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.

Comments

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[Pathwalker]

If only we could also have smtp bans for domains that don't have a valid abuse@ address.

Have you checked rfc-ignorant.org?

Re:Big deal.

[Motherfucking Shit]

I used to pull from alt.control and alt.test and pull news server that looked like a FQDN and then ping tested them. Then it tried to connect and do a test. I then used them as my 'private news server'. Still, you wanna be careful doing this...

If anyone's interested in open news servers without doing the probing themselves, check out NewzBot. The site tracks a database of news servers accessible to the public. You can even search to see which servers carry a particular group. There aren't as many "big" servers (30K+ groups) as there used to be, but if your ISP's server misses an article, chances are you'll find a server at NewzBot that has it.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[edremy]

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.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[lazyl]

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.