How many of you out there reading this post know what USENET is?
Raise your hands.
Good. Now how many of you are Time Warner customers throughout the US?
Well you bunch can kiss any USENET access via your provider good-bye.
Now, how many of you are Verizon customers?
Good. You bunch can kiss good-bye to all the ALT.* hierarchy of USENET.
This is because the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo knowing that there is no way he could get a law to standup in to any court challenges has effectively bullied Verizon, Time Warner and Sprint into pulling the service. He pulled this off by basically threatening these billion dollar corporations with public conferences that would insinuate that the companies via providing USENET access were nothing more than purveyors of child pornography.
The thing is that out of the 100,000 plus discussion groups in USENET probably less than 1% contains any child related pornography. As pointed out by Declan McCullagh on his blog
That amounts to an odd claim: stopping the spread of child porn on a total of 88 newsgroups necessarily means coercing broadband providers to pull the plug on thousands of innocuous ones. Usenet’s sprawling set of hierarchically arranged discussion areas include ones that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin. It has been partially succeeded by mailing lists, message boards, and blogs; AOL stopped carrying Usenet in 2005, but AT&T still does.
In what is apparently nothing more than a politically motivated move the NY AG has decided that rather than using those dangerous areas to actually track down offenders and prosecuting them it is better to totally remove our access to a valuable resource. Granted there are still third party companies that provide access on a subscription basis but one has to wonder how long it will be before they become a target because of less than 1% of the total newsgroup usage.
Conversation Tags: censorship, New York, Verizon, Time Warner, Sprint
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