<
f...@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 <
ad...@rocksolidbbs.com> RetroBBS Registration)
Do any of those server:port combinations work at all for you?