Comments on: ISP reaction could spell death of Usenet

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:04:57 +0000

I agree that it is the right of the ISP to decide what services it will offer, but to dismiss such an event as not important strikes deep fear into me. This is a fundemental first amendment right issue. In this case, one law enforcement officer has effectively silenced thousands- perhaps tens of thousands or more people from this means of expression.

What if a single person at a sporting event of 65000 people was in possession of child pornography and attempting to give it away at the stadium. If we draw a comparrison… What has happened here is one officer not only decided to arrest the offender, he bullied the stadium into closing its doors to everyone. Yeah, they have the option to go to another stadium, in another city probably, so they can still enjoy a game, but not at that one and pretty soon not at any as each is closed in turn.

By: Ralph

Ralph — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:50:31 +0000

People who say Bit Torrent will easily replace alt.binaries… don’t understand the dynamics of how usenet and P2P work. With torrents and other P2P schemes like Napster, everyone reveals their IP. With usenet, only the uploader reveals himself. Further, the reason why ISP agreed so readily (without going to court as they do for many other simpler things) is that it relieves them of a huge financial burden (usenet server farms and band width costs). What next? If someone sends you a porn picture into your mailbox, is the AG and the ISP now going to get rid of e-mail servers too, and then drape the flag of combating child porn onto that too? Bottom line, the real headline should be:

“AG get free publicity as “crime fighter” while he knowingly lets three big ISP rip off their usenet customers in nation wide anti child porn scam.”

Rlaph

By: dwalk51

dwalk51 — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:32:07 +0000

You can stop whining now… this is the 20th centaury, we have a thing called, “the Pirate Bay”. I’m confident it can replace usenet with ease.

By: Bobby Ewing

Bobby Ewing — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:03:57 +0000

One of the problems is that the ISP’s are too lazy to implement any sort of monitoring or filtering of USENET content. Sites like those mentioned in the comment above are able to do this just as Youtube and MySpace do – so why not the ISP’s with USENET content. True, you will never get everything – certainly YouTube, MySpace and other are unable to get a 100% result but that is alot better than just simply bannning it all together. Just as the comment above said “Where does it end?”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:08:17 +0000

.. you know.. most of australia is binary-free these days.. so.. welcome to the club, america. Sure we have a limited usenet feed, text mainly, but our government mandated that content such as usenet that was stored in whole or part, on the respective isp’s gear that was located within the aussie boundries was subject to the same rules and regulations as every other form of ‘banned’ or ‘probhibited’ content.

.. what I dont get it this…
some big-wig did a reccy on usenet and found 88 newsgroups with banned content. these news groups probably had legitimate content posted to them; no matter, we’ll take them from the legitimate people using them because a few bad apples have posted banned content.. the bad apples have already moved to other newsgroups, and thus, it stands to reason, that more newsgroups will be banned.. where does it end? …and what happens when the bad apples move on, the original newsgroups start having legit content posted to them, but they’re still blocked… so lets ban usenet, completely, so the bad apples move to (say) bit torrent.. and then they ban all bit torrent.. there is no end to it.. is there…

By: Bobby Ewing

Bobby Ewing — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:08:46 +0000

Why worry about ISPs dropping USENET when sites like http://www.jlaforums.com offer a convenient web based access to text and binary groups – all free?