Goodbye alt.*

Photo by esther-

Verizon will drop alt.* from their Usenet servers:

Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.

[From Verizon offers details of Usenet deletion: alt.* groups, others gone]

And so it starts. There's a pretty good slashdotting on the subject here.

Why? Because of the new pressure from New York to have ISPs cut access to child porn sources. At least, that is their excuse. It is obvious that cutting alt.* will free up quite a chunk of bandwith. Not everyone is going to be crazy about shelling out an extra $10-$20 for third party access to these newsgroups, so usage should go down.

This of course offends the Slashdot crowd: how dare they cut access to alt.binaries.pictures.purple.bunnies just because somebody found child porn in a few newsgroups out of the five million available?

It could also be part of a multi-pronged assault on piracy. Cut off alt.binaries, kill P2P by only cooperating with legitimate companies willing to deal with the P4P initiative and suddenly it becomes extremely hard to pirate a song or a video. Legitimate users of P2P should be OK, as long as their legitimate source (say, somebody trying to download an official Linux image through bittorrent) is part of P4P.

Or they'll simply figure out a way to force every god damn file to be signed, so it would be impossible to upload a file unless it holds incriminating information.

Who the hell knows?

The one problem this is not going to fix is child porn. As long as there is demand for it, people will figure out a way to get it.

As for the goat photo, it is an inside joke at #asp. It involves goats, Slashdot and New York City.