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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..."
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 *
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,
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!
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.
Unless I'm mistaken, they aren't blocking access to USENET, what they are doing, is essentially blocking groups or encouraging ISP's to drop carrying USENET on their own servers. You would still be free to connect to pay or free USENET servers out there...you just won't have one run by your ISP to connect to any longer.
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.........
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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?
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.
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
What do you mean caught? If he does get caught with "it" they will just find him in the evidence room looking at evidence... with his penis in his hand.
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
Your analysis is retarded.
Extending your 'logic' just slightly into your preferred medium of wonder and light, the markup Web, we can also swiftly dispense with most websites that aren't TMZ.com since in percentage terms, most of the sites out there are a miniscule portion of 'total Internet users' and thus can be disregarded.
I'm pretty sure that would include this one.
I think of USENET to the markup Web as radio was/is to TV.
Now make my day and followup with a similar brilliant analysis of why radio should be bagged since television allows for services that are _BETTER THAT RADIO_.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!!
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.....