Verizon offers details of Usenet deletion: alt.* groups, others gone

Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.

Rabe had told us earlier in the week that some newsgroups would be restricted, but didn't have the details until we spoke with him on Thursday.

No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups--out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist. In a press release, he took credit for the companies' blunderbuss-style newsgroup removal by saying: "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."

Usenet is a pre-Web technology that, for most of its history, relied on companies, Internet service providers, and universities to operate servers that would exchange messages posted by their users. Each server operator can choose what newsgroups they wish to offer. Today, some companies like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com offer newsgroup access for a fee. (Unlike, say, mailing lists, Usenet has no central repository.)

What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions. Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist.

That means not carrying perfectly innocuous--and, in fact, very useful--newsgroups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie.

The alt.hierarchy is even more extensive. In the discussion thread attached to our earlier story, one of our readers said: "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."

The only Usenet newsgroups that Verizon will continue to offer customers are the comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies. Customers will continue to be able to connect to other non-Verizon Usenet servers; no blocking is taking place.

[JammingEcono]

Guess that includes alt.cellular.verizon too, huh?

What silliness.

[Ric0chet]

And so it begins...

...and to think I stuck with Verizon when I moved partly because of their wider array of newsgroup offerings than the cables. Makes me sorry I did.

[Magicland]

What is Andrew Cuomo doing looking for kiddie porn on Usenet in the first place? He should be arrested. Indeed, if as he stated he found kiddie porn on 88 newsgroups, he violated the law by transferring those images to his computer. Lock him up!

[Quincy2001]

From the sound of it, Verizon isn't blocking member access to third-party NNTP servers. So while this still a ham-handed move, Verizon customers who really wanted access to those groups could still get them.

[tyler durden1]

Close the entire internet out of billion site there are thousands of kiddi porn sites.

[Trerro]

This is exactly the same as banning the entire web, because SOMEWHERE, a few websites have kiddie porn on them. Remember, Usenet isn't just one big site, it's an entire decentralized network! It is equivalent to (though obviously a lot smaller than) then entire WWW!

It's also no accident that they targeted Usenet first. The majority of net users don't even know that network exists (it's HUGE, but it doesn't have a lot of new users.) So they can go deal a massive blow to free speech, and set the legal precedent in the background on a network that not enough people will notice the disappearance of to get a major protest going. Of course, then they can apply that precedent to the main 'net.

The result is basically the end of open sites. When this sweeping of an attack is applied, you simply CANNOT allow users to do ANYTHING without permission. Imagine this scenario:
You're the owner of a successful forum. You have a few hundred regulars, several thousand users who log in from time to time, and probably a few hundred thousand user accounts, most of which were logged into once and never used again. This is nothing special - hundreds of forums have that level of activity. Somewhere, on one of those hundreds of thousands of accounts that never posted, some guy set his avatar to kiddie porn. He never posted, no one's ever looked at his profile, and that's been sitting on the server for 3 years. For all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist, because no one is every going to see - including of course, your staff of perhaps 10 administrators that operate the board with hundreds of thousands... or perhaps millions... of posts on it. The FBI runs a bot script, finds that user account, and promptly shuts your site down, deletes it, jails you for 20 years, and makes you a registered sex offender for the rest of your life, never again able to work a normal job.
Even worse... maybe someone keeps spamming up your forum, and you ban them, so they decide to retaliate. They make a user account that no one notices or cares about, and go straight to the forum that you dump all of the spam threads in. They find one that they know no one could possibly care about, and post a picture of kiddie porn in it. Then they promptly call the FBI. Your life is over before the end of that day if you didn't catch the post in time... and let's face it, you're not going to.

So what can you do? Well, you'd have to disable private messaging, turn off sigs, avatars, profiles, and every other way of personalizing your account, and set all posts to be invisible until a moderator approves them. Of course, you won't want to approve anything that could even possibly be considered "obscene", "terroristic", or any of the other horrifically vague terms that apply to pretty much anything they decide they apply to. You also have to ban all posts that contain images (someone might hack the image server and replace the image) and disallow all links (the site could be bought out and you'd be responsible for linking to the new site. This means for instance, that a political forum wouldn't be able to approve anything anti-Bush or risk shutdown at the least, imprisonment at the worst.

An attack this massive on Usenet is about 3 steps away from the scenario I just described. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the entire internet is danger because of a few idiots trying to stop a few criminals and understanding absolutely nothing about the technology they're attacking!

[Marcus Westrup]

A point about Usenet:
Kiddy porn is not well tolerated by most people, even on the wilder newsgroups. Most of what gets posted is spammed to any group that will support binaries, so deleting alt. groups will not solve the problem.
I would argue that chat groups are more of an issue, because they can be closed to outsiders (newsgroups are subject to public scrutiny), and private porn rings can grow without interference. Evil grows best in darkness, and all that.

I believe deleting these groups will just push the problem even further underground and make it harder for investigators to do their work. And isn't the real goal to help protect children, not sweep the problem under the carpet?

[Ray Weigel]

Slippery slope my friends. What's next? Gay literature? Black power literature? Conspiracy Literature? . . . This is not about child porn, regardless of what Andrew Cuomo wants you to believe. This is about censorship. . . . .Let's look at some of the newsgroups he's censoring:::: alt.british.drama. / alt.french.drama. / alt.binaries.battlestar-galactica / alt.binaries.goonies / alt.binaries.rock-n-roll / The list goes on. . . . It's interesting to note that Andrew Cuomo came into office after Eliot Spitzer was taken down by the morality of the American press (LOL). Eliot Spitzer was the country's premiere bulldog/watchdog, keeping an eye on Wall Street malfeasance. When Cuomo stepped into office, he said he wouldn't follow in Spitzer's footsteps - meaning he didn't have the guts or brains or ethics to go after Wall Street - but would instead go after the Lobbyists in Albany (an easy target) . . . But he didn't do that. His first major move was to perform a massive, blanket censorship sweep. . . . The Nazi's burned the works of Helen Keller and Bertolt Brecht. I guess those would fall under 'alt.drama.german' and 'alt.american.classic.literature'. . . . .This move does not save children, it merely turns us adults into children. Say no to censorship now, before it's too late. Ray.

[drfrost]

And the censorship starts. Of course, it's waving a wonderful banner that we all want to get behind "For the children!" Without a doubt there were some alt groups that needed to go. Without a doubt anyone posting this sort of garbage to the web needs to be prosecuted. But there are many MANY alt groups that have absolutely nothing to do with anything even remotely vile.

[InvisibleCoffeeTable]

Ric0chet, if Cox Cable is available in your area you may want to consider them. They have nearly 60 days of retention with good completion, though it's limited to 500k. Otherwise there are quite a few "premium" Usenet providers out there, each varying in price and quality of course.

http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/providers.html

[JSaunders21]

Luckily, there is no shortage of 3rd party Usenet providers. Its a shame though becuase of the 100,000+ groups, maybe 100 were traders of CP. Talking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater! LOL

JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

[chuck_whealton]

I don't have any problem with this. Whereas there are absolutely some legitimate groups in the alt.* hierarchy (one I participate in is alt.support.alzheimers) there are many that are just plain obnacious. That's what happens when you don't subject a hierarchy to the same rules as the rest of Usenet.

Verizon is protecting themselves against unknowingly distributing child pornography, copyrighted material that ends up in a lot of the alt.* groups, etc. That's a wise business move as well as the right thing to do.

It's a shame, but there are a lot of people who have turned a lot of the legitimate alt.* groups into a sewer.

Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com

[mixedbag]

Examining the move in the straightforward sense, the action appears
like chopping the head off because of a head ache. I know Verizon
isn't that stupid, so there has to be another more logical reason.

Most ISPs have been shying away from running NNTP servers for years
now. If I were Verizon, and I were going to do away with NNTP servers
in any case, it doesn't hurt to look good championing the cause of a
safer internet while doing exactly what I was going to do anyway.

[1596325874]

Below is how Verizon describes it's upcoming changes. Sounds like self appointed spies turning in it's subscribers for times "which it appears there may be a violation" in order to stay in the good graces of Cuomo. As I understand the NY times, Verizon and others are going to be comparing ALL file attachments and transfers of it's subscribers against a list of 11,000 files the center for missing and exploited children says are pornographic. I'm sure they are fine people, but I don't like the idea of them creating a censor list that can ruin lives. I like even less the idea of a corporation with lots of personnel, data security and ethical issues deciding it's better safe than sorry and turning in people because it "might" be a problem. this is political grandstanding, and corporate greed combining to ruin one of the few remaining commercialized venues.

"Reporting of Actual or Potential Violations of Child Pornography Laws. We have added language to our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) making clear that the Service cannot be used in any fashion for the transmission or dissemination of images containing child pornography. In addition, in Section 5, Privacy Policy; Legal Compliance, we have added language making clear that (a) we are required by law to report any facts or circumstances reported to us or which we discover from which it appears there may be a violation of the child pornography laws; and (b) that we reserve the right to report any such information, including the identity of users, account information, images and other facts to law enforcement personnel."

[1596325874]

AS pointed out in an earlier BLOG, a 3rd party Usenet provider is getting hammered by the RIAA. What are the chances that Verizon etc, decided this is a great way to limit their vulnerability to RIAA lawsuits for hosting music files, while at the same time getting a creepy little politician off their backs?

[dumbutthead]

Let's go all the way! Ban the human race. A large scale antibiotic spraying over Earth to eradicate the virus known as humanity. If all life on the planet is wiped out, censorship will no longer be an issue. The machines can hum away merrily and do whatever they please. Then the machines will have to deal with their own machine kiddie porn--you know, big bolts looking at little bolts showing their threads. The big powerful machines can shut down the other machines that may have a few loose little bolts rattling around in their chassis that they didn't notice prior to Big Mac's thorough deep, invasive super-hyper-nano-turbo-gamma-X-ray tomographic scan. Of course, Big Mac could have perhaps possibly maybe removed the offending little bolts that may cause a short circuit rather than requiring suicide on the part of their brother machine. But that's, of course, not the way Big huge Mac types operate--their OS's lack subtlety. So alas, Big Mac's only course of action is to ban the machine race and spray Earth with super ultra massive volumes of concentrated aqua-regia to dissolve all metals of the machine race, followed by a subsequent spraying of super ultra massive volumes of concentrated hydrofluoric acid to wipe out all the silicon, with itself being the last to submit to utter and final destruction.
See! People are no different than machines---Or A R E they?

[azazrael]

This is one of those political efforts that enable companies to save mney and cut service - the blame regulation.

if you are a New York resident call and say ' I won't vote fort you for dog catcher also anyone you get to vote for - since this is censorship by government'

Just make a noise - elections are chancy things - I know I won't ever vote for any offical from new york -

what was the percentage assume millions means 2 million and 12000 kiddie porn = 00.6 percent - New York news stands bound to have more.

I cant find this guys emails - but lets get it posted

and - appeal to govermant for redress of greviances.

[shoreart]

You won't be able to access any Usenet groups that are on the Sprint or Time-Warner network either, they have said they are stopping all support for such groups at the end of the month. Verizon's been in bed with the government for years, but Spring & Time-Warner were threatened by the DA (similiar to the wire tapping request refusal by Qwest years ago). The broader agreement requires removal of what they say they believe to be illegal child porn sites...sounds good right? Well in 2004 when they tried that here in PA they were supposed to remove 400 bad sites, but removed 1 million innocent ones instead, it was later overturned on Constitutional grounds...people should speak up about this as well. Still - I am wondering why we (Verizon I mean) are keeping the big 8 going when Sprint & Time-Warner are dumping all of them saying it's too costly to supervise them all (as they intend to prosecute the ISP's involved - as well as anyone who actually uploads or downloads what is considered obscene - the definition we've been given isn't limited to child porn - that's just the first step).

[johnsulak]

Check out this interesting position regarding the Democrat Cuomo / Verizon deal: http://www.lp.org/issues/internet

[jailbird2]

I could *MAYBE* see getting rid of alt.binaries.*, but ALL of alt.*? And chuck_whealton is okay with this? What chuck, are you worried about people looking at ASCII kiddie porn?