Update on the big Usenet News Server shutdown

ok, so because of some prick lawyer in NYC finding kiddie porn (whatever that definition is) in 88 out of 130,000 possible newsgroups, 3 big ISPs will stop providing an NNTP server to their ISP customers. One of them is only knocking out the 45K group alt.* hierarchy. Isn't that nice of them? Bastards. Time "Borg" Warner says they are nixing their entire news service. Well thats a joke cause long ago they rerouted all the localized server names to alias to a central server name for their whole internal network. I'm pretty sure that thats just a corporate gateway to an outsourced news portal anyway. TW couldn't run their own NNTP server worth a sh*t. They proved that long ago and after this quiet changeover years ago, their service became strangely good.

Now I don't know how long it will last, but what I have found is that TW did what I thought the slackers would do. They just dropped the news.roadrunner.com entry from their DNS server. Can't use what you can't resolve right? Wrong. The news client I use came from my old pay news provider. This pay provider is still an option. Like the rest of the US & world, you can just pull your usenet from a pay server or lightly from one of the few open free public servers out there. Really this asswipe lawyer isn't doing anything but making himself a name for reelection at everyone's expense.

Now because the free client app I got is "protected" by only accepting servers with names ending in .newsdemon.com (they have 4 sites), I can't just point it at roadrunner or any other ISP from its GUI config dialog. Ah shucks, so when I dropped the pay service I looked up the IP addy for roadrunner's news sever and added a line for it in my hosts file as:

66.250.146.128 rr.newsdemon.com

yeah, so now that stupid client app thinks that RR's news server is a newsdemon site and will work with it. A silly aside, I do catch it sometimes using uswest.newsdemon.com to pull new headers from but it still works and somehow I don't get any msg not found errors. Sadly, the search feature went away with the pay service. It alone almost makes the $10 / month cost worth having.

So for a long time now I've never used RR's dns to resolve the newsserver name. Guess what, it still works. In fact it may be working better now that there's less traffic hitting it but I'm still able to pull down all my radio shows and e-books. So for now, just add the IP address of your news server to your hosts file and screw the bastards. If you use any Time Warner in the US, the above number should work for you.

Njoy your NNTP.

kiddie pron is the Usenet equivalent of getting your front yard tree's TP'd for halloween. Eventually you're bound to run into a technical example of it. Usually posted as something else in the wrong group by some eastern european joker who gets off on the thought of making people paranoid about what junk jpegs are in his cache. Another good reason to never let the trolls at Best Buy look at your machine (not that I ever would mind you).