HIS.com Status: news.his.com housekeeping

[status at his.com]

We've done a bit of housekeeping on news.his.com (USENet news server) 
this week to accomplish the following:

a) *identify binaries newsgroups and filter the ones we've overlooked.*

We have never endorsed binaries newsgroups, mostly because of the 
tremendous bandwidth they can consume, and partly because of content 
(most of this stuff is porn, and most of the rest is 'warez' or pirate 
MP3s or other multimedia).  We've had blocks on alt.binaries.* and 
alt.sex.pictures.* for years, but some messages have gotten through to 
those groups via porn spammers who post to regular newsgroups and 
crosspost to the binaries, hoping to cirumvent this sort of filtering.  
Also, porn spammers have increasingly put their junk in innocent-looking 
newsgroups (nevada.jobs, etc.) figuring that ISPs won't find them 
there.  I've inspected some of these stealth groups and have discovered 
a disturbing amount of child porn ... we've always taken a position of 
not being involved in content so as not to be accused of endorsing that 
which we don't filter, but child porn is something else altogether.

We've greatly increased the effectiveness of our blocks on these 
'binaries' groups, and will be watching for new stealth groups.

This bit of housekeeping is going to disappoint some folks because we do 
have users who like the binaries newsgroups (we don't know who they are, 
since we purposely don't log news.his.com newsgroup access by user for 
privacy reasons).  Unfortunately, the USENet model, where all traffic 
comes to the server whether or not anybody ever looks at it, is not 
sustainable for newsgroups that have big file attachments - we have very 
high quality bandwidth - high quality doesn't come cheap, and we pay for 
actual use.

This will have the side benefit of clearing out disk space, so article 
retention times, already fairly long, will now become longer in the 
text-based groups.

b) *clear out obsolete and bogus newsgroups.*  There are probably 40,000 
'real' USENet newsgroups, but we've had almost 70,000 groups on our 
servers for some time - we've taken a first cut at deleting the 
obviously bogus ones and ones with zero traffic, and have cut the list 
by about 10,000 groups.  Nobody is going to care about these - they had 
no content other than random spam.

That's about it - FYI, in case you didn't know this:  folks who have 
accounts on mail.his.com can access news.his.com from anywhere (cable, 
DSL, work, whatever) by authenticating with their mail.his.com username 
and pasword.

/Paul

-- 

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