Fewer new posts in your favorite binary group(s)? This may be why.
Frank Durda IV
police agencies of other governments on people posting copyright-infringing
software, movies and other materials (via USENET, IRC, FTP and other means),
with a particular focus on some groups of people that specialize in breaking
copy-protection systems on software, set-top console games, and movies. One
particular group mentioned by the FBI was "DoD", short for "Drink or Die".
A significant number of individuals have been arrested (or are about to be
arrested) and their computer and related equipment seized. There were
actually three different investigtions that coordinated their arrests for
the same day, according to the FBI/DOJ, statement.
You can read more about this at:
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2001/December/01_crm_643.htm
(For the paranoid among you, yes, that is a Department of Justice web site.)
It appears that these groups may have been targeted because the laws the US
has against organized criminal activity can definitely be used against them,
which provide greater penalties than simple copyright infringement. Using
multiple people in these groups as an attempt to cloak their overall activity
simply increased the potential legal penalties of all the parties involved.
Our USENET servers have noticed a definite reduction in binary post traffic
since Tuesday evening, and at the time we kept looking for a network problem
but found none. We initially thought that another sizable chunk of the
@home network had gone away, as that has been happening a lot lately.
Then we found the DOJ/FBI statements, and by comparing previous posting
patterns to current ones, noting who wasn't posting now and comparing that to
the names listed in the DOJ/FBI statement and other news stories on the
raids, it explained the redunction in traffic.
A few binary groups have since gotten quieter or gone completely idle, but
then almost all of the posts in this small number of groups before
December 11th were coming from fewer than five people (in some cases, just
one person), and those may have been people who may currently be unable to
get Internet access, during their stay at Club Fed. Or these individuals may
be busy in their back yard right now, burying their computer, camcorder,
Dreamcast system and their CD-R/RW collection.
If you encounter the odd USENET group that seems to lack new traffic but
adjacent groups seem to be more or less normal, and the traffic levels went
down around the 11/12th of December, you are probably seeing the result of
the above police activity rather than a system problem, since the content
for all binary groups gets processed as a big shared stream, not as separate
streams for individual groups, so it is unlikely for a system or network
problem to shut-down just one or a few random groups.
Frank Durda IV
Airnews.net News Service
Internet America
Copr. 2001, all rights reserved.
pinto
Frank Durda IV <uhclem...@nemesis.lonestar.org> wrote in message news:<F8C6486BACE6FC88.DD9A2457...@lp.airnews.net>...