wrote:
On Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:20:07 -0700, Bruce L. Bergman
wrote:

There's the real concern - that the RIAA and MPAA are going to show
up at their main office and demand a list of all the users downloading
copyrighted music and movies.

Or the FBI going after Kiddie Porn.

The story on the shut down of the Alt.Binary groups on many ISP's is
that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo forced the ISP's to stop
carrying the binary groups because he claimed UseNet was FULL of
kiddie porn. Apparently there were about 8 binary groups with KP in
them, out of the 2 or 3 thousand binary groups.

I've owned and run a usenet service for the past 12 years and that's not
the way I heard it. My understanding is that he simply wanted the few
known KP groups removed, and wanted cooperation from the large ISPs to take
down KP posts that showed up from time to time.

The ISPs decided on their own just to get out of the Usenet business
because it was getting too messy for them (and hasn't been an important
service to them in a very long time). Less than 10% of a typical ISPs
customer base even knows what Usenet is. AOL got out for the same sorts of
reasons a few years ago. Do they defend freedom of speech and get caught
in a nasty PR problem of looking like they are protecting KP posters? Or
do they help fight KP and then just end up getting bad-mouthed by the
freedom of speech guys?

Usenet sure the hell doesn't need the ISPs to survive. Almost no ISPs run
their own servers anymore - they haven't done it for years. They all
outsourced the service years ago because it's just too expensive to run a
full binary Usenet service for all except the largest ISPs.

In the mean time, he shut down freedom of speech for a great many
people who used the binary groups to trade valuable information.

The guy they are trying to shut up is really Alex Jones. Seriously.

www.infowars.com

www.prisonplanet.com

Jones' stuff was routinely posted in many many groups, and the Nazis
hate him and want to shut him up.
Dave

Sounds like paranoid bull **** to me. I don't even know who to **** "Alex
Jones" is. Never heard of him.

Cuomo is fighting KP, and I doubt he's fighting anything else (other than
crime in general). The ISPs are just dropping a service that never had
much of anything to do with their business because it's becoming a
political hot potato for them. Cuomo isn't against freedom of speech -
he's just against KP.

There are 1000's places you can go on the internet if you want access to
Usenet. Nothing about Usenet will change even if all the ISPs dropped the
service leaving only the 1000 or so Usenet providers to get it from.

If all you want is text access to groups like this one, you can get it for
almost nothing (Free if you are willing to put up with the Google service),
and very low cost if you buy a block account from any of the NSPs that
offer that. http://www.individual.net/ used to give out accounts for free
for access to text Usenet but they got so popular they decided to add a
small fee (10 Euro's per year) for the service.

The reason the NSPs exist is for binary Usenet, not for text. To support
binary usenet, we have racks and racks and racks of disk servers and tons
of bandwidth to pay for. If you pay the rates in the $10 per month range,
you get access to these large binary servers.

You can run a text only Usenet server on a machine that's about as powerful
as a single old home PC and support thousands of users and months of
retention. As such, the services that offer only text access can do it
very cheaply. So for about $10 per year, you can get all the text Usenet
you want.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
http://NewsReader.Com/