Usenet file sharing thrives despite AOL dropping access to it

New Orleans CityBusiness, Mar 14, 2005 by Richard Slawsky

When Internet behemoth America Online told 24-million-plus subscribers last month it was dropping access to Usenet in mid- March, the response was nearly universal.

What's Usenet? people asked.

According to Dulles, Va.-based AOL, fewer than 1,000 subscribers were regularly accessing Usenet. But it wasn't always so slow.

In the early 1990s, when AOL began offering Usenet access, it drew howls from experienced users about the flood of postings from newbies with aol.com e-mail addresses.

Usenet used to be as big as the Web is now although it seems like it has passed out of vogue, said Chris Palmer, technology manager for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to defend privacy and other digital rights. People have moved on to e-mail and the Web took over much of the one-to- many publication aspects of Usenet.

Although Web logs and the bloggers who post to them have garnered a lot of attention recently, Usenet electronic discussion groups, or newsgroups, are older than the Internet itself.

The alt.politics newsgroup is one of more than 50,000 discussion groups on Usenet, along with others devoted to topics ranging from support for families of cancer sufferers to fans of the television show Law and Order.

Despite AOL's defection, however, the amount of data flowing through Usenet is growing at the estimated rate of between 10 percent to 15 percent per month, mainly due to the growth of high- speed Internet access. More than 100 gigabytes of data is posted to Usenet on a daily basis, much of it bootlegged music, movies or software.

Organizations such as the Washington, D.C.-based Recording Industry Association of America have made a public show of suing people for using file-sharing programs such as Napster, WinMX or Kazaa to trade files but few attempts have been made to try to halt file-sharing on Usenet.

Every Internet service provider can subscribe or not subscribe to Usenet but there is no way to tell what has been posted other than looking at each individual post, Palmer said. There is no real way to clearly delineate what is legal and what is not by the name of the group and that is the only mechanism you have.

When asked why Usenet wasn't garnering attention from prosecutors, RIAA officials needed an explanation of what Usenet is. Later, RIAA officials declined to comment on piracy through Usenet.

Some efforts are being made to police Usenet. Last August, the FBI arrested Avondale resident Montreal Fox and charged him with violation of the No Electronic Theft Act, a 1997 law that makes it illegal to reproduce or distribute copyrighted works such as software programs even if the act doesn't involve financial gain.

Fox, one of nine people arrested in the eight-month investigation, was targeted after advertising his software download site in the alt.2600.warez newsgroup. He was sentenced to five months in prison, five months home confinement and a year's probation.

How Usenet information is passed around makes it impossible to be blocked in one central place, Palmer said. Thousands of computer servers around the world carry mirror images of Usenet groups and constantly communicate with each other. Within minutes, a message posted to one server is picked up by other servers around the world.

Usenet originated in 1979 as the USErs NETwork connecting Duke University in Durham, N.C., with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The connection facilitated discussions about the Unix computer operating system, which was based on the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol designed to exchange data over telephone lines. It was intended to carry a few dozen messages each day.

Soon, other universities set up Usenet servers and the system became a giant multi-user bulletin board. Servers would dial each other throughout the day sending messages from computer to computer.

Usenet messages were also distributed through bulletin board networks such as Fidonet or Bitnet, where networks operated by hobbyists would periodically connect to each other to distribute messages and a primitive form of e-mail.

A code of ethics developed concerning Usenet conduct, and violators were flamed or castigated with harsh posts correcting the offender.

In April 1994, two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel posted a message to Usenet advertising their services in an upcoming U.S. green card lottery for immigrants. The pair hired a programmer to write a script to post their ad to every Usenet newsgroup. Although the term spam had been used before to describe worthless e- mails, the Canter and Siegel posting cemented its use in describing mass e-mail advertising - much to the chagrin of Hormel Foods Corp., the Austin, Minn., maker of the canned meat product.

Eventually, programmers figured out how to convert digital files into text messages. Programs like Xnews or Agent break music or video files into thousands of text messages then combine and convert the messages back into digital format.