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Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy
modemac writes
"Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8."
Verizon subscribers can still access them through Google Groups, for example.
I think the issue for many people is more about being blocked from accessing the alt.binaries.* groups, of which Google Groups doesn't provide access (well, not to the actual binary files at least).
They are just choosing which newsgroups to carry.
Just like every single NNTP server out there.
But don't let that stop you from overreacting, though.
Maybe with Verizon it did, but Road Runner is dropping Usenet entirelly by the end of the month.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Verizon isn't blocking anything, they are just not going to carry anything that isn't from the big 8 ON THEIR OWN SERVERS. That is all they are doing. There is no attempted blocking, no attempted fuck big brotherism, nothing. Anyone who was using the Verizon server can simply use another one (pay or free) and suddenly they have access to all the stuff (legitimate and non) that used to be available from the Verizon server. All that really happened is Cuomo wanted to look good to voters, picked an issue you can't lose (politically) with, started talking to several ISPs, and then they decided that even though what the guy wanted wouldn't solve anything, giving him something to make him happy wouldn't actually hurt anyone, so they said sure. This little bit of theater makes Cuomo look good, it makes the ISPs look good to the (mostly non usenet-using) public, and in actuality doesn't hurt anyone.
Independent usenet providers are often vastly superior to ISP provided usenet anyway(unless they outsource).
But some of us don't understand why we need to "move on" from a superior technology.
NNTP plus a good news reader still beats Slashdot and all other web forums in terms of usability/user-friendliness.
They just save on hardware. Even worse than that, it costs them MORE bandwidth this way.
Keep in mind, most ISPs only pay the big bucks for their internet connectivity. The network between them and you (and all their customers) is MUCH cheaper, measured only in maintenance costs. The internet lines have the same maintenance cost, plus bandwidth costs, on top of base charges.
Before, they transfered all of the news articles Once, using internet bandwidth once, from their upstream new servers to their own.
Customers could get these all from their news server, which can happen by any number of customers any number of times and there is no extra bandwidth fees to the ISP.
Now, all of their users will be transferring news articles from the internet to them, each one taking their share of bandwidth from the internet pipes.
Only the insane would willing switch to Comcast, I was switched to Comcast and my speed dropped and service has been horrible, my friend was off line for 3 days after doing what Comcast told him what to do for fixing his connection problems, and the problem wasn't on his side of the connection. The past 6 months I have had to call them 4 times, and they have yet to give me the correct answer the first time. Three of the times I fixed the problem and had to cancel a service call and the forth time, neither Comcast or me, know why the connection came back.
Depending on the number of people that are actually using usenet on any given network, it could still be less bandwidth to have those people use external servers. If Verizon was hosting most of the news groups out there then they are having to transfer a huge amount of data. Wikipedia lists it as >3TB of data per DAY. Verizon is big but I don't believe they could have enough people using usenet to pull that much traffic every day, thus it's probably less traffic for them to have the people that want it to download it from some external server.