Word: usenet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...INTERNET, WHEN PEOPLE want to chat about the bleaker side of life, they often find their way to alt.support.loneliness. The forum, a Usenet newsgroup, is open 24 hours a day for anyone who wants to post messages lamenting a breakup with a spouse, or how tough it is to meet people or find true love or even a true date. It's a moderately popular group. Or it was, before the Carolinian Lords of the Caucasus showed...
...CLOC, an unabashedly white-supremacist organization based in Columbia, South Carolina, takes pride in running locals off certain innocuous parts of Usenet with its race baiting. Members claim to have emptied out half a dozen forums already, including, improbably, alt.fan.barry-manilow and alt.food.dennys. "If you want an organization which makes things happen, visit our victims and learn first-hand what kind of a group we are," they boast at their World Wide Web site, which features an image of a burning cross. "CLOC is clearly on the forefront of the great war for Aryan domination of the Internet...
Among purists, though, the whole point of the Internet is that it isn't like traditional media. A wide spectrum of viewpoints is tolerated and even encouraged online, especially on the freewheeling, anarchistic Usenet. The notion is that for the first time in history, anyone can express his or her views to a mass audience. As a result, Cooper's proposal is stirring up opposition from cyberspace denizens on both the left and the right...
...this merely by telling CompuServe, the world's second largest online-service provider, that it was breaking Bavarian law by giving Germans access to Usenet discussion groups believed to include explicit sexuality. A strangely terrified CompuServe responded by removing any newsgroups whose title contained the word sex, gay or erotic, thus blocking access to all subscribers, not just those in Germany. Given the centralized nature of its operations--and the decentralized nature of Usenet--this was, according to CompuServe, the only way it could comply...
...Munich asked U.S.-based CompuServe, with 4 million members in 140 countries, to stop letting German subscribers see 200 discussion groups and picture databases that, according to the Bavarian state police, violated German pornography laws. The suspect newsgroups are all part of the freewheeling computer conferencing system called Usenet, which is distributed globally via the Internet. The only way CompuServe could promptly comply with the German request was to pull the plug on the newsgroups throughout its system. As a result, U.S. subscribers who try to reach them will find that their access has been blocked...