Re: Help us save usenet news for Time-Warner customers

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:22:31 +0000 (UTC), Vance <itsme@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>On 2008-06-22, Robert Reynolds <robbie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Vance wrote:
>>> I moved because verizon has decided that they are only going to carry
>>> the big 8 newsgroups as well as their own internal groups. I frequent
>>> alt.os.linux.ubuntu which isn't in one of the big 8 groups.
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, what are the big 8 groups?
>
>They are:
>comp.*
>humanities.*
>misc.*
>news.*
>rec.*
>sci.*
>soc.*
>talk.*
>
>rec.models.rc.air is obviously part of the rec.* group so there is no
>problem there. However, alt.* is not going to be offered after the
>26th of June and I frequent alt.os.linux.ubuntu. The biggest reason is
>because there is a lot of **** in the alt.* group some of it being
>child ****. So the New York AG took the draconian approach instead of
>blocking just the binaries groups where the child **** is being
>posted.

Reality check: this has precious little to do with anything that *any*
government agency - at *any* level - has had to say on the matter. It was
merely a gold-plated excuse to enable something the large cable-company
ISPs
would have eventually done anyway. Now they can hang their virtual hats on
the
supposition that they're actually doing something "good". Which is BS.

What this is all about is the large cable-company ISPs punting something
that
(a) provides zero income to them (no place to stick in-line
advertisements),
(b) costs them money to provide (whether their own infrastructure or
outsourced), and (c) actually competes with their business model (read:
folks
downloading content from usenet binary groups are less inclined to "rent"
anything from cable-company OnDemand offerings).

It's a no-brainer for Time-Warner and Verizon (and likely any other
large-but-faceless cable-company ISP) to get rid of the virtually
uncontrollable alt.* hierarchy. And that's the first shoe to drop...

For those who are not inclined to download binaries, there are plenty of
free
usenet servers that cover the tens of thousands of discussion-only groups.
www.motzarella.com, for one...

/daytripper