| Fascinating, and interesting similarities. I did not know much about Usenet, so I went to the Wikipedia page and found this: ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries. groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. This was the case years ago on the old news.iol.ie server; forgot all about it till now. That whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Legal_issues section is quite interesting in light of the above; a recommended short read. -- In general it seems that the network on which any system runs is pretty vulnerable to legal challenges. If not the ISPs, then maybe those pesky fibre and copper owners between them, for aiding and abetting copyright theft! Or maybe the ISPs might be coerced to only permit "Accepted" packet formats (ie inspect-able) to be used. So far ISPs seem to not be caving in too quickly, but there have been some awful exceptions: the recent DNS seizures in the US, and a little closer to home our backbone-less Eircom being the only ISP in Europe to cave into the demand a few years ago to block access to piratebay.org (ex govt, careful). However I shudder at the idea of a seperate darknet, it just seems so... unnecessary! Not to mention: "What are you doing honey?" "Oh I'm connecting to the Darknet." "Gee, isint that for pirates, hackers and perverts?". Though the ability for the common Jane to download mp3's and movies on it might have everyone secretly supporting it... hmm. I can only wonder at what the Internet will look like in 20 years time. Personally I hope we all get UN mandated rules for unregulated Internet - China, North Korea and Iran being some of the leading examples for why this is so important. |