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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.
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.
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,
this is for you
Little girls running down the beach naked isn't cp either.
I mean seriously, do any of these usenet categories contribute anything of value to society???
Well, you could apply that question to all of Usenet and on average, the answer would be No.
Besides... if alt.binaries.* gets blocked, the pervs will just move to the rec.* branch, or whatever strikes their fancy. They've done this in the past; they're probably doing it now. In all seriousness, they might as well ban Usenet binary distribution altogether. That's what they're going to have to do if they're serious about going the distance with this.
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!
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.........
Uh oh! A website with questionable content!
WE'D BETTER BLOCK ALL WEBSITES TOO
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.........
Channel28.EverybodyLovesRaymond
Channel52.AmericanIdol
Channel76.FriendsReruns
Channel95.FoxNews
Channel176.WWESmackdown
I mean seriously, do any of these TV shows contribute anything of value to society???
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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?
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.
Take a look at all the newsgroups you listed. What do they all have in common besides being in the alt. hierarchy? Here's a hint. Look at the second item in the name.
They aren't just dropping alt.binaries. They are dropping the entire alt. hierarchy. Including the ones where you can't even trade files.
These people have admitted that they only found child porn in 88 of the 100,000 newsgroups.
Technoli
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.
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?
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???
If there is a street in your town conveniently called Rapey Lane, just don't walk down it.
Demolishing Manchester becase of Moss Side is only a good idea on paper.
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."
this is for you
Little girls running down the beach naked isn't cp either.
Wow! looks like that link is slashdotted...
You buncha sick bastards!
You're using her as bait, Master!
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...
You haven't visited Britain lately...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/global/2008/06/25/noindex/nbaby.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/global/2008/06/25/noindex/nchild.xml
"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
Why wait? You can just disable them in your hosts file, like I'm doi@'#^&2:_=
NO CARRIER
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
"In all seriousness, they might as well ban Usenet binary distribution altogether. That's what they're going to have to do if they're serious about going the distance with this."
Genius! Cuomo has found a way to trick/force the Internet to abandon backwards compatibility for 7-bit character sets and MIME converstion!
4chan user detected!!! Launch missiles, Exterminate! EXTERMINATE! EXTERRMINAAAAATEEE!!!
Technically speaking, in the US at least, there's no requirement that there be any kind of sexual act or activity, only that there are minors engaged in something that can be described as lewd or lascivious.
What that means is that if some prude thinks the picture where you're giving your infant kid a bath in the bathroom sink... that can be child porn. That sort of thing actually does happen, and it ruins people's lives.
As another example, there are deeply creepy web sites where parents dress up their 12-year-old daughters in bikinis and miniskirts and get them to pose in very adult (think Penthouse) ways. People have gotten in trouble for that, too. I don't have links. I don't really want to go looking for links, but that stuff is out there.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't speak to China, but Japan had their nudity taboo imposed on them by Westerners. Originally, onsen (hot spring baths) and sento (public baths) were not separated by gender. Out in the countryside, people worked in the fields pretty much naked.
Shinto still has hadaka matsuri - literally, "naked festivals", though these days people usually (but not always) wear fundoshi.
Old Japanese erotic prints usually depict clothed figures, not naked ones!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I don't know why there's a flamebait mod on this. I am British, I live here, and I can tell you that there's a ridiculous amount of groundless fear and hysteria in this country. The article saying that they are struggling to find people to work with children because people are terrified someone will think they are a peadophile is spot on. I don't know how this country is in comparison to other countries, so maybe that's where the flamebait comes in, but it seems to me that things are pretty bad here and we need to find a way to make it acceptable to actually like children again and enjoy spending time with them, even when you don't have an "excuse" such as being their parent.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.