Slashdot Mirror
Usenet Blocking Intensifies
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The war against the alt.* hierarchy of Usenet continues as NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has convinced two more ISPs to drop access to part of Usenet. They've also set up the website NY Stop Child Porn, and convinced California to join them in the fight. In some sense, this is rather like bulldozing the slums to fight crime; sure, it might get rid of a lot of undesirables, but it also affects many innocent people, and everyone will now start migrating elsewhere in droves. The article notes, 'Cuomo's new web site signifies that he's clearly not done yet. It includes contact information for 20 ISPs that presumably operate in New York, and text of a letter to send to them to urge that they sign on to the campaign.' And you thought the Eternal September was bad..."
no more kinky sex stuff on usenet :\ That's the only good part of it, too.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
It's not just (or probably even mostly) about the kiddie porn - it's the software, video, and music that gets shared in the alt.* hierarchy, too. And the ISPs probably don't mind not providing a service that doesn't do much but cost them extra for bandwidth and storage.
Still, Cuomo's an asshole.
tomorrow the world!
bbs FTW! we dont need no steenkin ISPs.
So whats to stop some enterprising individual from putting all of Usenet on a distributed, encrypted network?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
While Usenet does have useful value, it IS full of kiddie porn.
alt.binaries.pictures.naturism.family
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.young
alt.binaries.pictures.youth-and-beauty
alt.binaries.erotica.teen.female
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.mclt
I mean seriously, do any of these usenet categories contribute anything of value to society???
and start chasing the people that harm the children.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
What really bugs me about this is the fact that the Attorney General has employed bogus threats to get ISPs to comply with his demands.
The AG's allegation is that all these ISPs have engaged in deceptive practices by on the one hand having terms of service that prohibit illegal content, and on the other hand failing to actively screen such content. If the AG's legal theory were correct, prohibiting illegal content would create a responsibility to screen all such content, and from what I can see it doesn't even matter whether the content actually originates on the ISPs servers.
Folks, the Attorney General's behavior is blatantly unethical. He's using false legal claims to bring down legitimate forums, and the ISPs are bending to his will.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
This will be no more effective than spam filters anyway. Block any group named "kiddy porn" and they'll rename it to k1ddy p0rn, and all the way down to "kay didalee dee pooArn" Filter it by the binaries and you create a race between the sick fucks and the police. One side will make undetectable binaries, the other side will want to detect them. And you'll push up demand for stuff that hasn't already been passed around ;_;
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
One of those nice little features of usenet is that people can *create* groups. If they ban the entire alt.* hierarchy, people are just going to create new groups outside the alt hierarchy for everything, legal or not. This will, of course, be an enormous headache to sort out since there will be *many* new groups being created for each existing group and it will take time for people to agree on which ones to use. Perhaps some of the new names will even make sense...
e.g. startrek.ds9, music.lossless or porn.bigtits.
they don't gotta burn the books
they just remove 'em
Now I can be protected from alt.rec.motorcycles
I'll miss it, but after all, it's for the children.
Also, there should be no "content" on the internet not owned by a benevolent large corporation.
Losing alt.rec.motorcycles is worth it to serve our new masters.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
There are moments when I really miss the BBS world. Yes, I love my broadband connection over the internet, but I remember a time when I could dial into a BBS, no snoopes, no riaa, nothing but me and folks that could try to share at ridiculous slow rates compared to today, but without the crap we have to deal with today,
So now ISPs may block access to usenet? lets see, my options where I live are DSL through AT&T or cable through Charter. Wow, like I will be able to choose a path were I wont be blocked!
Yes, I remember BBS and can only imagine how we can circumvent this POS called the Internet and move forward to a time where I could "connect" without friggin Big or little brother watching me. (the tense change was intentional)
I think I'll just sip on my third vodka and club and ponder what I can do.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
This whole thing is really sad. I love usenet. It's basically the only way I form more than passing personal relationships online. It's a great way to learn about and stay up with anything you're interested in. My ISP completely dropped usenet access last month.
I suspect that a lot of usenet users are simply going to give up at this point. There's been a vast amount of spam recently for knockoffs of shoes, purses, and watches. Many people whose ISPs have given up are not going to go to the trouble of finding affordable usenet access. Personally, I tried paying octanews, who ripped me off. Then for a while I used google groups, which reminded me of how much better a newsreader is than a web browser for participating in usenet. Finally a slashdotter recommended astraweb, which is working great for me now. Many people who had been using text-only usenet may not realize that you can pay for usenet access by the gigabyte rather than by the month, which means you can basically pay $10 and have usenet access for the indefinite future.
I mentioned usenet to my sister the other day, and she asked me what it was and why I wanted to use it. I actually had a hard time explaining it until I thought about it later. Basically, it gets the job of running a discussion group done way better than web browser interface. It's also noncommercial and very general -- none of this stuff about screwing around with some specific web-based group that will evaporate in a few years and that has no world-wide profile.
Find free books.
Just wait...if Cuomo discovers that child porn is shared via HTTP, he might force ISPs to drop access to the web.
I have dug a lot of Cuomo's recent suits for their customer/consumer-friendliness (recently he settled with Verizon when they advertised unlimited cell phone use and then dropped customers who talked too much, and also sued Dell for failing to deliver support). This is kind of silly, though. I mean, it's essentially declaring war on a protocol. It reminds me strip #2 of Get Your War On.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I guess the predictions about .xxx are correct, get every one together and then close the space.
People will find a way. Kinda like life don't you think.....
Long live the usenet!
Seriously, though. There are very, very few people left who use the USENET for anything real.
I mean, give me a break, the alt groups were a problem 10 years ago, and some ISPs are still carrying them? That's just stupid. When we were carrying the alt groups at BEST we had to set the article timeout for the high-bandwidth groups to 1-day, and that actually did a pretty good job stopping all the idiots trying to download 5000 part port movies over their dialup modems. They just couldn't keep up before the stuff timed out.
ALT had a signal to noise ratio of 1:1000 10 years ago, I'm guessing its more like 1:50000 now. Only a fool carries it. There are plenty of other ways people can exercise their freedom of speech (and most do, in other ways now).
-Matt
Just as his predecessor Mr. Spitzer's — also known as "fucking steamroller" — was in prosecuting activity, in which he himself engaged for years (his other unethical traits could fill a book). I wouldn't be surprised, if Mr. Cuomo gets caught with child porn in the next few years...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You don't talk about USENET.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's quite easy to simply stop carrying the feeds for those groups. What this action is, is the equivalent of using thermonuclear bomb to kill a fly. I'm sure that out of the multiple thousands of groups in the alt.* hierarchy, there's probably some kiddie porn. For all I know, there might be some in the free.* hierarchy, but I have zero interest in searching through all the hierarchies to see if I can turn up any kiddy porn. I guarantee you it isn't present in the alt.help.*, alt.health.*, alt.animal.*, alt.fan.*, or the alt.sport.* groups. Even looking through the list of the alt.binaries.* groups, they're overwhelmingly obviously not kiddie-porn groups. But hey, somewhere in there there might be some.
Saying Usenet is "full of kiddie porn" is pretty much a lie. There are a lot of groups in the alt.hierarchy I've belonged to over the years, and still do, and I've never seen any. However, I've always used the rule of "if it looks like something you're not going to want to see, then don't go there!
That would be slightly saner.
twitter and "inTheLoo" are the same person.
And as an aside to the public service announcement, I have to say it's hilarious to see him trying to shill his own posts with accounts that are all posting at -1...
It's not just the alt.* groups or the binary groups. My ISP (Time Warner) dropped usenet access completely last month. I'm sure that's what the other ISPs will do soon as well. Gawd, I remember calling my ISP when their news server went down, and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone on the phone who had even heard of usenet, or would admit that they (at that time) provided such a service.
Find free books.
Why not go after and charge the ISP's themselves, then? Hey Attorney General -- I know a few companies who have child porn on their servers.
There are other ways to put yourself out there without Usenet you know. Wonder what the AG thinks about the alternatives? Heh.
http://www.nystopchildporn.com/ - is that like http://www.expertsexchange.com/ or http://www.kidsexchange.com/ before they added their hyphens?
Or are they trying to lure in the kiddie-porn people, hoping they'll be looking for New York'S Top Child Porn?
Whenever there is an industry that has a social problem linked to it's products or byproducts, the industry has two choices. 1. clean up the problem yourself, or 2. pretend there isn't a problem, and wait until the government cleans it up for you.
The 'internet industry' has decided the latter course of action. I have seen hundreds of stories on slashdot about the evils of censorship. I think I have seen maybe 1 or 2 stories about stopping pedophilia. It is not that nerds are pedophiles, it's just that they feel no responsibility for the ways their product (the internet) is used in brand new ways by sick people to hurt others.
You have this logo of Einstein, you paste it on all your science stories. But apparently, you have learned nothing from Einstein, for if he had anything to teach us at all, it is that we are responsible for the consequences of our creations, and the effect they have on people's lives. No man is an island and nobody lives in a bubble.
If Internetania, including slashdot, had been working as hard to stop child exploitation as it has worked, say, on stopping spam, or stopping memory leaks in compiled languages, then the government would not have to step in and do the job for you.
But you let it fester. You just assumed that alt.kiddie.sex, alt.child.rape, alt.stories.incest.preteen, or whatever was not your problem, not your concern, and you could look the other way. Well, fortunately, you people do not run society, in a democracy everyone is supposed to have a say, and a lot of those people are social workers, survivors, and family members of abused kids, and they don't really think 'alt.binares.preteen' or whatever is something that they can turn away from and pretend doesn't exist.
This is only true on the alt.* heirarchy. On the Big 8 you need to go through a review process to have additional groups added.
I hear they are currently working hard to eliminate vowels from the vocabulary also on the grounds that they are found in numerous vulgar words and if the kids cannot use vowels it will severely limit their ability to cuss. Let's hope they do not convince Webster to remove the vowels.
At which point they'll just ban it entirely. They're already using overkill, what's the differences between a nuclear and a thermonuclear bomb if you don't care about the target's safety?
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Cops suck.
This is my sig.
I wonder what the connections are between Cuomo and the **AA?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There are plenty of Alt.binaries that are not just kiddie porn.
Its the same old problem of destroying legal "tools" or "methods" of communication that may harbor bad things.
Its the same old problem all over again. Alt.binaries.sex.amateur, while full of spam, is certainly perfectly legal for amateurs to post naked pictures of themselves. Sure its sex oriented, sure its full of spam... but it does not mean the government can just destroy it at will. EVEN IF some sick fuck from outside the country decides to flood it with kiddie porn with subject headers that appear to be of legal age.
Its always possible to trade metallica songs under the name "my dads band.mp3"
Where will people now share pictures and movies, music.... ? I ask this because whatever you think of copyright infringement... EVERYTHING has a copyright. If I film my friends having fun and post it on alt.binaries.home.videos, I'm sharing my video through newsgroups... and it is copyrighted... by me.
Should i now not be able to use the newsgroups because other copyright holders are more important than I?
Should we rip down the internet because child porn is available on it?
Why are we destroying ourselves to stop a few?
What is really more important?
This post was written Fri Sep 5428 18:59:58 EDT 1993
worried about other people's sexual perversions? They have enough of their own to worry about as it is.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
TWRR dropped Usenet because they were sending too much money to Newshosting for their outsourced news server, and Cuomo gave them a convenient excuse.
Eventually we'll have to unite and fight back against censorship, shutdowns, throttling, surveillance, and government control.
Imagine... the first "virtual revolution".
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Cuomo isn't an attorney, he's a politician.
He's playing the "Ooooh ooooh look at MEEEE!! I'm stopping those evil kiddy porn traders from hurting kids! I'm going to huff and puff and blow their house down!!!" game.
Of course nothing he is doing is having any sort of an effect whatsoever, but then that isn't the point. The point is that the average dimwitted (but I repeat myself) person doesn't knows very little about computers and absolutely nothing about usenet. But they sure do vote! So when Cuomo shakes his stick and growls at imaginary hobgoblins, the voters think well of him, and remember that good impression come election day.
Unfortunately the only real way to stop someone like him is to give him REAL problems to deal with and REAL bad guys to chase after.
This is what happens when you get rid of the mob, people like Cuomo have too much time on their hands.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I used Usenet way back in the day when it was the primary--nay, just about the only way to find like-minded people to discuss topics of interest. Particularly the alt hierarchy.
But now I find that web site forums, Google/Yahoo groups and email lists have supplanted Usenet. I haven't found any content I was looking for for a really long time on Usenet and haven't found a reason to delve there myself. I think the last time a search returned Usenet was a tech support question I asked like 4-5 years ago. We used it a little bit for Mozilla coordination but even then it felt like the bastard child of communication--bug reports, IRC and email lists were the method of choice.
It's definitely a sad day, killing a fly with a sledgehammer, etc. etc.--but how relevant is Usenet anymore really? Is it actually still heavily used and I just don't happen to know anyone who uses it?
Ding! Surprised more people haven't figured that out. The ISPs get to dump a bandwidth-intensive and sometimes even outsourced service. And as a bonus, they can say they're helping "protect the children."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
There are some sick things on usenet. Control does need to be exerted over the content of these groups, but outright censorship is not the way. I'd support an outright lack of service until the legitimate groups can be separated from the ones hosting illegal content in each jurisdiction. That is the legal, and open way to go for this. Outright state that its not the same, but that you are creating a derivative of purely legitimate content and not carrying the the original in any form.
Frankly, I've been amazed for years at Usenet's continued slipping under the radar. It's interesting that these days it's considered a kind of advanced or very geeky part of the internet, when in the old days it was often our first foray into global networking (after FIDOnet, of course!).
Increasingly, it seems like Usenet is being hosted by a few large, dedicated Usenet providers, and ISP's just subscribe to them for their users, which is understandable. Who wants to maintain an NNTP server?
Only problem is it makes it easier to take down.
The stupids, now that they are starting to finally grasp the true power of the internet, are naturally keen to see it destroyed...because they're stupid. We gotta remember who's right in this struggle, and the importance of protecting unpleasant and unpopular speech--including filez, warez, movies--everything. If you can keep me from sharing data you don't want shared, you can control what I say. There's no two ways about it, you can have one or the other--free speech or control over content.
Besides, didn't I read a year or two ago how some of the big Usenet providers were working with the Feds to try to filter out the kiddie porn? I highly approve of that action, and I think thats where we need to draw the line.
expandfairuse.org
You nerds voted for Spitzer, Cuomo, and the other Democrats. You were warned multiple times that the left stands for "the good of society" above individual liberties. If they think that something is bad for society, they ban it.
Owning a gun is bad for society. Driving a car is bad for society. Smoking a cigarette is bad for society. Drinking alcohol before you are 21 is bad for society. Owning a little house that you can afford is bad for society -- if you can't afford a 20 acre McMansion then you should live in an apartment with the other hoi polloi.
And now, reading alt.* groups is bad for society.
You listened to the seductive lure of socialism. You brought it upon yourselves. I have no sympathy.
I maintain the mostly misunderstood, contrarians view on this:
information is never evil
I don't care how horrible the image, how awful the sound, how shocking or offensive the video, or even how criminal the act that made the information... the information, by itself and after the fact, is NOT evil and, in my opinion, the US runs a horrible slippery slope by making some information "illegal" to possess. What next, burning books again? Get permission to learn something? See something? Know something?
When laws are crafted [for the sole reason] to try and curb market forces, they are in the wrong place and usually fail. Laws are the system we have to direct behaviors so society works and people are safe from each other (note: not from themselves). Mostly, the market and the financial drivers behind it is a completely different thing.
Law enforcement needs to do their job, and stop people from preying on other people, whatever their age. We need to fund them to the level they need so they can accomplish it, and hold them accountable for the results. Really. Like so many other places, it is getting harder with technology progression and with rate of technology change for law enforcement to stay up with things but that failure to adapt on their part does not justify lazy practice down the line or the erosion of core principles in how society works. Nor does it mean making ill-formed laws or government agencies where they dont need to be. Law enforcement needs to aggressively find, prosecute and jail people who harm others and break the law.
And we need to call the idea that some data bits are "illegal information" for what it is: "government thought police".
I have always believed that the flaw of the internet was in fact one of its strengths, The idea that it is a web of unrelated legal entities routing traffic. Once one starts to think about which traffic to route, the internet as a "free" (as in freedom) medium breaks down.
This is exactly what we are seeing today.
The problem with the internet is the same problem we have with the U.S.A. Fascism! The joining of government and industry is a dangerous precedent and strategy.
Just remember, Hitler (no godwin here, actual history) was fighting terrorists and protecting the children. We should be very suspicious of government that employs industry for its objectives because that mean industry will employ government of its objectives.
With RIAA, MPIAA, the telecoms and ISPs, and the new FISA bill can we ignore this any longer?
Usenet, smooze-net.
As longer as gopher still works. That is all I or anyone else who loves the Internet should care about.
One way around this, is setup and run you're newsgroups server.
I have been doing this for years, and have feeds from some of the largest paid providers for free.
Imagine if it didn't have an unnecessary (and incorrect!) apostrophe and said "your".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What was hilarious was when the service would go down, and I would call Time Warner about it. It was just silly trying to get a tech support person who even understood what usenet was. They would tell me that they they weren't the Usenet company, and I had to call Usenet directly. They would think I was talking about Google groups. They would refuse to acknowledge that they had any such service, even when I would point out to them that there was some server called something like news.rr.com, which had been working the day before.
Find free books.
Child Porn did not exist before Usenet and with the banning of alt.* it is officially wiped off the face of the earth.
Good show in trying to quote Commissioner Pravin Lal from the classic game by Sid Meier, Alpha Centuari.
You may want to consult this arguably definitive list and update your sig, though:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri#Peacekeeping_Forces
Cheers
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
Go on - you know you want to :-)
Tomorrow: the .ORG, .NET, and .COM TLDs get blocked from major ISP nameservers.
After all, there are a few .COM domains out there that contain illegal porn.
There may be some legitimate sites to use the .COM TLD, but "a small price to pay", for keeping the information superhighway clean.
The ISPs have agreed to feed only the Big 8 from their servers. There is no blocking. Here is what Verizon says on it support page.
"I use Newsgroups frequently and access different groups outside the Big 8. What should I do?
We recommend using a general news provider. Verizon will not stop anyone from gaining access to content of their choosing from an external news provider."
ADD ISP ADDRESS HERE
RE: Stopping child porn on the Internet
Dear ISP:
I am sure you are aware of the New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's campaign that claims it is to rid the Internet of child porn. So far, several major ISPs have fallen for the lies perpetrated by AG Cuomo and agreed to a code of serious misconduct to broadly overreact and shut down a huge portion of the Internet that has nothing to do with child porn. I am a subscriber to your services and am concerned that you might also be mislead by these lies and end up committing to the destructive agenda set out by Attorney General Cuomo. I urge you to contact the Attorney General's Office as soon as possible and tell him you will not participate in this stupid foolishness that will do nothing to actually shut down child pornography. Tell him instead that you will shut down actual sources of child pornography and nothing more than that. Tell him that you do not need to sign any agreements with his office whatsoever in order to do the right thing.
Sincerely,
ADD YOUR NAME HERE
cc: Office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My bad, its been so long since I posted I didn't notice the typo.
It is unreasonable to block the entirety of the alt.* hierarchy. You can accomplish your goals by pushing for a block on alt.binaries.* and alt.sex.*. While I know that there are some meritorious and perfectly legal groups within these two subsets of alt.* this is a reasonable target. It balances the need to satisfy the prudes without having to finely specify what you want ISPs to block and it avoids harming one of the more vigorous parts of Usenet.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's called HTTP and it allows for services that are _BETTER THAN USENET_.
Lets take a look at who really cares about usenet. I can't really guess how many usenet users there are, but according to (1) I can say usenet message volume (this month) is between 9 and 10 million messages per day, including spam which is a very significant portion. Based on (2), I can get a good estimate of the number of internet users world wide: about 1.4 billion.
That comes out to 0.0071 messages per user/per day. It is probably a safe assumption that usenet users responsible for a majority of those posts post atleast once every 2 days (50% of all days). This puts an extremely outward guess on the number of usenet users at 0.0142% of total internet users.
Really, just let the fucking thing die already.
1: http://newsadmin.com/feedmessages.htm
2: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
They can be added, but won't newsserver admins decide whether or not to carry the groups? porn.girls.gone.wild probably already exists, but probably hasn't propagated far.
Your new group name should contain a triple predicate. You'll do much better in alt.config if you follow standard Usenet protocols. ;^)
--
Toro
Good. People should stop using their ISP's news servers for posting or downloading binaries. The retention on those servers just suck and the quotas are too small. There's just too much quality sheep porn to be had for a consumer to waste his time with such bad servers.
Seriously though, I wonder what the effect will be on commercial Usenet service providers like Giganews. I would think the immediate effect would be a leap in new subscriptions; but will it be very long before Cuomo decides to go after these companies, maybe even attempt to block Usenet access outright under some sky-is-falling failed logic. There is a lot of legal content in the alt.binaries hierarchy. There's a lot of porn, but at last I checked, much of it is spam for porn sites we presume to be operating legally. But some of my favorite binary groups have nothing to do with illegal subject matter or pirated goods.
Or you will summon Andrew Cuomo!
(Don't look in the mirror and say "Biggie Smalls" three times neither!)
Just sayin'. ;^)
I'm wondering who's on the USENET backbone these days. Is the discontinuation of these groups or the entire USENET by any of these companies going to create a break in the USENET backbone?
Maybe there isn't a real backbone any more but there was in the old days.
Perhaps Slashdot is filled with users that are just interested in publishing various "workarounds" instead of addressing the real problem. Here I am looking for someone/something to "rally-cry" with, but nobody is home.. .
"Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the smartest thing we ever did.." Homer Simpson
a 'Soviet America' joke in there. The sad fact is that it isn't a joke anymore.
On another note:
When the governement came for p2p,
I remained silent;
I was not a p2p user
Whem the governement closed nntp,
I remained silent,
I was not a Usenet user.
When the governement came for ssh,
I remained silent,
I was not a ssh user.
When the govenement came for http,
there was no way left to speak out.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They can be added, but won't newsserver admins decide whether or not to carry the groups? porn.girls.gone.wild probably already exists, but probably hasn't propagated far.
But that's no reason to assume that porn.attorneygeneral.newyork would be prohibited.
You forgot a biggie: decentralized distribution. Get your Usenet feed from your local (or otherwise preferred) site. If one Usenet site goes down or goes crappy, simply switch to another one. Conversely, if your favourite web forum goes away, you're fucked.
From the front page of "nystopchildporn.com":
"Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office earlier this year conducted an unprecedented undercover investigation that revealed a major source of online child pornography known as Newsgroups, an online service not associated with websites."
... and you still didn't fix the apostrophe.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit. I challenge you to find a single actual kiddie porn picture in any of those groups. I think you won't find any. Just going by the names of the groups is sheer idiocy, especially in alt.* where any joker can start a group at a whim under any name (and maybe two or three providers will even actually carry it).
You should write to all these independent Usenet providers. Maybe you'll convince them to have an epiphany and instantly drop their service to their hundreds of thousands of customers.
You're confusing alt.* and alt.binaries.*. There are plenty of good and active text groups in alt.*. In modern terms, the bandwidth they consume is insignificant. There is no reason you should have to carry binaries.
And then of course there's the Big 8 hierarchies, which you conveniently declared dead right along with alt.binaries.* even though none of them carry any binaries. Please stop conflating issues.
Telco's and cables companies are rational utility maximizing decision makers. That means if they can save a buck by eliminating a service they will. I really like alt.certification.* and comp.* but apparently it's more important for Cuomo to get headlines and ISPs to save a buck. .binaries newsgroups in which large files (frequently pornography or pirated media) are often posted publicly. A small sampling of the change (measured in feed size per day) follows:
I ran across this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#History
Over time, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased. It is important to note, however, that much of this traffic increase reflects not an increase in discrete users or newsgroup discussions, but instead the combination of massive automated spamming and an increase in the use of
No citation of course. The propaganda machine is in full force.
I work for a data processing company in Australia, where I oversee a team of FIVE full-time operators who each spend eight hours a day, five days a week scanning "Working With Children" license applications on behalf of the Department of Justice...every volunteer for sporting, religious, educational etc organisations, schools, daycare centres, you name it! The state I cover has only got a population of 5 million, and these guys can scan in 400 applications an hour EACH...and the backlog grows every...damn...day. The hysteria is everywhere.
his last predecessor was obsessed about prostitutes in all shapes and forms.
Does the girl thing bother you more than the boy thing?
You remind me of the old joke:
A farmer catches his buddy fucking a goat in his barn.
He says "What the hell you doin' with that goat?"
His buddy says "well, I'm pretty horny, so I was fuckin' a goat"
The farmer laughs and says "Well, are you going to fuck my steer too?"
And his buddy replies "Hell, no! I ain't no homo!"
I didn't see anything sexual about the LHS pic. Seeing that as sexual is very much like the victorian thinking that made seeng a woman's ankles was depavity presonified (but practically having the nubs bust out was a-ok!).
The RHS was sexual. Or at least extremely titillating. Whether this is KP depends on what age they are. InJapan, it could be they are absolutely legal (14 years plus). In Kentucky (I think), not (21 years+).
That's what we're getting in here. You want to stop X, X is faciliated by Y, so getting rid of Y should get rid of X. Easy conclusion, but a fallacy.
Child porn was around years before the internet existed, and no matter how you crack down on internet propagation thereof, you won't stop it. Why? Because the internet is not the medium it was created for. If you wanted to get rid of, say, MMORPGs, then yes, getting rid of the internet would probably solve this problem.
If you want to fight child porn, don't try to eliminate the propagation means (you can't, it's much like trying to mimic Sisyphos rolling his stone uphill), eliminate the source. You have pictures of the perpetrators, for crying out loud!
Btw, your daughter should be safe. Or rather, it's in your hands whether she is. A friend of mine is a social worker, specializing in just that matter. In a nutshell, whether a child gets into such a situation depends mainly on his or her parents. It usually is parents not loving them enough, or parents "loving" them too much (if you catch my drift...).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you're really about the discussions then there's Individual for 10 euros a year. Very good at sorting out spam.
I don't like big tits. If I needed cushions I'd get pillows. Medium tits FTW!
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
When the government came for alt.binaries, I remained silent: I was not a filesharer. When they locked up the kiddy porn posters, I remained silent: I was not a pedophile. When they came for alt.religion.vim, I remained silent: I was not a Vim follower. But when they came for alt.religion.emacs, there was no one left to speak out.
"We are sorry that you are no longer permitted to leave your home without a pre-approved commute plan and a scheduled police escort, after a thorough 'intent-scan', but think of the children".
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is just the beginning, its more like 'bye bye to our way of life and freedom'.
And who is going to be brave enough to complain these days and risk being tagged a dissident?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Once it becomes federal law, they will be next.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
is how avidly you trolls read everything he writes. you losers are the twitter experts, which is one of the saddest wastes of life and effort imaginable. one day, you might step up to spooge mopping at the local peep show.
i do support for Comcast, and i end up taking everyone's usenet calls. that said, i wonder how long before we drop our usenet service. perhaps i should just put up the money for GN and be done with it.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
I heard a million USENET leechers scream out at once and then they were silent.
Bellsouth, now part of the AT&T Deathstar monopoly empire, shut off alt.binaries yesterday at noon. Getting free access through your ISP is all but over. While I hate kiddie porn, they could've just blocked the groups they found it on, or better yet, track down the purveyors. So really the shutoff is not about K.P., it's about eliminating the storage and bandwidth headaches for ISPs, providing less for the same $, and of course helping out their buddies in the entertainment industry. It's end of my relationship with Bellsouth/AT&T. I'm canceling my service with them. On to Speakeasy and Giganews!
They didn't even use him as an excuse. The official word (a webpages linked from the news.rr.com, said the reason was lack of popularity).
And now my upstream usage on my TW line has gone from insignificant to near saturation. USENET was a huge win for ISPs, because the cost of supporting it was far lower than BitTorrent.
Well no, the alt.* hierarchy is the only one where you can create your own group easily -- and that's a bug, not a feature, caused by someone figuring out the command for creating alt.* groups. The traditional Big 8 require you to go through a long Request for Discussion process to prove there's enough interest in a subject to justify a dedicated group. This is why you don't see rec.binaries.bestiality.hamsters.duct-tape and rec.fan.karl-malden.nose but there are tons of such groups in alt.*
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
You have to add salt, too.
Use giganews. It's cheap, complete, has long retention, and it's probably faster than your ISP's news servers. Plus you can use your account on the road as well as at home.
Let your ISP push packets. Their "value-added" services usually suck anyway.
Isn't that quote good enough to qualify as defamation. He's basically calling everyone who uses the NTTP protocol a pedophile.
I personally am incensed.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Nuke them from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
Begin of Message. 0;0
Just remember it didn't have to be this way. These organizations are taking this and similar actions willfully.
They do not have a grasp on the emergent behaviors which will result when the system is modified so rashly. They do not care because their belief and analysis shows their profits and control either remaining constant or growing.
The four areas of tampering have dire consequences:
My own simulations (curiously enough using random binaries on the alt.binaries.* hierarchy as a source of entropy) show that the current state of things has a result factor of 3.6 months and that the reconvention ratio will be approximately 0.74 at that time.
The net result will be a massive shift in efforts on their part sometime on or around Armistice Day (talk about Irony) followed by a major dissolution event on or around Groundhog Day, 2009.
Subscribers to the use of branch-distance simulations would be well served on both of those dates to fully and faithfully observe all preconditions described in the 1958 treatise that originally developed the theory including:
End of Message. 0;49
Heh, be grateful you actually have Usenet. here in India, ISP's are so lazy and cheap (not affordable!) that they do not provide this thing called usenet. You use services from paid or free providers in other countries.
The city of New York has without a doubt been used to distribute child porn. I say we nuke it!
Of course, there's the post office! We'll have to burn those down.
Of course, the one absolutely essential ingredient to child porn is children.....
Seriously, it's decades old. and it's not like there aren't better alternatives that have also been around a long time.
I haven't used usenet in a long time, especially since the SPAM levels went through the roof.
The Usenet has been untouched for years. But now that child pornographers (CPers) are shifting gears toward the Usenet, it is our responsiblity as Usenet users, especially those who subscribe to Usenet binaries, to shut down the CPers before the law (which knows about as much about the Usenet as they do the concept of witchcraft).
Like any mail system, the Subject of a message is a given description of whether a message is pushing CP. The problem is that these jerks will post their crap in ANY of the alt.* group reguardless if they support binaries or not. Binaries subscribers suffer the most because when the message is in their heirarchy, i.e. alt.binaries.erotica.carmen-electra, all the nerds who are swapping photos of the worlds most loved Clevelander are now suspect because samirATmailDOTru wanted to distribute photos of all the children he's touched.
American's need to wake up and knock this lazy "can't someone else fix it" crap off. When was the last time there was a major virus kicked around the Usenet? Where is the fringe crowd of computer hackers?
Freedom is not free. And if we don't stop the CPers and the technophobe law enforcement agencies, we will lose the Usenet!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Some of you may recall that his father was a loved governor of NY state for many years.
He is obviously planting the seeds for his own race. This is a simple case of
scoring points by beating an easy target.
What I am surprised by is how few people here plan to protest this tactic to the AG or the
the ISP. You know that many busybodies will write to the ISPs eventhough they have NEVER
heard of Usenet before. If as many or more subscribers write to the ISPs, they
may discover more of a backbone to negotiate and try to craft real solutions instead of
a sham.
ADD ISP ADDRESS HERE
RE: Stopping child porn on the Internet
Dear ISP:
I am sure you are aware of the New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's campaign that aims to rid the Internet of child porn. So far, several major ISPs have fallen for the misinformation perpetuated by his office and agreed to overreact by shutting down a huge portion of the Internet that has nothing to do with child porn. I have been a subscriber to your services for ___ years and am concerned that you might also be mislead by these lies and succumb to the ineffective and counterproductive tactics promoted by Attorney General Cuomo. I have enjoyed the USENET newsgroups such as ________ for many years. And even the Attorney General's own study showed that 99.9+% of the newsgroups have nothing whatsoever to do with child-porn. I urge you to contact the Attorney General's Office as soon as possible and tell him you will not participate in this overreaching campaign that will do nothing to actually shut down child pornography. Tell him instead that you will shut down specific sources of child pornography following the existing laws.
Sincerely,
ADD YOUR NAME HERE
cc: Office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
IN order for a picrure of a child to be "PORN" it has to have sexual content or be used for sexual stimulation. Your typical picture of kids in a tub is not child porn in any US court.
One of those nice little features of usenet is that people can *create* groups. If they ban the entire alt.* hierarchy, people are just going to create new groups outside the alt hierarchy for everything, legal or not. This will, of course, be an enormous headache to sort out since there will be *many* new groups being created for each existing group and it will take time for people to agree on which ones to use. Perhaps some of the new names will even make sense...
e.g. startrek.ds9, music.lossless or porn.bigtits.
They can do what Telus has done in Canada - ban all groups carrying Binaries.
Honestly, I don't get what all the fuss is about.
Usenet has child pornography - it MUST be stopped at ALL causes.
We should ban Usenet and, if after 30 days, anyone hasn't complied ... we should NUKE the data centers!
Seriously.
The internet has child pornography! And what about TERRORISTS??? They use the internet all the time!!!!!!
What are we waiting for, people??? It's time to BAN THE INTERNET!!!!
I mean, honestly, what good has ever come from the internet, anyway?
While we're at it, I've heard that some child pornography comes from Eastern Europe ... we've been waiting for decades for an excuse to NUKE the Russians back into the stone ages ... NOW IS OUR CHANCE!!!!!
I, for one, would rather die of radiation sickness before the following nuclear winter than to see any child pornography in the world! WE MUST NUKE THE *ENTIRE* *WORLD*!!!!!!!
---------------
ISP's are taking away all of our freedoms. What the F%&K can we do about it? A few major ISPs dominate most of the US bandwidth market. Once they all start deciding what users can and can't view ... it's all downhill from here. What can we do before all of our freedoms are taken away from us?
This Sucks.
Without it the objectives of creating a repressed mass cannot be achieved. We are supposed to have seperation of powers, what these moves signify are that "rule of law" has now borken down, Industry and government have started to collude to such a degree as to undermine the liberties they are entrusted to provide via communication networks.
When there are no seperation of powers between branchs or industry we will see total tyranny. We have to get in the way and shut this and other moves down, they are declaring war on freedom itself. This century might very well fulfill total nuclear annhilation, and the faster communication gets slowed or shut down the sooner we will have all out war and anarchy. They must want this to happen, otherwise why short circuit the economy and the communication infrastructure.
If they think this will bring about world peace they are fools. If one can sexual repress the young than one can effectively control the masses through mysticism and fascism. Masses will then seek out a dictator to fullfill the desires and ideas they are repressed from and lack. This happened in Germany in the 1930's. If we are seeing a repeat then there will truly be massive destruction and warfare in the near future, I'm afraid that this needs to be sent all over the net, people need to understand the ramifications of censorship and sexual repression.
Freud called it "the return of the repressed".
I was thinking wouldn't it be easy to create a backdoor? You know a way to put things on the net that could then be used to destroy people's ability to communicate. Nobody knows who posted the stuff for all we know the government could have been the posters, right, you know like planting a gun or drugs on the suspect. Then Cuomo comes along and plays the good cop. Afterall the feds have THE largest database of child porn on the planet, maybe they might be doing something with it other than using it to identify the victims?
Just a thought but maybe they don't care because they are the ones doing so, or maybe it could be Viacom and RIAA MAfiaa MPAA doing the posting we all know how much they love NY and Spitzer and now Cuomo. Can't people figure that this people are running protection rackets and it happens to be the North Eastern seaboard that has begun our descent into middle eastern style sexual repression. Next he'll be calling for Shria Law to be enforced in NY city, thus the constitution dies from a thousand multicultural cuts to the trunk of the metaphorical tree.
You've got government wanting to bomb the world, media companies wanting to control communication, sexually repressed mentally ill wanting to inflict maximum lowering of intelligence on the rest of us wild eyed sexual freaks and political radicals, which will of course lead to fighting in streets rather than on the messege boards, which maybe where the morons in the war on drugs want this to go, where they can inflict the sadistic pleasure they so greedily desire with their safe sex rubber bullets and clergymen with billyclubs can get off all they want on bashing the protesters heads in.
Obama means a war on speech, MCcain means a war on movement and speech, funny they both want to stop speech, what a coincidence. I bet the kids will revolt when they figure out what this war has costed them and they come back from the gulf to a censored internet, it'll probably be cops busting the heads of ex-soldiers from the gulf demanding their rights back, this will be a nasty next 4 years maybe.
IANAA and IANAL (therefore, IANAAL) but I've heard of rulings where an image has been defined as porn because someone could find it titillating.
I think it was here that I read it. It's ludicrous - some third party unknown to you could get a hard on over potatoes and that means you get 25 in PMITA pen.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Since children are a cause of a lot of freedoms being restricted why don't we just get rid of the children? Food prices would plummit too!
Yes, it probably is, but the ISP's involved just don't give a damn.
It is not a war on the alt hierarchy, it is a war against free speech. This is no different than saying that some books are available that portray child porn so we should ban all books."
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
by giving it away free on usenet, how could the artists make any money off it? better to get rid of usenet and limit distribution to proper commercial channels
some third party unknown to you could get a hard on over potatoes and that means you get 25 in PMITA pen.
Potatoes Mashed In The Ass?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I can see two useful functions they serve.
Serving as a sink is the more important function of the two. In fact this is one of the most important functions of the entire alt.* heirarchy. For instance, there will be sci.physics, frequented by physics students and even PhDs having serious discussions at one level, and then there will be alt.physics which may have some serious discussions, but is a place where Joe Stoner can post his Marijuana inspired grand green unified theory of everything without cluttering up sci.physics.
Getting rid of alt, will mean that Joe Stoner, having nowhere more appropriate to post will then post his stupid idea to sci.physics cluttering up the group.
Then the sci heirarchy will just probably just start carrying a sci.alt subheirarchy. Likely the other heirarchys will do the same. The current posters to the above newsgroups will just spam some other unfortunate non-alt ( say xyz.* ) newsgroup heirarchy which will have to provide a more appropriate xyz.alt.binaries.pictures heirarchy outside of alt.* for this stuff so as to keep it out of the other groups in that heirarchy.
...