Leftist attack on Usenet
The usual "pornography" excuse:
"New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would "shut down major sources of online child pornography."
What Cuomo didn't say is that his agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers' access to Usenet--the venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful of which contain illegal material.
Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."
It's not quite the death of Usenet (which has been predicted, incorrectly, countless times). But if a politician can pressure three of the largest Internet providers into censorial acquiescence, it may only be a matter of time before smaller ones like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com feel the squeeze.
Cuomo's office said it had "reviewed millions of pictures over several months" and found only "88 different newsgroups" containing child pornography. "We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business," Cuomo said in a statement released after a press conference in New York. "I call on all Internet service providers to follow their example and help deter the spread of online child porn."
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.
Many of Usenet's discussion groups are scarcely different from discussions you might find on the Web at, say, Yahoo Groups. Because there's no central authority, however--Usenet servers exchange messages in a cooperative, peer-to-peer manner--politicians are more likely to look askance at the concept. (For that matter, so is the Recording Industry Association of America.)
Source
Sort of like burning down your house because you think there might be a mouse in it.
9 comments:
Personally, i'm in favor of totally eliminating any and all forms of child porn, be they on the internet or anywhere else. What i'm not in favor of is violating peoples right to access "legitimate" content.
The fact that this is coming from NYSAG Andrew Cuomo, who like his father Mario, (former NYS Gov.) is further to the Left than just about anyone you could think of, is quite surprising. Then again, he is "lusting" for NYS's governors mansion!
This looks like what AOL did about 15 years ago. They had complaints about sexually explicit chat rooms and they decided to shutdown any that used forbidden words. So chat rooms about breasts, boobs, jugs, melon and hooters died a quick death. Then the complaints started to roll in. When they got rid of breasts, they shutdown the Breast Cancer survivors room. Boobs shutdown the worst TV show for the week. Jugs took out the Pottery group, melons, well that took out the melon recipe group and Hooters took out the Owl appreciation group.
Less than a week later, all groups were back.
Mobius
I'm sure they have the technology to eliminate just the specific sites that are generally considered offensive, such as child porn. Of course, that technology can also be used to silence certain political views. (ie: conservative)
It has long been possible to not carry certain newsgroups so they could have taken that route instead of cutting out all newsgroups but it's also a fact that their users can access newsgroups from other sources.
Not offering newsgroups as an I.S.P. is not the same as blocking newsgroup traffic. The internet still tends to route around all attempts at censorship.
When someone can describe mathematically exactly what porn is, and then what child porn is, then a program can be written that will block or destroy it!
Unfortunately no such description has ever been done and in fact most likely won’t ever be written.
Just to describe it in English is impossible! As one Supreme Court Justice said, “I know it when I see it, but I can’t define it”.
Mobius
See if this helps. It's when you see some old guy stick his dcik in your 5 year old daughters arss! Got it now?
So then anon, if she is 6 years old, its not child porn? Is that what your saying?
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