Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 07:05:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: News... Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.970417065419.26558h-100000@sidhe.memra.com> In-Reply-To: <27507.861262973@orion.webspan.net>
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On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Gary Palmer wrote: > However, that won't change the fact that you still need a lot of > diskspace to hold the articles. And it's growing. Nothing will stop > that (short of dropping alt.sex and alt.binaries like someone else > suggested). A lot of people are afraid that by dropping sex newsgroups specifically, they will become legally vulnerable since they are EDITTING the material on their news server based on its content. But there's an interesting twist that may sidestep this issue, however I am not a lawyer so ask your own lawyer for advice if you have any questions. Rather than just targetting alt.binaries.* and zap everything, target any message that is in a binary encoding format. In other words, USENET is for messages, discussions, etc. so zap anything that is abusing USENET by using it as a file transfer medium. Don't accept UUencoded messages or Base64 or any other recognizable binary format. Text is OK and so is HTML because these are message formats, not file formats. Why do this? Germany just laid charges against Compuserve for distributing porn. Australia announced plans to target child porn and to ask OECD countries to join it. Canada's national police force has asked ISP's to drop porn newsgroups because they have child porn in them. Playboy raided a company that redistributes binary images because of copyright violations. OCAF in the USA is working with local police forces to target ISP's who carry USENET porn http://www.amazing.com/internet The UK government is asking ISP's to not carry porn newsgroups. Is there a pattern? I think so. If people want to get porn from the net there are literally HUNDREDS of WWW servers offering the material and taking the responsibility for checking that it is legal by the standards of the country which they are in. But USENET opens up ISP's servers to images from anywhere with no checks and balances. There is no clear case law yet, but in some countries it is possible that ISP's will be held legally responsible because they are storing the material on their servers for public access, unlike WWW, email or IRC. IMHO the solution is to clean up binaries from USENET and force people to use file transfer protocols (FTP, HTTP, DCC, FSP) to transfer files. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
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