You might have heard it in the news that Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon are blocking the complete alt.* hierarchy of the Usenet after coming to an agreement with N.Y. attorney general Andrew Cuomo in an effort to fight child pornography on the Usenet. This basically means that roughly 100.000 groups will be blocked because of a handful, I think it was 88, where child pornography was discovered.
This would be equal to force search engine providers to block a full country from appearing in the search index because some domains with the country extension were found to contain child pornography. A highly disproportional move by the Internet Service Providers. Time Warner made the decision to discontinue their Usenet service completely while Sprint / Verizon is blocking the complete alt hierarchy.
The alt hierarchy is known to be the group with the largest bandwidth requirements and it could be that the ISPs saw this as a welcome initiative to reduce their bandwidth costs.
Giganews, my Usenet provider of choice, is offering specials for Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers who would like to keep uncensored Usenet access.
Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers get 50% off of Diamond access and 20% of every other plan in the first month which is probably a good way to test the excellent service provided by Giganews. I’m a customer for more than 2 years and never looked back to other Usenet providers. Unparalleled in retention (200 days), speed and security in my opinion.
Members must click on the Free Trial link on the above landing pages and sign up with a valid Time Warner / Sprint / Verizon email address to receive the special.
I just realized that they added another ten connections to my Diamond subscription which means I get 20 simultaneous connections now. Speed is already maxed out with ten connections though, and that is 16 Mbit per second.
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This would lead to usenet being capped all together, this is going to be bittorent all over again.. (with people talking about how using usenet isn’t “actually” piracy)
When I heard this on the radio last week I figured that it was just a bunch of BS to block usenet…
guess I was right, go usa!
People better start opening their eyes, the gov is being sneaky as all hell.
http://www.newsdemon.com is also offering a special discount for the Time Warner and Verizon members. Newsdemon is offering a 15% lifetime discount on all their plans, including their block accounts.
As far as I unerstood it’s not “blocking access to” – it’s stopping to cache it on provider’s servers [for free?].
I am not into usenet but I think current stuation is that people using it go for proper paid services instead of crappy free ones from ISPs.
So who cares?..
Rarst you are right, they are limiting or removing the Usenet service that they did offer. They do not limit, block or censor Usenet access from third parties.
I already pay $19 a month ( with SSL included ) from a my lesser known Usenet service that has 120 days retention, don’t get me wrong Giganews is a premium service but that’s not of price cut compared to others.