...
This is just ludicrous...
The reall issue here is that they've offered a service, then gone out and reduced it, while not reducing their pricing. Basically it feels like they're violating my contract.
I would love to see the lameness ratio of USENET decrease due to lack of users that were using it primarily for binary transfer, and back to the state it was before the Endless September, and wish more ISPs took this route.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
When I contract with an ISP I want to be connected to the internet at the highest possible speed and reliability. If the ISP is spending time and money subsidizing usenet or free home pages it makes it even more difficult for them to provide me with the level of service I require. I want my ISP to focus their resources on the service I am paying for and that is connection.
At the same time, I subscribe to a commercial usenet service and I want them to focus their resources on article completion and retention. If my news service suddenly started offering connectivity to its subscribers without charging additional fees, the news service itself would suffer. Most people would find that unacceptable and yet they expect their ISP to offer commercial quality news service at no additional cost.
I realize their is a historical backdrop against which most ISPs offer email, home pages and news groups along with connectivity. But the internet market place is evolving and maturing into a more service oriented place. Some things are worth paying for and if you truely value usenet you will subsidize its existence by paying for a premium service.
On the other hand, if SBC is continuing to offer some binary newsgroups and not others than their move cannot be seen merely as a move to improve quality of service for their customers, but must be seen to some degree as censorship. After all, they had to use some criteria other than cost or quality of service to decide which groups to offer or not.
Under these circumstances I think that their motive should not be applauded even though it will almost certainly allow them to increase service levels.
On a closing note, I used to use SCB/PacBell and their service is horrible anyway.
alt.fan.oksana-bayul.small-tits is a good example.
This is also why people who do bin-cancels are total fuckheads.
dinner: it's what's for beer
As long as you never have a problem, then you'll never have a problem. If you do, the first thing you'll have to do is find out what you agreed to, with your fingers crossed. Then don't act surprised at the results.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
As a DSL subscriber to SBC this is no great loss. The binary NG coverage was okay but the fact they cap download speeds at ~30K or so is the real insult; I'll continue to use outside news servers and never miss a beat [no pun inteneded].
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
Heh :)
In my world, inside my head, I thought 90% cutoff was a good thing because I was sure they talked about filtering useless spam in the newsgroups, I've rolled on the floor with joy like stimpy in an episode which I don't remember...
Then someone outside my world came in and explained to me that the 90% figure was in VOLUME not in # of posts... everything around me turned to grey, as I understood that this would filter the best content (p0rn) and leave only the spamming...everything around me faded, in a dark dark grey...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
SBC's previous news server (news.pacbell.net) was very slow, and broken about 20% of the time. Downloading a single article took seconds to tens of seconds. It was so bad I had to drop out of a discussion I started on "comp.std.c++", a low-traffic moderated group, because I couldn't get all the messages in. And this was with a PacBell DSL line. Customers have been complaining loudly about SBC's miserable news service for months.
(PacBell's miserable service has become a front-page issue in the local papers. The SBC merger has been a disaster.)
I'm telling you -- and the moderators will think I'm just blowing smoke -- that the future of ISPs is that we will make our own.
After seeing this info about how to lay your own DSL line, and noticing this (clearly inflammatory but still interesting) piece about wireless grids, it's becoming obvious to me that we are going to end up building some of the network ourselves. Maybe it'll just be the last mile, or maybe we'll be building a nice, humble network to replace the original internet -- a net on which we are not beholden to corporate and government evil.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I'm an sbc internet subscriber and for the most part very happy with my DSL line. I was shocked, though, when I switched to the new news server and saw that almost all the alt.binaries groups were gone. The email was very misleading about just how extensive this was going to be. I'm not really angry about the situation - once upon a time I worked in a small ISP that became part of a large ISP and then got bought out by an even larger Japanese Telecom giant. I fully understand the decision from an operations standpoint -providing full access USENET service is expensive, time consuming, and hard, from a legal standpoint - you can claim common carrier all you want but the DMCA opens the door to all sorts of problems from Entertainment industry lawyers, and from a business standpoint - hardly any of your customers care about news groups, much less binary groups so why bother to offer an expensive service when your customers will be just as happy with a cheap one. Hey, if your an SBC customer and not interested in binary groups you ought to be happy that they made this choice. By all rights, the news service should be better now than ever before. The only thing that really bothers me is the censorship angle because despite all of my business experience and appreciation for anyone, including mega corporations, wanting to make a buck, I still think there are some things more important than money. Or maybe I just want my porn, who knows. In any event, I'll by subscribing to a dedicated USENET provider not only because I want my porn, because I do want my porn, but because it's important to support companies who provide full access to all Internet resources.
The law has changed fairly recently for ISPs with regard to the material they carry. A distinction has always been drawn between a common carrier (the post office isn't responsible for your hate mail; the phone company isn't responsible for your threatening calls) and another provider that has more control over the material.
The only case I know of that hits the issue head on is ALS Scans v. RemarQ, from the Fourth Circuit. http://www.loundy.com/CASES/ALS_v_RemarQ.html
It's a good read. Flip through it and watch Judge Niemeyer try unsuccessfully to understand Usenet...
--
The above is not legal advice, and does not either create or invite a lawyer-client relationship.
Almost every cable provider (that I've seen, that is) has it in their TOS that you can't run an FTP server, some of them also say you can't run a webserver (and hands you a gayass little "personal web space" thing as a consolation prize).
So if you don't mind getting a hardware router to disguise your firewall dishonestly, by all means go with cable.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
"Binary groups either contain legitimate data that has a minority of interested parties... If the data is legal, then it will be available virtually everywhere else as well..."
Minority of interested parties != available everywhere.
Non sequitir. Human error detected.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
There service has GONE way down hill in the last 6 months. I've been a dsl customer for almost 28 months and since the prodigy merger things really SUCK. My line is slower, support IS EVEN MORE CLUELESS, and the things that used to function no longer DO. I have switched over to Astound cable, no Static IP but they answer the phone and actually follow up on calls. PacBell service is the WORST in ANY company I've ever dealt with in ANY field. I would rank them right up there with the IRS and the DMV. For your own sanity and protection, STAY AWAY FROM PACBELL.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
FYI, this isn't limited to Pac Bell. I got a notice on July 27 that SW Bell is also doing this. The exact same message, in fact.
Which brings me to a question. How is it that I submitted this info on that date (7/27), and it was rejected for posting as an article here, but it gets posted today, over a month later. I realize Slashdot gets a lot of submissions, but still. If whether something gets accepted or rejected is based on chance, as it appears to be, what's the point in submitting?
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
they have a holding tank for those that have not gotten fed up enough to leave, and a HUGE SALES force to draw in new suckers (err I mean customers) When the were running their own stuff PacBell was decent i suppose, now they PLAIN SUCK, support, operation, nearly every facet of interaction with PACBELL DSL is painful.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Why would anyone be surprised by this, given the language in the DMCA that makes any copy in RAM of a protected work actionable? It only makes sense that big ISP's are going to want to avoid the liability of putting the alt.binaries.* stuff, very much of which is illegal copies of copyrighted material, into the memory of their servers. You'd think most ISP's would be doing this actually.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I have this service and recently switched to the new server. Most of the binary groups are indeed gone but not all of them. You would think that they would turn off the ones that had the most traffic or maybe didn't specialize in pirated material, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm seeing groups missing like the entire alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.* heirarchy, which isn't suprising since those groups have huge amounts of traffic, but other groups that also have huge amounts of traffic still remain.
For instance, right now I'm seeing these groups still available:
alt.binaries.games
alt.binaries.vcd
alt.binaries.divx
All of which are 99% pirated material and all of which are extremely high volume groups.
I wonder if maybe someone at SBC has an interest in free movies and games. Who sets the standard?
Sigs are awesome huh?
For years on end the discussion has come up about usenet news and all the piracy and such. For as many years, ISPs who host news services have been looked upon as "common carrier" services and are not required to censor. There have been rulings in the past regarding that responsibility and ISPs have historically won all of these based on their status as a common carrier.
I have also read that if they take ANY measure to censor, then they remove their rights to claim the status as a common carrier. This means if people simply create new news groups in order to slip the material through more easily, any given copyright holder can then hold the ISP responsible for letting it through.
If I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be here... so much for that disclaimer.
So is it possible that now they are not to be considered a common carrier and will be therefore liable for the information that passes through their servers? Or instead because their approach is to simply block "known channels" that they can maintain the common carrier status that has historically protected them? Any legal experts want to field this one?
You know, in a way, this defeats the
purpose of the alt.binaries groups, which
exist mainly to keep the stuff that floods
the alt.* groups from flooding the more
mainstream news hierarchies instead .
This will perform the marvellous feat
of getting the copyrighted material out of
the alt. groups and into rec.arts where they
really, really aren't wanted. Thank
you, Pacbell.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
...they HAVE to do this, folks.
You should be bitching at the legislature that created the DMCA and passed it, and the courts that are ruling that the ISP's can be sued for the copyright violations.
And even then, you're sucking wind, because the alt.binaries newsgroups alone require something like two T1s worth of bandwidth alone to provide, and don't make a *DIME* of income for the ISPs.
So which choice should they make:
1) Start charging for Usenet access.
2) Stop providing Usenet access at all.
3) Drop alt.binaries in whole or in part, so that the rest of Usenet can be kept for a reasonable retention period at a reasonable cost.
They're not blocking outbound access on port 119, they're just declining to devote 3Mb/S of bandwidth and (150GB * number of days retention) to providing a service that 99% of their users don't even use, and a large number of the remaining 1% don't get from them anyway.
A spool subscribes/peers/whatevers to carry the groups it wants. They tend to do this by customer interest. It is very rare to find a place that carries *all* of the newsgroups--and it is likely that noen exist at all. As a matter of fact, I'll bet against finding one that carries both the psu.* and iastate.* heirarchies . . .
Each newsgroup carried requires resources, both in disk storage and bandwidth. Cutting high-bandwidth groups saves on both.
Finally, the realistic groups which get cut off? It's the naked.bimbo.* heriarchy--which after a recent audit, a big player found consumed more than 90% of the resources for usenet . . .
hawk, who still thinks allowing mime on usenet was a bad idea