- Wednesday, 7 January 2009
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Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality - Oscar Wilde
Comcast to shut down free Usenet access
A READER sent along the following email he recently received from his cable ISP, Comcast:
Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer:
As of October 25, 2008, the complimentary Comcast Newsgroups service, powered by Giganews, will be discontinued. This feature provided customers access to 2 gigabytes of newsgroup information on a monthly basis. After this date, these customers will no longer be able to access the Comcast Newsgroups service through Comcast. Customers who have subscribed directly to Giganews for newsgroup access will not be affected by this change.
While we have seen a decline in popularity of newsgroups as customers have chosen to get information from other sources, we know a small percentage of our customers continue to use newsgroups today. If you are interested in continuing to access newsgroups, Giganews is offering a special promotion for Comcast customers.
Thank you for being a valued customer.
Comcast Cable
Information from other sources indicates that Comcast canceled its Giganews contract on September 16th. This is apparently a unilateral, nationwide service change by Comcast.
Our reader's reaction to this announcement, and we agree with him, is that not only is this censorship, it's also effectively a price hike. Any time a service provider cuts off a specific service without a corresponding reduction in price, it amounts to an imposed fee increase.
He writes, "[It is] much like making candy smaller and charging the same coin for it. This is probably why Giganews was so quiet about it as well."
The Big Media companies have been pressuring ISP companies to discontinue their Usenet services, because the MAFIAA simply can't stand the thought that some Internet users might be using a few Usenet newsgroups to share some bootleg copies of tunes and clips.
It means nothing to either the media cartels or the ISPs that most casual file sharing on Usenet probably doesn't infringe any copyrights, nor that the volume of other very useful content on Usenet is far larger, by several orders of magnitude, than any that is suspect.
Comcast is just the latest of the large ISPs to buckle under to MAFIAA pressure from the music and movie cartels, but that doesn't mean that they deserve to get away with this. µ
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This also happened a few years at various US government agencies. The MAFIAA just needed a bigger thumb$crew for Comcast and the other ISPs. Believe it or not, but the same agencies are now blocking FTP (file transfer protocol) - in BOTH directions, inbound and outbound, even anonymous FTP. Sure, this is all about "security". Liars. Let's see how long it takes for commercial ISPs to follow suit. What is happening to the Internet to please the MAFIAA is just sickening.
Dear MPAA / RIAA. The internet does not belong to you. All you are doing is hurting Comcast profits and Comcast is stupid enough to follow your suggestion. I can get around this very easily. Nope, not telling you how... do your own homework fat cats.
I got a note telling me that my Comcastic rates were going up due to "improvements" they have been making. I guess they mean when they dug the crap out of the neighborhood...
O2, who bought out BeThere.co.uk in UK, also has no newsgroup access. Most of the other ISPs have newsgroup access. Newsgroups are very handy, looks like more will switch to using google newsgroups. Maybe it's google pushing the isp's to stop newsgroup access?
You can thank NYAG Andrew Quomo for this one. In the name of "protecting children" he's managed to cut off all Comcast customers from the internet's oldest area of free speech. Quomo won't stop with ISPs. He'll be using this next election. Unless maybe he's another Spitzer but we probably aren't that lucky. MAFIAA may have played a hand but with a 2GB monthly limit I find it hard to believe it was a big threat to them.
Yea, it's pretty amazing how much fear the MAFIAA spread. Take for instance any DoD office computer. They are so paranoid of the MAFIAA (yes these are people with nukes and missiles) that they panic whenever any office employee downloads a .torrent file (even if it's a torrent file made available on a .gov site for government data). They're not scared of Al Qaeda taking over their mandated Microsoft Windows machines but scared that peer-to-peer torrents will bring ruin to the American way of life.
More that just the MAFIAA are opposed to the Usenet News: ever fascist on the planet gets rectal cramps from the concept of an information service that cannot be censored. ~D
Well over a year ago TimeWarner Cable NYC started letting it's newsserver fall apart when at one time is was fairly decent. Most of the binaries were missing and the ones that did come lasted less than a week due to poor retention. The newsserver was something we as customers were paying for and we complained many times that the newsserver was lousy. They would say that there was nothing that could be done to fix it. At the time I had started using AstraWeb and Giganews premium newsservers and only occasionally checked on the TimeWarner newsserver to see if things ever improved. It never did. Eventually I got a notice a few months ago saying that they would shut it down on account of not many users accessing it. They were a bunch of jerks because we told them it wasn't functioning properly, so there wasn't much point in using it. So they shut it down and never gave us back any money even though they took away a service that we were entitled to have. I'm sure it had something to do with downloading pirating movies, but that's the breaks. The ISPs are really getting crappy and now they intend to put limits on how much can be downloaded at a time when download speeds are going up. One time last year TimeWarner Cable shut down my access to the internet because I was found to be downloading a particular movie on Bittorrent. I had to agree to stop downloading movies on BT and then I got my internet connection back. I never even got a warning they were going to disconnect me and I had to telephone to find out what was going on. I never download U.S. movies on BT anymore. I dislike the idea that they can look into my downloading activities, but what can I do. I guess the heyday of the internet is just about over.
Go to https://www.altopia.com/ for US$6/month Usenet.
You can't complain about losing a service that you never paid for. Your subscription to Comcast Internet service (or any other service) really only entitles you to just that: INTERNET ACCESS. They don't have to offer any additional services (whether they are at an additional charge or free). People should be more grateful for what they do get, rather than harping on the things that they don't.
@Brainiac: I decided to take everything you get. Now sit in the corner and be happy for nothing.