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Proposed Usenet Death Penalty for Australia's Largest ISP
supine writes "David Ritz has issued a request for discussion on applying a Usenet Death Penalty to Australia's largest ISP, Bigpond (and it's parent company Telstra)." This brought back to memory the time when AOL was facing similar charges.
You've obviously never tried to grab the newest oscar screener SVCD DVD rip the day after it was sent out..
It comes in quite useful at time like these..
Click here to read too much about my personal life
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If only we could also have smtp bans for domains that don't have a valid abuse@ address.
Have you checked rfc-ignorant.org?
From the site:
UDP, or Usenet Death Penalty, is a means by which site administrators and others around the world attempt to enforce the cooperative nature of usenet on an uncooperative member of that community...
An Active UDP is one in which every message posted to usenet by the offending site is canceled or failed to be propagated.
If it reduces spam, I'm all for it. I for one have read far too many ads for health plans, penis enlargements, low-interest credit cards and fabulous marketing opportunities!
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
This happens all the time. If a few members of a high-school basketball team keep brawling with the opposing team and the school does NOTHING. Eventually that school will not be allowed to play until they clean up their act. This my not be fair to the players who don't fight but it is reasonable.
There is no cabal
If you are using Windows, and have Outlook Express on your computer, open it, then here's your todo list:
1. "Tools" menu => "Accounts"
2. "Add" button => News
3. Yadda yadda
4. For the news server, you must find the address of a news server that you have access to. It is likely that your ISP provides one for you. If your ISP doesn't offer one, or if you're too lazy to find out, you can search newzbot for a server.
5. After putting the newsserver in, click next however many times you need, then click finish. Click "Yes" to download the newsgroups from the news account you added.
6. Double click on a newsgroup in the list to subscribe to it.
The newsgroup you selected is now visible on the left. Click on it to read all the messages.
I can't imagine how bad Usenet would be without UDPs. It's totally overrun by spam as it is. You can't go into any unmoderated thread without seeing hundreds of Lolita and girl/horse sex adverts. I've never gotten a good answer to a tech question from Usenet either. Is Usenet even relevant anymore, being full of spam and the technical illiterates? I find sites such as Slashdot and the Futuremark boards to be much more informative.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
you know not of which you speak.
to be effective "enough" a UDP only needs the participation of a couple dozen of the biggest usenet server admins. And for someone like Telstra, they will participate.
The second phase of this proposed UDP, will only require the participation af a few cancelbots. While some servers ignore cancels, it is to their advantage to obey pgp-signed cancels, and cancels that can be verified as coming from a good source. Those who ignore these cancels, will simply be storing the extra articles themselves, and hurting only themselves and their peers.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet.
I find this an odd comment. With a decent newreader (MT-Newswatcher for you Mac folks), USENET has features that web boards can only dream of: it's still years ahead of anything else on the web for discussion. Can you imagine how much nicer /. would be with the ability to create intelligent scorefiles with color-coding? Or no more waiting for a web page to load? No blinking ads covering half the page?
Through Google (nee Deja) I can get USENET postings back to the early 90s almost instantly. Web boards often don't archive, so everything there is lost after a few months
I can't get USENET at my current work (save through Google) so I spend time on /., K5 and FARK. Other than the Photoshop contests on FARK, I can't think of anything any of these boards does better than trn+a good news feed did back in 1990.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
From the UDP FAQ:
Isn't this censorship?
No. Firstly, the legal definition of censorship in the USA (where, unfortunately, most of the spammers are, even when they use resources outside the USA) is that it can only be done by the government - private entities can not, by definition, be guilty of censorship. Outside the US, laws are varied. Secondly, even ignoring that definition, and using the uninformed public's opinion of what censorship is [preventing someone from saying something that they don't like], this does not fall under that criteria, either. The articles being canceled or shunned by pathhost aliasing are not picked and chosen by their content - ALL articles from the offending site are canceled or shunned. It has nothing to do with likes and dislikes - it has to do with abuse by one system of all of the other systems on usenet.
Now perhaps you disagree with that, but I thought I'd point it out. Personally I agree with it. Also, if you haven't read the entire FAQ, you should. There are a lote of interesting points made. Please don't bother to reply to this post unless you have. Here's another good one:
So if you cancel everything from the UDP site, don't legitimate people get canceled, too?
Yes. One of the driving forces behind forcing compliance with generally accepted guidelines is that the ISP's own legitimate users (if any) can bring pressure to bear on their rogue ISP. Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure.
Aw crap, ninjas!