From Newsgroup: alt.bbs

Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> wrote:

How the hell did it fall entirely upon Usenet but not the Web
or any other medium of communication? Access to the Web was not dropped
by any ISP despite the kiddie pr0n issue.

I think the reason that the now disgraced Cuomo was successful in his
kiddie porn politicization of Usenet was simply that people are stupid.

Most people are so stupid they'll believe anything you tell them to.

And sadly, recent events (see also: Trump, ivermectin, UV suppositories, hydroxychloroquine...) make it clear that nothing whatsoever has improved
in the US since Cuomo's day. Or P. T. Barnum's, for that matter. (And did
you know that Barnum was a Nazi sympathizer?)

Democracy depends on an informed constituency, where I won't disagree with most of what you say (I'm not sure about Nazi's but a lot of people way
back when, e.g., Lindburgh for one, didn't know what we now know of them).

Trump (as a Republican) was as much a liar as his lawyers were (e.g., Giuliani) but Cuomo & Spitzer (as Democrats) were just as indiscreet.

Back to Usenet, I didn't use the free newsreaders in the days of AT&T cable because they gave you the NNTP server settings along with the POP3/IMAP4.

While I'm sure free (usually referred to as "open") news servers existed
since the dawn of Internet time, when did free news servers come of age?

Specifically, in light of AT&T dropping Usenet en masse (I received their letter telling me that it was all for the kids - can you believe that!), is that when the free news servers started becoming part of the main stream?

BTW, I've never seen a free news server list that contained even the ones I know of offhand, which makes me want to ask for a "real" free newsserver listing which includes not only eternal september, mixmin, dizum, paganini, netfront, neodome, solani, etc. but which includes new ones like rocksolid.

Have you?
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From Newsgroup: alt.bbs

<fos@sdf.org> wrote:

you seem to see the diminishment of Usenet services by ISPs as a result
of a crusade against child porn.

Did you receive the letter that AT&T sent to all its cable customers
when they killed their NNTP servers? I did. I received that letter.

It was bullshit. Pure political bullshit. Stupid people believed it.
Oh, AT&T. They care so much for the kiddies. They're saving them.

They "teamed up" with the NY sleazebag Cuomo trying to make a name for
himself as "a good guy with simple solutions" to very complex problems.

If you ask me why they teamed up with that NY sleazebag Cuomo, I suspect
you already know that answer based on what you wrote below, in fact.

i think it had far more to do with broadband allowing for increased
volume of bandwidth thus network, hardware, and administrative costs of hosting news servers significantly went up and fast and the child porn
issue was merely a convenient excuse of ISPs to shut them down and
save money.

I agree. You could actually tell, in those days, how little they supported
NNTP servers because their instructions came with POP3/IMAP4 setup instructions, but you had to call and go up a few support levels to get
their NNTP server setups.

I'm not an employee of a cable company but I suspect they inherited the
NNTP setup just as they inherited the POP3/IMAP4 setup, and they weren't expecting the explosion in NNTP data, particularly I guess in binaries.

I don't actually know much about their business model, but what I did know
at the time was that dropping _all_ of Usenet was too simple of a solution.

You don't see that as a phony issue?

No.

Whenever you see a politician (or a company, as in the case of AT&T),
propose a too-simple solution to a rather complex problem, there's a good chance there's a _lot_ more to the issue than they are pretending it to be.

You can use Prohibition, as one (currently non-contentious) example, but
let's not stray too far into politics since the topic is free news servers.

I can't get Rocksolid to work even though they gave me credentials.
I tried every news server setting proposed so far in this newsgroup. rocksolidbbs.com:119
rocksolidbbs.com:563
news.novabbs.org:119
news.novabbs.org:563

None work for me.
(login/password supplied by <admin@rocksolidbbs.com> RetroBBS Registration)

Do any of those server:port combinations work at all for you?
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Win32 NewsLink 1.113

From Newsgroup: alt.bbs

To: badgolferman
Re: Re: Can't post to rocksolid NNTP - where to get help?
By: badgolferman to alt.free.newsservers,news.admin.peering,news.software.nntp,alt.bbs on Tue Mar 07 2023 04:57 pm

volume of bandwidth thus network, hardware, and administrative costs
of hosting news servers significantly went up and fast and the child
porn issue was merely a convenient excuse of ISPs to shut them down
and save money.

Back in the early 2000s, my ISP switched from running their own news servers to contracting to a third party for news services. They then adopted the "if we make our news service bad enough, maybe they'll go away...". I'd call about a credit after their 3rd party news server was unavailable for a week, and was told that News was a "free service" offered to their customers and no refunds would be available.

Shortly after that, they just dropped news service. I don't know if this was after Google integrated usenet into Google Groups, but I bet that was the last straw for any ISP that hosted news.
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* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
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