Verizon shuts down access to Usenet
/* Posted June 16th, 2008 at 11:06am *//* Filed under News */
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Verizon has announced that they will be stopping access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas including the very popular alt.* groups that have been around since the late 1980s.
Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said only a select few newsgroups/discussion groups would be offered to customers going into the future. It appears the decision is in response to political “strong-arming” from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who wants strong restrictions on all newsgroups.
Cuomo added that his office had found child porn on at least 88 newsgroups, although that percentage is tiny compared to the over 90,000 newsgroups that exist. “We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers…I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry,” read a press statement from Cuomo’s office.
Newsgroups are a pre-Web technology that has relied on ISPs and Universities to operate servers in which users can exchange messages and files.
With the decision however, comes the shut down of many useful newsgroups such as symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie. which have longed helped users.
One user of the alt.hierarchy was very upset over the decision. “This is ridiculous. I actually met my wife on alt.personals, 14 years ago… I still use usenet – there are a lot good discussions and a person can get answers to questions on specific topics pretty quickly. It’s nice to have a decentralized place to hold discussions, one that is not beholden to a sysadmin to correctly run a forum, one that’s free of blinking gifs and flash ads.”
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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?
As general policy, i think its messed up that Internet providers are cracking down on these types of things. It looks like our future is headed towards a moderated internet, and the days of the wild wild west are slowly going away
An online bulletin board is not going to replace Usenet in terms of sheer volume of data. Usenet is great because it is so broad, not limited to a handful of topics the BB moderator decided to create. Instead, you’re better off looking for free Usenet servers to replace the one your ISP shut down. The West isn’t gone yet, we still have free Usenet servers, FTP and IRC.
The great Firewall of Cuomo
Imagine if you went into work on Monday and only 8 out of every 1000 websites you saved in your browsers favorites folder was deemed ‘cuomo’ friendly?
What would you do then?
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22212833295
Cheers,
Dean
adm_snackbar – The site linked ( http://www.jlaforums.com ) provides web based access TO USENET – not “topics the BB moderator decided to create” Most of the high traffic (and even low traffic) groups (both text and binary) are available there.
I did visit the website as it certainly would be of greatest interest to me if it indeed were a portal to Usenet so if you could clarify things I’d appreciate it. Let’s say I want to read alt.binaries.anime, what’s the navigation path and URL to that newsgroup on that website?