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Usenet Blocking Intensifies

Posted by Soulskill on from the forest-for-the-trees dept.

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..."

2 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:When are we going to take our Internet back? by Toll_Free · · Score: 0, Troll

    Your internet.

    The US government built it, fool.

    When was it ever in YOUR posession?

    I mean, c'mon, I'm all for net neutrality, etc., but let's be honest here. You NEVER owned it, and it was never yours, and to even attempt to lay claim that it was makes you look like an idiot.

    --Toll_Free

    --Toll_Free

  2. Honestly, who gives a fuck? by nog_lorp · · Score: 0, Troll

    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