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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."
Will Verizon make sure all eat right, bathe occasionally, wipe their ass in the proper direction?
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
What a coincidence that they make an enormous overreaction which frees up countless gigabits of bandwidth!
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).
Political stunt for the win!!!
What happened, pissed off because alt.sex.fetish.piss-on-your-customers is already claimed by T-Com?...
I'd block all access to the internet-- much more effective.
-Devin Jeanpierre
Child pornography has also been found on 3,000 of the 100,000,000 sites that form the Worldwide Web. Verizon will be shutting down access to this service immediately.
Child pornography has also been found being shared by approximately 0.5% of users on peer-to-peer networks. Verizon will be shutting down access to this service immediately.
Ahh, nothing like feeling protected. Pretty soon you'll find you can receive the same level of service and "protection" AS Verizon provides by cancelling your internet service entirely and save yourself $40/month in the process.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Wow, what a huge over-generalization on the part of Verizon. I guess that means you would no longer have access to alt.startrek.creative. Gotta keep those dangerous fanfiction writers away from t3h childrens.
An enlightenment painter would paint a grand house on a lawn; A romantic painter would paint it on fire.
Someone upload some child porn to the Verizon billing site.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups--out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.'"
.088 or greater percentage of sexual predators will they restrict the rest of the state from traveling to that area?
.088 then other states should restrict all travel and communications with NY.
Can we apply the same logic and standard to New York's population. If the state has any areas/counties/towns with a
What about other crimes? After all we are talking about everyone's well being. If NY's overall crime rate is greater than
the same way Republicans are obsessed with Homosexuals.
If you thought GOP was bad in these past 8 years wait until Democrats assume the wheel with supermajority to push whatever nanny-state bullshit they can think of in the name of the "children"
Video games and the internet seem to be the useful idiots for Democrats. Just blame it on violence and child porn to shut things down and generate talking points for the next election cycle. Oh yeah, do that in between paying lip service to net neutrality proponents.
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.
is that it now opens up someone else to be sued.
follow me, on this. right now, the network is *mostly* unfiltered and for many users, they do get a clean unfiltered net feed (home, work, whatever). and so if laws are broken (say you illegally download something), the own-ness is on you. the carrier or the authority policing the carrier isn't at fault since its not them who are guaranteeing a '100% legal internet feed'. they clearly can't say that all things you could pull down are legal and they are just a common carrier. I know that CC status is magical and not all real CC's have it but that's just because our laws in this area are not well fine-tuned yet. any reasonable person knows that an ISP is a service provider just like the water department, electric department or the phone company.
but say that they now have the job of regulating the legality of all things you could net-access. then, if you -do- find some song or other 'illegal content' and you do manage to download it, you SHOULD be free and clear. right? afterall, there is now a policing layer (a 'great firewall' if you will) between you, the user, and the ISP or upstream service provider. if they take on the job of filtering and 'ensuring a clean and legal net experience' then ANY bad deeds you do by downloading files is not your problem anymore.
I don't think they want either side, to be honest. they don't want to be in the regulation business because once you do that in an above-board manner, you should be liable for any faults in your so-called filtering algorithms. if you tell some grandma that 'the net is now safe' and she finds something she does not like, she SHOULD be able to sue your damned ass.
its sad to think that the ISPs are not thinking far enough in the future to see where this leads. they must insist on common-carrier status and all that that implies. the net is like a water pipe (cue the infamous senator quote about 'tubes!' here) and it should not be filtered or mangled by some well-meaning (cough!) government moran.
responsibility belongs AFTER the demarc point, so to speak. NEVER EVER before it!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Suit: So Cocks called.
John: Cocks?
Suit: Yeah, Cocks. The network for the ballsiest.
Anyway, they want to be hooked up to our digital cable service. What's the capacity on our system right now?
John: Well we still have 50% of our bandwidth av--
Suit: Sweet Virgin Mary! Only 50%? Who's eating up all our bandwidth?
John: Well it's mostly HD football channels, and then peer to peer, and then Usenet.
Suit: Well, we sure as hell can't get rid of the football, and you were supposed to block peer to peer anyway! What in God's name is Usenet?
John: It's a bulletin board system where people can share files.
Suit: Well drop it! I'm not going to limit quality programming for some godless file sharing faggots.
John: But how do we explain that we're arbitrarily dropping a significant portion of our service?
Suit: What are you, stupid? Just say what we always say: we found child porn. Why do I pay you if I do all the thinking?
Bullshit! If child pornography were the real target, they could have simply removed the binary groups. Removing alt.folklore.computers and alt.os.linux in order to avoid kiddie porn just makes no sense.
But dropping all of alt.* just because a few have had child porn floating about on them?
I'd still consider them to be overreacting more than the grandparent poster is on the subject as there's quite a bit more actual useful stuff in the alt.* branch as it was for anything that didn't fit into the normal comp.*, etc. branches of organization in USENET. As someone said, this is a convenient excuse to lose quite a bit of bandwidth consumption on their part.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In other news, automobiles were banned from expressways today in an effort to curb alcoholism once and for all. Items also banned today were kitchen knives amid concerns of forced penis removal, horseback riding in an effort to promote the chastity of young ladies, and bedsheets due to fears of beds not being made.
Does / did anyone actually use their usenet service anyhow?
ISP usenet services are 9 times out of 10 either outsourced, or have terrible retention, spotty coverage, and no propogation.
BitNabber has all my usenet needs taken care of.
Verizon is not blocking access to newsgroups in general. They are just no longer providing servers to host newsgroups themselves. You can still connect to other newsgroup services which exist in multitudes. What's the big deal? I see no problem here...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
It's high up on the agenda of Virgin, actually.
For context, click Parent.
No, they'll just do their best to turn all adults back into children, so there's just one group of people and they can all be protected together.
To my eye, looks like it's been pretty successful so far.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
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.
That old adage comes to mind: "freedom of the press only exists for those with a press".
If we want to have access to all the internet then we have to control our access to the internet. We have to create our own internet service providers. We have to have the demonstrable power to convince politicians (not the loud ones but the ones who actually control things by blocking bills in the early stages) not to interfere with our activities.
Developing the ability to control and/or prevent child pornography distribution through the web would go a long way to convincing loud politicians that we recognize this problem and can control it better than the giant corporations who approach everything with a 'just shut it all down for everyone' approach. This is assuming that the politicians are actually doing this to prevent distribution of child porn. They could be using child porn as a red herring to shut down ALT access to non-teckies because they can't control it.
My point is that if we want to control the access to the web (so that we don't get shut out of parts that are important to us) then we have to be able to do a better job of catching the criminals who use the web than the police or giant corporations can.
The ISP industry should stay out of matters like this or it will be to their own disadvantage in the long run. If they set a precedent of just forwarding the content and not actively deciding what users can get, they will be less liable when somebody does access something. When somebody gets child porn on their network, they can just say "We just provide a gateway to view content. Our industry has never played a role in deciding what gets viewed." It's a slippery slope and this precedent seems dangerous for ISPs.
My ISP [Free, in France] provides usenet access, but constantly snips off groups according to its whims.
Since I use Usenet+NZBs, BitNabber works for me.
Others that might work for you:
Giganews.com - 200 days retention, from 7.99 p/m [SSL available] - no nzb service
SuperNews.com - from 3.95 p/m - the owner / admin Daniel is very hardline against spam, possibly the cleanest provider out there
Whilst it's frustrating that service should be cut, it seems that Verizon is behind the curve on cutting NG access anyhow.
For sanitary reasons, the female of the species should always wipe front to back. (It also seems awkward for the male to do it any other way, but it's not something that's 'required')
alt used to be called Anarchists Lunatics and Terrorists.
But don't tell the politicians that...
We're talking about felony distribution of child pornography. Such material is not "protected free speech" and it never has been. Unprotected speech has a long history of censorship in this country, the court case in the link being just one of many examples. That case is what brought forth and confirmed the argument that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is not protected speech due to the risk of unintended mob violence. Threats of violence is another example of unprotected speech.
Thus, while many on slashdot might not like this fact, it is legal and justified to censor material that causes great harm to another person. And in this case, it is great harm done to a child, for profit. To censor this material is to uphold the right of privacy for those children who have been sexually abused in front of a camera for profit. The distribution of that material is assumed to cause those children involved great personal harm. That harm is far worse than the harm to society in general due to a policy of censorship. Particularly since we're not censoring political speech, but are censoring the commercial product of a criminal conspiracy.
Let's be clear: child porn is essentially a snuff-film.
Finally, Verizon owns that hardware. There are no filters in place across the network to block access to the nntpd port or its encrypted counterpart. End users can continue to purchase newsgroup access from a variety of vendors. They can even use free services to read and debate on USENET. The issue here is not about a right to USENET access, but about a private company choosing to heed the request of a district attorney to block access to criminal materials. That they chose to close a large portion of the service down for business reasons is not relevant to the central issue of children's human rights.
The real surprise is that this happened on the first day in three weeks that a non-pornographic image was posted to the alt.binaries hierarchy . . .
hawk
I like to wipe back to front, it makes my balls smell nice.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Before the Internet, how did they track it down? Huh? How did pervs get their porn? Most likely, they got it through the mail or stores, via porn distributors that put up a legal front, but did some percentage of their biz in illegal material. To bust guys like that, back then, must have taken some effort. You can't just open mail willy-nilly or search store inventory looking for the needle in a haystack.
Now, I'm as much against warrantless search as the next guy, but with kiddie porn on the 'net, you can quietly ask Verizon to monitor a suspect's traffic. They don't have to comply, but if they don't you just get a warrant and then they have to comply. Then, getting all the guy's traffic is as easy as adding him to a list in a file. You don't have to tamper with his mail, which might give him telltale clues he is being watched.
Remove kiddie porn from the Internet, and you remove an electronic audit-trail that might even bring us all the way back to the original source, all in the comfort of the agent's office. Remove it from the 'net and you drive it into a new underground. Most likely it would be retro to whatever was used before. Agents would have to go back "pounding the pavement" more, and with the cost of ga$ going through the roof that's not likely to happen.
In other words, it will just go further and further underground. Pervs are as lazy as anybody else. If it's easy to find on the 'net, they'll find it.
Taking it off the 'net only makes sense if you believe that having it there is likely to "convert" normal users into pedophiles. That's probably as bogus an argument as the idea that having gays in your neighborhood is going to convert people. I don't have a study to back it up though. Do they?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm shocked, shocked that file sharing is going on here. Round up the usenet servers and have them shot.
I don't think the question is, does your balls smell nice; the question is how did check?
alt.sci.physics was one of my favorite newgroups -- a few real scientists, but mostly armchair physicists trading crackpot ideas. Always made for an interesting read.
How about just blocking the 88 groups that have been identified as carrying child porn? That's quite doable and they could even include a provision to drop other groups if they had more than X reports of child porn in them as well. That way they only drop groups that are known to have child porn in them but keep the rest for their customers.
I think Cuomo's mostly concerned that they took no action on the groups they reported in the sting. If they did something like the above it would probably satisfy him because they're acting on reports (which they should have been doing anyway).
It was really nice of Verizon to make this announcement.
They've been sending me FIOS advertisements about one-a-day. I was almost ready to jump from Time Warner to get the faster speeds, but with P2P blocking "bandwidth shaping" and censorship, who needs faster speeds to access nothing?
We're Verizon! We'll give you 20Mb/s of the fastest nothing you ever saw.
Stupid fucker. The child pornographers will just pick on a non-alt newgroup to invade and post on, but the rest of us will lose alt. Moron politicians -- they know nothing about the Internet and should leave their dirty stinking hands off it.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
. . . the child pornographers will just user other newgroup servers. Ok, so Verizon chops alt.* from *their* server. Is there anything that prevents a user from connecting to a third-party news server over the Internet? What does this accomplish other than pander to the NY AG?
Hmm, natural fertilizer. Is that the secret to penis enlargement?
Those posts of child pornography on Usenet are traceable evidence of crimes exploiting children. The state AGs should be tracing the evidence back to the criminal exploiters and busting them. Instead, they're driving it underground, where it's harder to stop. First use the evidence to find and bust the perps, then remove the evidence from the public where it does further harm. Or the perps will just disappear, then pop up again creating more harm to more kids.
This foolish shortsightedness isn't just prosecutors and cops misunderstanding the newfangled Internet. This is cops and prosecutors failing to understand how free expression is always a benefit, when you understand it enough to use it right. That's a lesson at least 200 years in the making. It's about time Americans forced our "justice" system to get smart about it.
--
make install -not war
Another thought... Usenet allows the free exchange of commercially produced child porn. It's child porn piracy.
Now if music piracy is supposed to hurt the music industry, and movie piracy is supposed to hurt the movie industry, then shouldn't child porn piracy hurt the child porn industry? By shutting down child porn piracy, aren't the feds and the ISPs helping the commercial producers of child porn by protecting their business model and intellectual property rights?
(Hee hee, I figure a post that equates the RIAA/MPAA with pedophiles has to get a +5)
I've been using Internet since roughly 1991. Before that I used X.25 a lot. Obviously, I make my living by working in network/internet related areas, and spend half a bloody day using Internet in one way or another.
I have never, ever, in my life, found a child porn, nor seen it.
It is pretty simple, I think. I have never looked for it, so I never found it.
If a dumb politician thinks that him looking for something and then finding it (and he was looking for nothing less than child porn) is a reason to be upset, well... I feel sorry for the people he represents.
1.5TB a day as a huge commitment? You really think that? This is a major corporation, 1.5TB/day*14days = 21TB. That is nothing to a company of their size. Assuming triple redundancy, you could still fit all the rackmount hardware into something smaller than the average linen closet.
They probably spent more on the press release for this than it costs to maintain that hardware for a year.
We found suspiciously planted child porn in unusual newsgroups like alt.gardening or such.
All true. It's not about bandwidth. It's about politics.
What Verizon has accomplished here is getting this stuff off it's servers, thereby reducing the heat from a local New York politician, who still has no handle on third-party usenet services not located in New York.
my point about only 8 out of 1000 websites was an analogy.
....now lets move onto the juicy bits. - That pesky Vonage traffic is travelling over our users networks and Verizon don't make any money form this, lets start blocking that traffic. ....You like watching video's from Netflix using their Roku internet set-top box, cool we'll just have to charge you for this. .....Listening to a radio station that isn't in the Time Warner 'family', sorry this is tier 2 internet class traffic so the audio might be a little jittery from time to time, sorry about that.....
sorry you didn't get the link.
maybe the post below will help you get the point
Cheers,
Dean
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-so-now-it-begins.html
Sent: Sunday, 15 June 2008 4:49 PM
To: Dean Collins;
Subject: Re: And so now it begins......
What motivation would they have to do that? Just dumb or nefarious in this instance?
---
Andrew Cuomo - gets press, and to be seen to be doing something, (probably being advised by people who have 'ulterior motives' and he's too stupid to know the difference).
Verizon - heaps of reasons; far too many - but here's my interpretation.
Usenet is an ancient 'spooky' space on the internet that no one but geeks and porn swapping perverts visit, by blocking 99.7% of UseNet's under the guise of getting rid of kiddy porn Verizon are able to establish a precedent that 'managing' internet access for the betterment of society is a good thing.
The thin edge of the wedge has been struck.
After that it's easy to start blocking off entire country domains, I mean no one has any good reason for reading blogs in Iran correct?
Ok now lets move to something that some people will care about but with 2 sets of prior acts Verizon will be covered. Lets block all P2P traffic, I mean P2P is only used by people swapping pirated music and video's - yes some 5% of the population may complain but most of them will be kids and not voters so we should be able to cover any publicity backlash.
If you want to hear from people who are far better at explaining this check out http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/net-neutrality.html
Like I said it all started with some dumb politician who had probably never used Newsgroups before and had some carrier stooge whisper something into his ear about 'think of the children'......the rest is history.
As a society we should be strong enough to accept that any technology solution to a society problem will never work and any politicians who suggest otherwise are either too dumb to be making that decision (e.g. swallowed a story from a lobbyist) or is acting in coercion.
But what do I know, I'm just a disgruntled geek.
Cheers,
Dean
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.
I participated in this same debate at two different universities.
So what's different now? Everything.
This isn't just one university. This will soon be most major ISPs. If most U.S. ISPs drop alt.*, the posters will just hammer big 8 groups. With NZB files, the actual group things are posted to doesn't matter very much. Issuing cancels will be a full time job for the few that care to fight the flood.
What's sad is that this really threatens the argument that ISPs are common carriers and aren't responsible for filtering content. Sure, I understand the different between filtering and not providing groups on your NNTP server, but people that wear suits and robes for a living don't. If alt.* falls what's next? All of Usenet.
Usenet is an unusual asynchronous, disconnected, communication model and in a way, is an almost priceless anonymizer. There is (almost) no link between the sender and receiver of a message. I've always wondered how we've let an almost untraceable communication system survive.