Goodbye Usenet, it's been nice ...

In another textbook case of 88 bad apples spoils the entire 60,000 bunch (give or take, depending upon which usenet reflector you ask), “Time Warner is blocking all USENET access, entirely.”

Not that anyone even knows or cares what Usenet is any more, since it was assimilated by the GoogleBot and re-branded as Google Groups; still, The Death of USENET would be yet another ominous sign indeed for the future of open information sharing. Nevertheless, the politicians once again seem ready to not only throw out the naked babies with the bath water, but also the tub … and what the hell, might as well pull out the plumbing while you’re at it, too. If not for that running water, after all, there would be no naked babies in the tub in the first place, right? Only YOU can prevent the evils of indoor plumbing!

Look, I’m surely no defender of child porn; what a sad and complete waste of a life for the so afflicted; however, I do know how firewall rule sets work and we can filter at virtually any and every conceivable level of detail. So block or decommission the 88 worst of the worst if you must and leave the other 59,912 alone.

Yet again, John Perry Barlow’s 1995 Death From Above proves its prophetic place in net history, “And indeed we are talking about religion here … the monotheism of Control, the one-to-many system which has dominated the West at least since the Industrial Revolution, possibly since Gutenberg; possibly since Moses.”