Part of agreement reached with Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo to “shut down major sources of online child pornography.”
Verizon is the latest ISP to discontinue newsgroup access following a “landmark agreement” reached last year with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to “shut down major sources of online child pornography.”
Starting September 30th it will join ISPs AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in eliminating free Usenet access, specifically to the alt.bin and alt.bain newsgroup hierarchies that provide actual data files, in order to fight child pornography.
Oddly enough, Verizon makes no reference to fighting child pornography in its reason for discontinuing newsgroup service, saying instead that it has to do with reduced demand.
From Verizon:
Newsgroups were initially developed as a text-based way to share information on the Internet. Today, demand for newsgroups is much lower, since most users have switched to more exciting ways of getting and sharing information via the Web, such as social networks, email and sites such as our Verizon Central Newsroom.
Because of the reduced demand for newsgroups, on September 30, 2009, Verizon will discontinue its USENET newsgroup service. Subscribers will not be able to post or download material from the Verizon newsgroup service after this date.
It’s probably not a big deal for most because true blue newsgroup users subscribe to dedicated services like Giganews for their Usenet access.
Either way, it’s another example of ISPs offering you less while charging you the same price or more.
Stay tuned.
[Hat Tip]
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oks so the joke has always been with usenet that the first rule of usenet is to not talk of usenet. no the above poster is a complete fool usenet is not loosing in popularity, it is almost completely overun with folks downloading nzb’s i mean come on usenet has not been this popular since i was a sysop and had a windmill system on acorns in the basement. i was at a local bar the other day and a group of frat daddy looking college kids was sitting at a table discussing what the best news reader is. REALLY? usenet has never been this popular! think about revenge of the nerds for a second back in the day only us nerdy tri lambda types were on usenet. now its not just the tri lambdas on usenet, the Alpha Betas are there and Ogre has a problem with a rar file.
Good luck with that Cat5e
Usenet has been dying a slow death for years, as the service became little more than a binary dumping ground. NNTP has fewer and fewer users and used more and more bandwidth. I miss the corners of Usenet that still function as user groups, but those are fewer and fewer every month and I understand why ISP’s don’t bother any more.
Non sequitur, malgre.
that is not going to work because people will just start paying for other newsservers who have good privacy policies.
I’m just hoping they don’t apply the same ideology to other networks as well. Say, for example, some official thinks BitTorrent is merely a means for distributing the illegal filth, then forcing ISPs to block the protocol.
It’s a long ways off and BitTorrent isn’t a service provided by the ISPs, but we can hope that this “landmark” agreement isn’t a thin wedge to control the packets flowing through the ISPs much more vigerously.