Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to Block Usenet

Found on Webmonkey on Tuesday, 10 June 2008
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New York's Attorney General has just launched a blacklist-based initiative to quell undesirable Internet content. Child pornography is the target, although like all blacklists there will be a large number of blocked innocents and civilian casualties.

An undercover investigation by the Attorney General's office uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as "Newsgroups," an online service not associated with websites. The Newsgroups act as online public bulletin boards where users can upload and download files. Users access Newsgroups through their Internet Service Providers.

According to a report by Declan McCullagh, Sprint will be blocking the entire alt. hierarchy of Usenet, while good old Time Warner Cable has no time for such fussiness and will just stop offering all Usenet access.

I can't hear that stupidity anymore. Sure, go ahead, use all your resources to block the access to childporn instead of trying to curb its creation. I bet the kids will be so happy. But what can you expect from someone who already fails at the basics? "Newsgroups" are not some unbelieveable hidden pool of illegal activity; this amazing "investigation" should have figured out that newsgroups are as old (if not older) than the World Wide Web. Or the "Internet" as they call it; as if the Internet is nothing but the WWW. Users can up- and download files via e-mail too. What's next? Shutting down e-mail (well, at least that would stop spam)? That shows clearly that you never ever should let someone work on something he doesn't understand at all. And it will take ages until they realize that this will do nothing; pedophiles will move to other ways of distribution. But oh joy, let's use the childporn argument to axe everything because nobody dares to speak up against it without being labeled as a pedophile.