Verizon Blocks Access To Whole USENET Hierarchy

[Lennon]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080616-alt-blocked-verizon-blocks-access-to-whole-usenet-hierarchy.html

Verizon has released details of the agreement it and other ISPs signed last week to block access to Usenet groups that have been caught trafficking child pornography. Instead of simply blocking the handful of offending groups, however, Verizon has decided to enforce a blanket ban on what could be tens of thousands of completely innocent groups.

It all started when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo enlisted the help of Verizon and other ISPs with his assault on child pornography spread through Usenet groups. A while ago, Cuomo's investigators submitted anonymous reports to ISPs like Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable about child pornography images stored on their servers and trafficked through Usenet groups. When the ISPs did nothing—failing to uphold their policy of taking swift action against peddlers of child porn—Cuomo's investigators threatened to charge the ISPs with fraud and deceptive business practices.

The ISPs bargained with Cuomo's office and came to an agreement in which each would pay $1.125 million to the Attorney General's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to fund further efforts. The ISPs also agreed to clean up their servers and block access to Usenet groups that are spreading child pornography, and Verizon has now offered details on exactly how it plans to enforce this ban. Originally, Cuomo's office claimed to have found child pornography on 88 of the 100,000-plus Usenet groups.

[and-justice-for-all]

1. What are Usenet Groups?

[merwin]

2. Wikipedia Link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access to the Internet. It was originally conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET," employing UUCP to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software. This system, developed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was called USENET to emphasize its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation (Daniel et al, 1980).

The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within the sci hierarchy, for science. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read.

[and-justice-for-all]

3. Danke! nt

[lapfog_1]

5. Poor man's ARPANET

would entail having to explain ARPANET...

The ARPANET was the internet before there was the internet (it even predates TCP). ARPA (later DARPA) was the Advanced Research Projects Agency... a government funded agency that looked at interesting technologies and funded them through research grants. Later a part of the DOD ( hence the "D" prepended ). The "internet" was, for some 30 years, funded mostly by government agencies... until Al Gore "invented" it by authoring and promoting legislation that allowed commercial traffic on government "backbones" and also put the entire technology into the public domain, allowing all sort of companies to innovate things like "routers" and "switches" and such. (Al never said he invented it, only allowed for the phenomenal growth and commercial application... which was TRUE).

Of course there are many boneheads (Congressman Dornan - R - idiotville) that think that it is a wholly private sector invention, made by some powerful computer companies for their own commercial interests (NOT). Even things like the WWW and the DNS (domain name service or xxx.xxx.com or .gov or .org, etc - invented by Jon Postel) came not from private enterprise but from government funded research institutions... the WWW and the use of html came from Tim Berners Lee at CERN ( the European High Energy Research Laboratory).

I was one of the original IMP programmers... back when the ARPANET had about a dozen nodes (that is, there were only 12 computers that made up the whole "internet"). Mostly I did a little tweaking of packet sizes and such and wrote a paper on it for class.

[Speck Tater]

4. They are what the internet was before the "World Wide Web"

Most people think "The Web" and "The Internet" are the same thing. Wrong. "The Web" is only one of many services on "The Internet". But most people on the Internet only know about, and only know how to access the Web, (HTTP services) by using a web browser, and email (SMTP services) using an email client like Outlook.

But there's a LOT more on the Internet that cannot be accessed with a browser, because it is not part of The Web. The Internet was around long before The Web, but back in those days only computer geeks were on the net. You had to be a geek because you navigated the Internet with UNIX command lines, and all you ever got back was text. The Internet (It was still called ARPA Net back then) came into existence around 1967. By 1971 there were 23 computers on the net, and by 1974 that doubled to 46! I was on the Internet in the 1980's.

The World Wide Web (WWW) only came into existence around 1992. I had already been on the Internet for about 10 years when I first got word of this new thing called The Web and the new kind of computer program called "A Browser." So the part of the Internet that most people think is the whole Internet is really just a very recent add-on to the whole rest of the Internet.

Think of it this way. The average Internet user is like a person who bought a TV set, but only knows how to watch channel 6. He doesn't even know that there are other channels to watch. Web browsers only show you channel 6. There's a whole big world of other channels out there that your browser can't pick up. USENET is one of those channels.

edit: typo

[OutNow]

6. How Soon We Forget

As someone who spent too many years crawling around in X.500 architecture and the formative years of LDAP, I often forget that many folks use their Internet browser without understanding anything about HTTP, SSL, DHCP, DNS, CSS, CGI, etc. On the other hand, if Internet use still required a detailed knowledge of the underlying protocols, the Obama campaign would have received 150 donations online rather than 1,500,000. So I guess it's OK.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

7. Sadly, child porn peddlers have no fixed residence. They're nomads.

You shut down one of their dwellings, they have 559 others.