Ron’s Blog

Cuomo and Time-Warner put an end to child pornography!

Being an old-school kind of guy who remembers when the internets were made of tin cans and string, I still like my usenet binary newsgroups.

So I was a bit bugged when NYS Attorney General Andrew “pre-whore Spitzer” Cuomo made threats about shutting down the newsgroups by threatening to prosecute ISPs on child porn charges for the illegal stuff — which in my view is like threatening to shut down the phone company because people sometimes use the phone to set up drug deals. But hey, you can kill anything if you paint it as a threat to children, or a help to pedophiles. Sure enough, the major ISPs — including Time-Warner’s Road Runner, mine — just bailed, shutting down their usenet news servers as of today. So no usenet for me — and, presumably, none for those using it for evil.

Oh, except that I (and those using it for evil) can buy usenet newsgroup access for about $5/month from a third party provider, and get and post exactly the same things as before.

I know as a parent that I feel like my son is so much safer from the pedophiles now; don’t you?

Update: Interestingly, Time-Warner is lying about why they did this; here’s the bit from their FAQ, that says it’s because of “low subscriber usage”: