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Anonymity Leaves Usenet Providers
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-10-24
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GigaNews and Usenet Server have made changes to their terms of service, quietly removing references that touted the anonymity features for their subscribers.
 | | Anonymity Leaves Usenet Providers |  |
A Usenet access provider called Usenet.com has been the focal point for a RIAA lawsuit over the trading of music in newsgroups.
The lawsuit attacks the assertions made by Usenet.com that its service protected the identities of those using its service.
It seems to have been enough to encourage a couple of other Usenet providers to make changes at their sites, to avoid being caught in the penumbra of blame over promoting anonymity as a feature.
Thomas Mennecke at Slyck cited one of the site's forum posters in picking up an edit made by Usenet Server in its FAQ.
The old FAQ contained this item:
5. What do you mean by "anonymity"?
At Usenetserver.com, it is our goal to keep your personal information as private as possible.
Our news servers remove the X-TRACE header and NNTP-posting-host header, thereby removing where you posted from.
Other users only see from which UNS server you posted.
We also do not monitor what you download. We only monitor how much you download in accordance to your chosen account.
Please understand that we only see byte data and nothing else.
That text has been removed from the Usenet Server FAQ. Mennecke also noted similar editing taking place at GigaNews, where the phrase "Download anonymously" has been tossed in favor of "Download privately" on the GigaNews front page.
"They started by going after Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and after that they said, 'We're gonna go after individuals to see if we (can) get into the psyche of people that peer-to-peer file sharing is wrong,'" says Washington, D.C.-based copyright attorney Ross Dannenberg said in Wired News. "Now it has come full circle. Throughout this cycle, (Usenet) newsgroups have been ignored."
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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