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back to article Provider: Anti-piracy ruling has 'killed Usenet'

Europe’s biggest Usenet provider News-Service Europe (NSE) says anti-piracy organisation BREIN has "killed Usenet". The Dutch organisation this week lost a landmark case in which it was ordered to remove all pirated content or risk fine of €50,000 per day. "It is technically as well as economically impossible to check the …

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      1. The Infamous Grouse
        Reply Icon
        Unhappy

        Usenet for tech support

        VirginMedia used to do this for TV and broadband technical support. The staff members who monitored it were, I believe, from the soon to close Albert Dock facility.

        It was one of the best technical support systems I've ever used. Available for reporting 24/7 (even if the responses weren't always immediate) it had multiple advantages over the traditional phone support, not least of which was that technical information could be passed around internally in its original ASCII form, not like on the phone where it would be subjected to an endless game of Chinese whispers ultimately ending with the user having to explain the whole thing again from scratch to yet another department.

        You could even arrange, rearrange or cancel engineers' visits through it without having to go through the call centre, which was an incredible time-saver. Sadly, Virgin pulled the plug several years ago. It was given a brief reprieve for about six months, but then went away for good.

        Virgin's electronic support system is now web-based, with all of the issues that entails. But I guess customers these days aren't interested in learning how to use something unless it's in a browser window.

        Some smaller organisations and groups -- most notably Steve Gibson's GRC -- maintain small private NNTP servers for discussions, but they tend to be run by, and aimed at, a more technical user base.

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      2. Displacement Activity
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        @Tasogare

        I've thought about this occasionally, but never done it. Setting up the server is trivial. The big problem is that users don't understand newsreaders; they're fixated on the crappy web forums.

        Another issue is getting ISPs to carry your group, if your server isn't up to the job. This would be easy if you can get your group into the big 5 name hierarchies ('comp.', etc), but Usenet is actually 'run' (surprisingly enough) by a bunch of Anal Retards who make this incredibly difficult. That means that you're stuck with a slot somewhere in alt, which makes it hard to get others to carry your group.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bypassing the law courts > no sympathy

    I'm sorry, telling a third-party that it hasn't "bothered" to develop technology to solve a problem between yourself and a law-breaker isn't right.

    BREIN should develop the tech itself, take a news feed and notify the the NSE of infringing content. NSE removes the content from its servers and BREIN can try to track down and sue infringer if it wants to.

    That is the proper procedure. You don't change the principles and process of law because it doesn't suit your financial interests.

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  3. Richard Kettlewell

    I have wondered for some time how NSPs carrying the binaries groups got away with it; the service they are selling is quite obviously piracy.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Living in the past...

    Most Usenet binary content really is in binary, not text.

    The old text-based methods of encoding binary fell out of use years ago - most of it is now yEncoded, which uses virtually all of the 256 possible values of each byte. Therefore it would be trivially easy to filter out. However, once you start filtering out yEncode, people will simply stop using it and go back to Uuencode or Base64 which are pure printable text encodings. But even then, it's trivially easy to spot encoded binary in these forms. So, people will develop encodings that cannot be trivially detected - they'll take up rather more storage space and bandwidth, but that's not exactly expensive these days.

    The other thing about binary content is that it's BIG. Yes of course it's split into multiple small messages, but even then they have to be reassembled somehow and so the message subjects contain this information. This makes the typical "infringing content" trivially easy to detect simply by its size. Of course, it would be possible to invent a scheme where the message subjects were assigned at random. You'd still need indexing sites though, which could then be the subject of prosecutions.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Boffin

      Interesting on the encoding… for that matter, only one message in the series needs to have a recognisable subject line… the list of other such messages can easily be encoded into the data stream so as to allow location of the other components.

      That'd make life even harder. How easy would it be to make such data look like a GPG signature?

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  5. Herby

    If only...

    Those who rail against "piracy" were as engaged against SPAM, the world would be MUCH nicer. Until they do, I feel that nothing will be gained.

    Remember the quote: "The INTERNET sees censorship [of whatever type] as a fault and routes around it"

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Usenet died in 1993.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Usenet sucks, I haven't used it in a decade.

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    1. Stoneshop
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      Headmaster

      Sucks to be you, then

      if you couldn't find worthwhile content on Usenet. I still do.

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  8. T J
    WTF?

    How do you kill a corpse?

    It was already dead. However this is a giant liberty by pretend authorities just the same. USENET could have one last USE on the NET - cause these idiots to tie up all their time and money chasing ghosts.

    In the meantime - why not just move your leaf server/s to a non-treaty country (Ie. one owned by a different Kleptocracy to yours) and be done?

    If you just close up shop it gives the wrong impression - it makes them think they can win (they can't) and it makes them think they understand the new status quo (they dont, and never will).

    Just sayin.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bad Luck

    Find a new business model.

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  10. Danny 14
    Devil

    oh well

    so this affects astraweb then? No? so no difference then?

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