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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..."
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."
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.
No, Cuomo is a politician.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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 *
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!
>And the ISPs probably don't mind not providing a service that doesn't do much but cost them extra for bandwidth and storage.
And customers.
Considering once the data is on their network, it costs them (virtually) zero to transmit it to their customers, a usenet leech is the best customer you could ever have.
Just to be technical...unless the kids are doing something sexual...it isn't kiddie pr0n. If if the bar is 'that' low, then we got a bunch of parents out there that are liable to be arrested and taken to jail for taking shots of their little kids bathing or running around nekkid...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Far from it...I still find programming advice, and discussions out there. I've had discussions with lawyers and accountants on corporate law (especially when wanting for form my own corp)...and lets not forget the huge amount of binary material out there, easy to download tv shows you might have missed in real time.
I'm guessing your are gonna say that IRC is dead and unused for anything real too?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Is some of that really 'kiddie porn'? I checked out naturism newsgroup has lots of regular looking folks not engaging in sex and doing regular activities in the nude, I wouldn't exactly call that 'porn', many of them look like family vacation/bbq/get together photos to me IMHO.
Looking at pictures in naturism.family doesn't seem like porn to me at all, (disregarding cross posters) there are regular people taking pictures in the background in a few of them.
I think this all has to do with judeo-christian cultural values of the west and it's crazy puritan heritage, other cultures do not share the same values. The idea of 'kiddie porn' is not universal.
People are naturally born naked, and many other cultures are comfortable being around people (strangers) in other countries, it's only really the west that is so repressed.
From a technical standpoint, I have absolutely no problem with an ISP dropping access to USENET. It's an old protocol that has outlived its usefulness. No one expects their ISP to carry access to UUCP anymore, this is no different.
But that's not the argument that Cuomo is making. He's essentially saying that because some third grader pissed in one end of one pool, we have to close and drain all the municipal pools and outlaw swim lessons. This is absurd. Kiddie porn traders used to send their garbage through the mail, did anyone suggest shutting down the postal service? What's next, will he try to force ISPs to inspect every email that traverses their network and make sure there are no images of little kids in them? (Oops, I think they're actually already doing this one.)
He's had some good press lately with the consumer protection stuff, this is just completely insane and should be laughed out of court.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
TWRR dropped Usenet because they were sending too much money to Newshosting for their outsourced news server, and Cuomo gave them a convenient excuse.
pointless, nearly everyone who does pirate stuff off of usenet uses something like giganews.
Hell i wish they put more legit stuff on it, i get 1.5-2MBs via giganews; I even download things like wow from it because its way faster then any other method.
First of all, you're confusing a network protocol and a community. The Usenet of NNTP is the same as the Usenet that used to be propagated via UUCP. Some people might still get their messages via UUCP - how would you know?
Second of all, we don't have many things we took for granted at the height of Usenet:
Today's fragmented web has nothing that can approach Usenet, and every time somebody wants to add these features to some web app or another, he has to do it from scratch, and often incompatibly and poorly.
Gee, it's almost like the war against drugs and piracy! Strange how people keep doing what they want, against the "laws", despite the prevalent "morality" of their state. It's almost like the state doesn't truly represent the people at all.
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.
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
Does blocking them?
May the Maths Be with you!
CENSORSHIP IS NEVER THE ANSWER. WHAT YOU PROPOSE IS STILL CENSORSHIP.
Information can never hurt anyone. If you want to stop harmful acts, then stop harmful acts. As a Supreme Court justice one said, the answer to bad speech is more speech. Not banning what you personally find offensive. Banning things is the way to a repressive, stagnated culture.
Also, what ISPs are doing, although reprehensible, is perfectly legal. Stop the sloppy thinking already. Learn to separate the concept of "right" from that of "legal". You'll get bitten in the ass time and again.
The answer to "why shouldn't I do this?" should always be "because it's wrong", not "because it's illegal."
it's the software, video, and music that gets shared in the alt.* hierarchy, too.
That's basically the first thing I thought of: Cuomo in be with {RI,MP}AA and using child porn as a smokescreen.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If Cuomo really wanted to stop the child porn, he'd focus on the child porn. But this absolute idiot who is a disgrace to the human race is running some kind of agenda to shut down the internet. Instead of asking these ISPs to close off the groups that have the porn, he's creating a situation where people who have absolutely nothing to do with the porn, and are involved in groups that do not have any porn, are forced to go somewhere else, which is likely to have those same porn groups. This is an action that won't shut down porn. It will just move it elsewhere ... and move the other people that effectively and unknowingly help support it, along at the same time. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
He's only making the problem worse.
The child porn will go somewhere else. He hasn't eliminated the market for it. Then he'll demand shutting down other parts of the net. Next you know he'll demand ISPs block port 443. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with the web site forums is the severe fragmentation. You have to join so many different sites just to have access to several of the topics. With Usenet, you could go to a single place to get everything under one signon. With Usenet, if you wanted to jump to another topic you have never been on before to ask some question, it's easy. With the web, you have to go find a site that carries that topic, register, keep track of yet another password, sift through ads that are in many cases abusive, and post your question. Then repeat half of that after you login, and do this all several times to see if you got an answer. And that doesn't even account for the fragmentation of there often being a couple dozen web sites covering the issue. But no web site is as thorough as Usenet; not even close.
Yes, it is sad that New Yorkers seem to host so many of the idiots of the Democratic party.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with "something must be done" is that it rapidly turns into "this is something, therefore, it must be done".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Back in the day usenet was my bread and butter. It is sad to watch it fade away into obscurity. The binary groups have been replaced with p2p and the message boards with blogs. Since my ISP imposed a 2GB per month limit I've stopped using it altogether. I do feel a small piece of me and my heritage has been lost.
^^vv<><>BA
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.
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.
It's easier to shut down a website forum with easy to alter DNS records etc. then to stop free speech in Usenet which gets sent around all over the world, no central storage. THAT's what it's about, control of speech and thought.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Who am I to decide why someone looks at pics? We're getting pretty close to thoughtcrime here.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? I'd guess so, since I don't understand the appeal of watching people BBQ naked (unless you're in some twisted way interested in how people react when they get burned in more sensitive places, I wouldn't stand next to a BBQ without some protective clothing).
But just because I don't understand it doesn't make it "evil", or leads automatically to the train of thought "there is no other reason to do X but Y", since Y is the only thing I could think of. Along the same lines, you could argue that games like Battlefield and Call of Duty serve no purpose but to prepare people for terror attacks, since I don't understand why someone would play it for the sake of playing it.
Beware the borders of thoughtcrime.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is the typical action of a "quick, fast, hard action" politician. I don't even think he isn't aware that this action won't do or solve anything. I'm quite sure he's aware of that. But it serves the purpose: It looks like he's really badass about cracking down on $boogieman_of_the_month.
What you need to do for this tactic is to shut down something that can in some way be linked to the crime in question and doesn't hurt a sizable portion of your voters. Now, who uses UseNet? Certainly not Joe Average Voter. So Usenet is the perfect scapegoat. It's something his voters don't understand, thus don't really miss if it's gone, and it looks like he's really putting pressure behind his agenda. That it doesn't do jack doesn't matter.
When you look around at the scapegoats that were blamed for this or that, and politicians going badass against those things, you will notice that NONE of those scapegoats were anything a sizable majority of their voters would use or at least know about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.