I have sent the following to Verizon. I hope more do the same. They are
eliminating access to all but 8 supergroups.


Why are you deleting perfectly good newsgroups from your service? I
routinely access the following"
alt.autos.jaguar
alt.autos.subaru
alt.engineering.electrical
alt.ham-radio
alt.os.linux.ubunt
rec.radio.amateur.homebrew
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

Al

Unfortunately, nothing to do with the net is a protected right, it is a
privilege. Most ISP's don't even know what Usenet is let alone carry
it.

I buy blocks from Octanews, because while my current ISP has access, they
cap it at 16Kb/s. Makes downloading mp3's on my cellphone faster. Octanews
blocks aren't limited as to speed, just Mbytes.

Good luck!
__
Gregg

"geek" wrote in message
news
Unfortunately, nothing to do with the net is a protected right, it is a
privilege.

Actually it's a contractual agreement between you and your ISP, but
realistically most "consumer grade" ISPs promise nothing -- no guarantees on
speed, services, ports, uptime, etc.!

You might try access via google (groups.google.com) and web browsing.
Also, look at other ISPs. There are a lot out there. Lots are more
friendly to the old "free" internet spirit. I use www.panix.com quite a
bit of the time. There are many others.

======= no change to below, included for reference and context ====


On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Al wrote:

I have sent the following to Verizon. I hope more do the same. They are
eliminating access to all but 8 supergroups.


Why are you deleting perfectly good newsgroups from your service? I
routinely access the following"
alt.autos.jaguar
alt.autos.subaru
alt.engineering.electrical
alt.ham-radio
alt.os.linux.ubunt
rec.radio.amateur.homebrew
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

Al

Al wrote:
I have sent the following to Verizon. I hope more do the same. They are
eliminating access to all but 8 supergroups.


Why are you deleting perfectly good newsgroups from your service? I
routinely access the following"
alt.autos.jaguar
alt.autos.subaru
alt.engineering.electrical
alt.ham-radio
alt.os.linux.ubunt
rec.radio.amateur.homebrew
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

Al
Right now I am using AT&T (bellsouth) DSL. If they drop the news groups
and Comcast doesn't, I think bellsouth will lose both my phone and
internet business. It's nice to have TWO providers of the same service
competing with each other!

ken scharf wrote:
Right now I am using AT&T (bellsouth) DSL. If they drop the news groups
and Comcast doesn't, I think bellsouth will lose both my phone and
internet business. It's nice to have TWO providers of the same service
competing with each other!
=======================================
Agreed, this is rather OT ,but if you have a (A)DSL connection with a
provider in the USA , do you have to 'sit out' a say 12 months contract
before you can switch or can you switch at any time ?

Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

Did any of you guys look at http://groups.google.com to see if what you
want is there? There are lots of ways to connect to NG servers that are
outside of your network (unless they disable nntp protocols).

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Highland Ham wrote:

ken scharf wrote:
Right now I am using AT&T (bellsouth) DSL. If they drop the news groups
and Comcast doesn't, I think bellsouth will lose both my phone and internet
business. It's nice to have TWO providers of the same service competing
with each other!
=======================================
Agreed, this is rather OT ,but if you have a (A)DSL connection with a
provider in the USA , do you have to 'sit out' a say 12 months contract
before you can switch or can you switch at any time ?

Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:39:43 -0400, A wrote:

Did any of you guys look at http://groups.google.com to see if what you
want is there? There are lots of ways to connect to NG servers that are
outside of your network (unless they disable nntp protocols).

Ya, but... Post from Google and a Great Portion of the usenet
population will never see your postings:

http://jonz.net/ng.htm

http://improve-usenet.org/

Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | linux
38.24N 104.55W | @ config.com | Jonesy | OS/2
*** Killfiling google posts: http://jonz.net/ng.htm

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Allodoxaphobia wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:39:43 -0400, A wrote:

Did any of you guys look at http://groups.google.com to see if what you
want is there? There are lots of ways to connect to NG servers that are
outside of your network (unless they disable nntp protocols).

Ya, but... Post from Google and a Great Portion of the usenet
population will never see your postings:

I have access to three non-Google ISPs and in recent months, the posts
have been getting out to all of them just as fast as I can log onto them
by telnet and check for myself. They have improved over, say, a year ago.

Whether your post gets "out" far onto the net depends at least to some
degree on where on the net your ISP is located and what kind of traffic
flows there. I've had experience with about a dozen UNIX shell account
ISPs over the last 15 years and in the past there were quite a few that
did _not_ have good connectivity with other ISPs through the nntp
protocol. I'm not overly happy with Google for NG access, but if anyone is
unhappy with their own ISP's NG server (they can subscribe or block
whatever NGs they feel like) then certainly they should try Google. And,
you can even use Google (and other "portals") to find other NG accesses.


http://jonz.net/ng.htm

http://improve-usenet.org/

Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | linux
38.24N 104.55W | @ config.com | Jonesy | OS/2
*** Killfiling google posts: http://jonz.net/ng.htm

In article q6f6k.61015$Ni1.7141@trnddc01, Al wrote:
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

They're not really denying you access; they're just no longer running a
USENET server as part of their ISP business any more. You can still get
to those groups ... you'll just have to pay someone else for usenet
access. (Or get it for free from, say, aioe.org, or use google's lame web
interface, etc.)

As such I don't think this is something for the law to be involved in.
Verizon's decided to drop part of their service, but there's room in
the world for crappy ISPs alongside the good ones.

If Verizon decided to start blocking access to other companies' news
servers, or forge reset packets, etc., the way Comcast (allegedly?)
does, then you'd have something to write your representatives about.

You might be able to get out of any contract you have with them, on
the basis they've changed the service without renegotiating...
people seem to do that for cell-phone contracts a lot.
--
Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1