First, Jonno tells me that the whole Lithium Picnic sued by Suicide Girls thing is now gosh-and-golly just a big misunderstanding and they’re all “friends again“. Then, Praemedia jars me out of my bewilderment to send me spinning into WTF land with the Ars Technica article announcing that Verizon is banning all alt* subdirectories to — of course — protect the children from teh pr0n predators. They’re banning access to the whole USENET hierarchy. That includes the dirty pictures of Bart Simpson that are no doubt being trafficked in the alt.tv.simpsons discussion groups. Snip:
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. Perhaps aspiring to win a G-rating from Utah, CNET reports that Verizon has opted to block not just the 88 offending groups, but a whole lot more. Verizon will provide access only to the “big 8,” a group of hierarchies that are actively managed and governed by a more substantial set of rules than the banned groups. (…read more)
This is going to have a null effect on child pornography. They have their own networks for distributing and collating images: Usenet groups are hardly central to that, I’m sure.
It’s just going to annoy a lot more Verizon customers that are already annoyed at the company’s chop-and-change, bait-and-switch tactics.
That said, from a technical standpoint, I wonder how Verizon proposes to do this? Monitor and maybe block every nntp session?