Usenet going bye bye

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Fri, 6/27/08, Ty Unes <riverty at kc.rr.com> wrote:

> First, I want to let you all know that I called Time-Warner
> Cable (45 minute call) and logged a formal complaint about 
> the lack of Usenet service. The decision to pull newsgroup 
> feeds to TW customers is not neccessary. With the goal of 
> trying to curtail piracy and pornography, other ISP's are 
> simply filtering the "bad" stuff (porn, movies, software, 
> etc. - binaries) and leaving the good stuff (text only 
> groups) available to their customers. A MUCH better decision. 
> I would ask anyone who has TW Internet to call and complain 
> the same.

TWC might be in a bit of a bind when it comes to Usenet.  Quite a lot of the fun text-only groups are in the alt.* hierarchy, and a newsgroup in the the alt.* hierarchy can be created fairly easily by anyone.  This means that if a child pornographer lost his alt.binaries.* groups, he could create a new one fairly easily and get going again.  Other unmoderated hierarchies could be overrun as well.

So if they're serious about their reason of "stopping child porn", TWC would be giving themselves an unending expensive job of constantly monitoring all the newsgroups for child porn.  Wiping out all Usenet from their service means that they don't have to monitor anything.

Back when the Internet was largely limited to college campuses and the government, there was a nice little application called UUEN/DEcode which converted binary files to and from 7-bit ASCII, for use in text-only E-mail and Usenet.  MIME encoding largely replaced UUEN/DEcode later, but the fact remains that the software required to post binaries to text-only groups still exists.  While its a lot harder to use than MIME encoding, the folks trading child porn are already used to hardship from existing laws, so getting rid of alt.binaries.* groups won't prevent people from posting binaries on Usenet.