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

Usenset is still Useful

[rf0]

You just need to know which groups to look at. For certain specialist things it can provide decent information and a reasonable community. Also the UDP does work as was shown with blueyonder.co.uk a year ago or so. They were threatened and quickly cleaned up their act when they saw the impact

telstra have problems

[gumleef]

I doubt that this will be resolved by telstra if threatened with action; action will have to be taken.

Telstra have been losing money for a while now due to shoddy work in all of their services. Consumers just wont stand for it any longer, and this is strongly reflected by their dropping share price.
I believe they are losing money at such a rate that they refuse to outlay any on ressurecting this current spam problem - that, or they really are ignorant of the problem (due to incompitance).

Re:telstra have problems

[questamor]

Telstra give a shit, I think. When i've dealt with them and only needed to handle one department, the service and people have been fine. The odd problem, but they've been on-par with anyone else.

Problems come up when one department of telstra need to talk to another. There's just no useful communication between groups, no trust from one section to another.

I once had a billing issue I had to contact telstra about. Billing attempted several times to contact the technical dept that did the work. That just didn't happen after 3 weeks, despite constantly calling Billing.

After a day of phoning around I was able to get through to one of the engineering departments who performed phone work for me, and they immediately saw the error and attempted to get back in contact with Billing. It took another month, and *ME* faxing information sent to me by engineering, to actually get anything resolved.

It could have been fixed overnight if there was appropriate communicationbetween departments. I get the feeling telstra like breaking up into little bureaucratic bundles, each with their own world.

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.

Hypocritical ?

[tmark]

Yesterday, there was an article about the /. effect and most posters seemed to be arguing that /. should not be liable for /. effect-related charges, on the grounds that if you have a website, you're asking for traffic for the world, and that /. should in no way be responsible for notification of the /.'ed website.

Yet when it comes to spam, most posters here are prepared to swing the heaviest hammer they can find at supposed offenders. But I wonder whether this is hypocritical.

Let's consider the parallels:

• email and websites under consideration are both available to the Net public at large
  
• both spam and the /. effect may be unsolicited. While some sites may seek exposure on /., certainly many did not.
  
• both spam and the /. effect can be great inconveniences, but the /. effect can force the victim to incur huge, one-time charges - at least spam costs are absorbable for the average little guy.
  
• there is no good way to opt-out of spam, and no good way to opt-out of the /. effect
  
• spammers and /. would probably both claim it is beyond the scope of their responsibilities to check whether their targets are willing/able to handle increased load due to their activities.
  
• spam companies make money indirectly from inconveniencing their victims, because they provide some of them with useful information (people do buy things from spammers after all). /. makes whatever money it makes from /.'ing its victims by using the /.'ed website provide content for its own benefit.
  

Is this a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". ?