Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy 579
modemac writes
"Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8."
alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
Gad zooks (Score:0, Insightful)
``Child porn on 88 newsgroups'' (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Logical progression: (Score:5, Insightful)
Child pornography has also been found being shared by approximately 0.5% of users on peer-to-peer networks. Verizon will be shutting down access to this service immediately.
Ahh, nothing like feeling protected. Pretty soon you'll find you can receive the same level of service and "protection" AS Verizon provides by cancelling your internet service entirely and save yourself $40/month in the process.
Huge overgeneralization (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's all? (Score:1, Insightful)
Where can we go with their logic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we apply the same logic and standard to New York's population. If the state has any areas/counties/towns with a
What about other crimes? After all we are talking about everyone's well being. If NY's overall crime rate is greater than
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
Who isn't surprised it's lasted this long?
Democrats are obsessed with Child Porn (Score:4, Insightful)
If you thought GOP was bad in these past 8 years wait until Democrats assume the wheel with supermajority to push whatever nanny-state bullshit they can think of in the name of the "children"
Video games and the internet seem to be the useful idiots for Democrats. Just blame it on violence and child porn to shut things down and generate talking points for the next election cycle. Oh yeah, do that in between paying lip service to net neutrality proponents.
the problem with filtering (Score:5, Insightful)
follow me, on this. right now, the network is *mostly* unfiltered and for many users, they do get a clean unfiltered net feed (home, work, whatever). and so if laws are broken (say you illegally download something), the own-ness is on you. the carrier or the authority policing the carrier isn't at fault since its not them who are guaranteeing a '100% legal internet feed'. they clearly can't say that all things you could pull down are legal and they are just a common carrier. I know that CC status is magical and not all real CC's have it but that's just because our laws in this area are not well fine-tuned yet. any reasonable person knows that an ISP is a service provider just like the water department, electric department or the phone company.
but say that they now have the job of regulating the legality of all things you could net-access. then, if you -do- find some song or other 'illegal content' and you do manage to download it, you SHOULD be free and clear. right? afterall, there is now a policing layer (a 'great firewall' if you will) between you, the user, and the ISP or upstream service provider. if they take on the job of filtering and 'ensuring a clean and legal net experience' then ANY bad deeds you do by downloading files is not your problem anymore.
I don't think they want either side, to be honest. they don't want to be in the regulation business because once you do that in an above-board manner, you should be liable for any faults in your so-called filtering algorithms. if you tell some grandma that 'the net is now safe' and she finds something she does not like, she SHOULD be able to sue your damned ass.
its sad to think that the ISPs are not thinking far enough in the future to see where this leads. they must insist on common-carrier status and all that that implies. the net is like a water pipe (cue the infamous senator quote about 'tubes!' here) and it should not be filtered or mangled by some well-meaning (cough!) government moran.
responsibility belongs AFTER the demarc point, so to speak. NEVER EVER before it!
Re:Logical progression: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are concerned about pornography or even piracy of any kind, you don't carry alt.bin tree , problem is solved.
alt.* tree besides bin is really about freedom of speech in its pure form.
Re:quick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Logical progression: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Common Carrier Status *poof* (Score:3, Insightful)
But dropping all of alt.* just because a few have had child porn floating about on them?
I'd still consider them to be overreacting more than the grandparent poster is on the subject as there's quite a bit more actual useful stuff in the alt.* branch as it was for anything that didn't fit into the normal comp.*, etc. branches of organization in USENET. As someone said, this is a convenient excuse to lose quite a bit of bandwidth consumption on their part.
Re:Logical progression: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's all? (Score:2, Insightful)
RE: Does anybody mind? (Score:4, Insightful)
ISP usenet services are 9 times out of 10 either outsourced, or have terrible retention, spotty coverage, and no propogation.
BitNabber [bitnabber.com] has all my usenet needs taken care of.
Re:Binary groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Very bad things...
Re:To protect children... (Score:5, Insightful)
To my eye, looks like it's been pretty successful so far.
Re:the problem with filtering (Score:5, Insightful)
Common carrier does not necessarily demand you service anybody. A common-carrier truck line can only service two major cities (say, Portland OR and Seattle WA), or only be able to provide services with a 14-foot van.
Similarly, Verizon can choose to not carry a wide swath of net.news, provided their reasoning for not carrying it fills a technical requirement. All they have to say in front of a judge is that it is increasingly difficult to operate and maintain a news server to carry those groups, and any potential lawsuit is over.
If it even sees the inside of a courtroom. Last I checked, Verizon subscribers are tied to binding arbitration.. so good luck with this ever being seen by a judge.
Re: alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, even after crippling usenet, Verizon is still the best in my area - I can either go with them, Comcast, or RCN (cable) unless I want to shell out for a dedicated line. I'm surely not going to vote with my feet over to Comcast, and RCN doesn't have a stellar reputation, either.
precedent (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
The free services came and went on a weekly basis, and every couple months I'd have to blow another afternoon looking for another service.
So I ended up ponying up for a pay newsgroup service that carried all the groups, for an extra $20/month I felt my ISP should already be giving me. The service was metered, and once you'd downloaded your monthly limit, you were done until next month. But they did have good speeds and almost 100% of the available groups with at least 2 weeks retention.
Although cost-cutting and censorship are both being blamed here, I don't think that's it. It looks more like a company taking the path of least resistance. The ThinkOfTheChildren tag seems most appropriate. People exercising extremely poor judgement and foresight that result in a massive net-loss in public benefit, under the guise of some holy cause, the only real purpose of which is to shut up a few whiners.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:3, Insightful)
My last ISP dumped Usenet (which like many still use over 'blogs'). I asked if they were going to drop the subscription cost. They said no, I said bye! That decision cost thousands of subscribers.
It's just an attempt to get rid of all discussion, which is what the governments want, especially "democracies" under pretext of terror or in this case a certain type of "porn".
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the first rule about USENET was that you didn't talk about USENET....
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
Dropping the entire alt tree is an overreaction but it will save them money in server administration and bandwidth - I'm willing to bet 95% of their users have never even heard of usenet (and half of the remainder call it 'google groups').
Re: alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
Abused kids have a right to privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Thus, while many on slashdot might not like this fact, it is legal and justified to censor material that causes great harm to another person. And in this case, it is great harm done to a child, for profit. To censor this material is to uphold the right of privacy for those children who have been sexually abused in front of a camera for profit. The distribution of that material is assumed to cause those children involved great personal harm. That harm is far worse than the harm to society in general due to a policy of censorship. Particularly since we're not censoring political speech, but are censoring the commercial product of a criminal conspiracy.
Let's be clear: child porn is essentially a snuff-film.
Finally, Verizon owns that hardware. There are no filters in place across the network to block access to the nntpd port or its encrypted counterpart. End users can continue to purchase newsgroup access from a variety of vendors. They can even use free services to read and debate on USENET. The issue here is not about a right to USENET access, but about a private company choosing to heed the request of a district attorney to block access to criminal materials. That they chose to close a large portion of the service down for business reasons is not relevant to the central issue of children's human rights.
Re:the problem with filtering (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The real surprise . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:4, Insightful)
More importantly, are we expecting these customers to physically move? Because often, the big ISPs have a physical monopoly on an area.
MediaDefender had a hand in this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nanny Verizon (Score:5, Insightful)
Real men use a bidet.
Re:Common Carrier Status *poof* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the problem with filtering (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not go after the people who MAKE child porn? You know the ones ACTUALLY HURTING kids? Oh wait, that's because this requires actual police work, which is DIFFICULT. The prosecutors and lawmakers need someone to blame, so they blame the people who possess and distribute simply because they are easier to find.
It's laziness combined with a need to point a finger at someone. And it really stinks.
Re:So what do YOU suggest they do? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about just blocking the 88 groups that have been identified as carrying child porn? That's quite doable and they could even include a provision to drop other groups if they had more than X reports of child porn in them as well. That way they only drop groups that are known to have child porn in them but keep the rest for their customers.
I think Cuomo's mostly concerned that they took no action on the groups they reported in the sting. If they did something like the above it would probably satisfy him because they're acting on reports (which they should have been doing anyway).
Stupid fucker (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that some ISPs still offer newsgroup access (in-house) surprises the hell outta me. How are you going to throttle bittorrent traffic while promoting NNTP as a service you offer...
I would imagine that. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Destroying the Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
This foolish shortsightedness isn't just prosecutors and cops misunderstanding the newfangled Internet. This is cops and prosecutors failing to understand how free expression is always a benefit, when you understand it enough to use it right. That's a lesson at least 200 years in the making. It's about time Americans forced our "justice" system to get smart about it.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
1. delaware.net - Can't complain about their service or policies as I was a member for years, but... it's dialup.
2. Comcast.
3. Verizon (they aren't available for me, but if I lived a little further to the north and to the east, I could get it).
4. AOL.
Those are my choices if I want to get online. I'm not going to be so silly as to pull a number out of my ass, but I doubt that I'm in the extreme minority there.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: alt.binaries.* (Score:2, Insightful)
No No NO dammit: pay attention.
The whole idea here is to slowly destroy the ability of the non-centric Internet to spread information without control from any hierarchy (political, economic, religious, or whatever). Using porn as an excuse to censor the Internet and efforts to indirectly control it (as in the US government circa early 2000s asking providers for millions of search requests so they could analyze how people used the net) are the "thin edge of the wedge".
The net started as a DARPA project* to create a web that (among other things) would continue to function if chunks of it were lost to attack; the design makes it difficult to break the web enough to stop data transfer. That ability to keep moving data without easy application of control from above is what those who would keep us ignorant, divided, and powerless fear most.
Wake the f@ck UP. A lot of very powerful interests would love to take away from you all but a very few, sanitized "tubes" in "the Intenets".
*http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/cerf.shtml
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/teaching/spring2005/reading/clark88.pdf
http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~acc/docs/arpa--1.html
Re:Taking kiddie porn off net is stupid. Here's Wh (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if music piracy is supposed to hurt the music industry, and movie piracy is supposed to hurt the movie industry, then shouldn't child porn piracy hurt the child porn industry? By shutting down child porn piracy, aren't the feds and the ISPs helping the commercial producers of child porn by protecting their business model and intellectual property rights?
(Hee hee, I figure a post that equates the RIAA/MPAA with pedophiles has to get a +5)
You find what you are looking for (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never, ever, in my life, found a child porn, nor seen it.
It is pretty simple, I think. I have never looked for it, so I never found it.
If a dumb politician thinks that him looking for something and then finding it (and he was looking for nothing less than child porn) is a reason to be upset, well... I feel sorry for the people he represents.
Re:Nanny Verizon (Score:3, Insightful)
Children might be able to see boobies, and we all know that boobies are bad.
It's politics (Score:2, Insightful)
All true. It's not about bandwidth. It's about politics.
What Verizon has accomplished here is getting this stuff off it's servers, thereby reducing the heat from a local New York politician, who still has no handle on third-party usenet services not located in New York.
Re:It's politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Politicians will never learn that the kind of oddballs who go for that crap will find ways to do it, no matter what laws they have in place.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet in the US, now that it has been taken over as a telecom commodity, is only available to the vast majority of people as "choose one of the following options"...
1 - local cable monopoly (usually the fastest affordable option)
2 - local DSL monopoly (about the same price, but much slower)
3 - local dialup barely eking survival (cost about half 1 or 2, but too slow to matter)
4 - national dialup (about the same as 3, unless you also purchase a line from 1 or 2 as a carrier, increase speed at increased cost)
5 - local telco T# line (very fast, but bend over and grab your ankles for the pricetag)
Very few other alternatives exist anymore, as most were driven out of business. Lately we've been seeing FIOS as a new option, but the valid market segments in the US for people who can see fields and trees outside their home's windows can be counted on the fingers of one hand. For instance, I probably won't have FIOS available in my area until about 2019.
Do I like having Comcast as my provider? Hell no. Do I trust them with my connection? Hell no. Do I have any other options? Hell no.
This complaint has come up several times recently on Slashdot and other sites, and it always burns my ass when people reply with statements like: "Well, why don't you move?"
For an easy thing to say, it's one of the hardest things to do. Maybe those of you that are thinking this can pay for me to buy a new home and move to it. If it's outside of Comcast's influence, since moving that far would make my commute somewhere on the order of 3-4 hours each way, maybe you'd also like to get me hired to a job near my new home so that I can continue doing things I've gotten into habit to do - such as, you know, "eat".
Re:Nanny Verizon (Score:1, Insightful)
Top-posting.
Disclaimer: I saw it in another thread some time ago, but it's apropos here.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, all of their users will be transferring news articles from the internet to them, each one taking their share of bandwidth from the internet pipes.
They would only need more bandwith if all their customers who use usenet combined now download much more than that from external providers. I am sure they have done the numbers
Re:Common Carrier Status *poof* (Score:3, Insightful)
sorry you didn't get the link.
maybe the post below will help you get the point
Cheers,
Dean
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-so-now-it-begins.html [blogspot.com]
Sent: Sunday, 15 June 2008 4:49 PM
To: Dean Collins;
Subject: Re: And so now it begins......
What motivation would they have to do that? Just dumb or nefarious in this instance?
---
Andrew Cuomo - gets press, and to be seen to be doing something, (probably being advised by people who have 'ulterior motives' and he's too stupid to know the difference).
Verizon - heaps of reasons; far too many - but here's my interpretation.
Usenet is an ancient 'spooky' space on the internet that no one but geeks and porn swapping perverts visit, by blocking 99.7% of UseNet's under the guise of getting rid of kiddy porn Verizon are able to establish a precedent that 'managing' internet access for the betterment of society is a good thing.
The thin edge of the wedge has been struck.
After that it's easy to start blocking off entire country domains, I mean no one has any good reason for reading blogs in Iran correct?
Ok now lets move to something that some people will care about but with 2 sets of prior acts Verizon will be covered. Lets block all P2P traffic, I mean P2P is only used by people swapping pirated music and video's - yes some 5% of the population may complain but most of them will be kids and not voters so we should be able to cover any publicity backlash.
If you want to hear from people who are far better at explaining this check out http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/net-neutrality.html [blogspot.com]
Like I said it all started with some dumb politician who had probably never used Newsgroups before and had some carrier stooge whisper something into his ear about 'think of the children'......the rest is history.
As a society we should be strong enough to accept that any technology solution to a society problem will never work and any politicians who suggest otherwise are either too dumb to be making that decision (e.g. swallowed a story from a lobbyist) or is acting in coercion.
But what do I know, I'm just a disgruntled geek.
Cheers,
Dean
Re:That's all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Verizon FIOS [wikipedia.org] tops out at about a third of that in certain areas, or considerably less everywhere else.
The 90s called. They want their alt.* debate back (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's different now? Everything.
This isn't just one university. This will soon be most major ISPs. If most U.S. ISPs drop alt.*, the posters will just hammer big 8 groups. With NZB files, the actual group things are posted to doesn't matter very much. Issuing cancels will be a full time job for the few that care to fight the flood.
What's sad is that this really threatens the argument that ISPs are common carriers and aren't responsible for filtering content. Sure, I understand the different between filtering and not providing groups on your NNTP server, but people that wear suits and robes for a living don't. If alt.* falls what's next? All of Usenet.
Usenet is an unusual asynchronous, disconnected, communication model and in a way, is an almost priceless anonymizer. There is (almost) no link between the sender and receiver of a message. I've always wondered how we've let an almost untraceable communication system survive.
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:alt.binaries.* (Score:4, Insightful)