"Melinda Shore" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Wingnut wrote:
ISPs, and I use the term loosely 8^), are increasingly dropping their
newsgroup service, so anybody who doesn't find an independent service is
saying bye bye.

Right. I've recently had several meetings with people from
"content providers" (film companies, basically) who are
interested in getting service providers to deploy technology
to detect protected content on the wire and do one of
several things in response when it's detected. They said
that they basically got Comcast and a few others to drop
Usenet entirely because of the way the binary newsgroups are
being used to transport copyrighted material.

As I am the chief technical head of an ISP I am pretty confident
in explaining this is unmitigated nonsense. Bittorrent today
transports an order of magnitude greater amount of copyrighted
content than Usenet ever could and that is what the film industry
is really worried about.

The film companies would have everyone believe the world revolves
around them. As for wire-sniffing technology, this is fantasy-land,
film industry people are some of the biggest BSers around. If they
knew anything at all about the Internet they wouldn't have problems
with illegal movie distribution they are having now.

The amounts of data that are processed by the major ISP's are
awesomly large. And I mean BIG. Not perhaps as big as your
typical film company executive's ego, but close. ;-)

In order to "detect" anything you have to examine all that data going
through the "wire" in the ISP. Well, the ISP's are currently MERELY
ROUTING that data (and all routing does is take the traffic from one
wire and send it out to another) with hardware that costs in the $100K
range - for a single device, not including the yearly service contracts -
and any ISP has to spare out routers, besides.

So to build this content filter, you START with at least of $100K of
hardware JUST TO MOVE THE TRAFFIC. Then add lots and lots
and lots of more CPU processing power to look inside the traffic
and examine it. And since this magical mythical filtering box that
doesen't currently exist isn't going to sell near as many units as a
major router model, it's a special-built device that's going to cost
quadruple.

Only governments have that kind of money - the only filtering of
this magnitude currently going on on the Internet are the secret black
boxes the NSA puts on the overseas Internet links to look for
spies sending data - and overseas links carry a far less amount of
data than domestic links.

The REAL reason a number of ISPs are dropping Usenet (more
specifically, the binary groups in Usenet) is simply that they consume
an enormous amout of bandwidth that is mostly wasted.

For example someone posts a DVD iso on Usenet. To do so they
have to break it up into, say 500 postings. If a couple of those get lost,
the entire group of 500 is worthless. But, that group of 500 is 4GB of
data right there - data that has done nothing for nobody - not even
the illegal pirates - all it's done is cost the service provider money to
relay!

So what happened is the service providers got together a few years back
with the State of New York and created this rubbish bullcrap cover story
about
fighting child porn. You can read about it he

http://www.nystopchildporn.com/

A list of who's doing it and what is affected is he

http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.p...binary_problem

This allowed the ISP's to either chop out all binary groups or dump Usenet
entirely, while giving their pissed-off customers an excuse that would
somewhat mollify them.

Ted