On Jul 20, 2023 at 11:05:46 AM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>
>> Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years
>> about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a
>> Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and
>> cooperation with law enforcement.
>
>> https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm
>
> I should be clear: I am not saying that absolutely no service provider
> anywhere has ever decided to try to profit from CSAM. Obviously I can't
> make a claim like that, particularly given that 8chan and company exists.
> I personally know nothing about Giganews and would be a fool to comment.
>
> The world is large and full of people. I'm sure just about every awful
> thing anyone can think of has been attempted by someone at one point or
> another.
>
> My point is only that the idea that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta,
> Apple, etc. (the companies that most people think of when someone says
> "cloud provider" which was the term used in the message I was replying to)
> have a business model built on CSAM is directly contradicted by the very
> real and large expenditures by those same companies to try to get that
> stuff off their platforms as much as they possibly can given other
> constraints they have around promises of user privacy, etc.
>
> The shape of their problem is instead that they have been wildly
> successful beyond any of their reasonable expectations and with that level
> of scale comes a level of platform abuse that they were wholly unprepared
> originally to deal with. They're still desperately digging themselves out
> of that hole and occasionally falling into it again. But if they could
> somehow make the problem go away, they would *love* to do so.
>
> One tension they have is that a lot of people also (quite understandably)
> feel pretty weird, at best, about their cloud provider saying "oh, we're
> going to scan everything you do to see if any of it would be of interest
> to the cops," which means they would strongly prefer to be reactive rather
> than proactive, but some of these groups are quite sophisticated and find
> new ways of hiding from reactive scanning techniques. Another tension
> they have is that in a lot of cases they would like to promise end-to-end
> user privacy because it's a selling point, but end-to-end user privacy
> from the cloud provider means they by definition cannot scan or do
> anything else about whatever is crossing that channel, so they end up in a
> three way fight between privacy advocates, the government, and the news
> media. (And, to be clear, usually manage to say the stupidest possible
> things and step on five rakes in the process.)
>
> It's an incredibly tricky area and I certainly don't have all of the right
> answers. All I know is that (a) Usenet is a hobby for me and I'm not
> going near this mess with a ten foot pole and would strongly recommend
> against anyone else doing so either unless you have the money for lawyers
> and a real anti-abuse team, and (b) the idea that cloud providers in
> general benefit from CSAM seems like bullshit to me given the amount of
> money they spend on trying to get rid of it and trying to control the
> public relations fallout from the bits they didn't manage to get rid of.
> Even if the balance of money is slightly towards profit (which I highly
> doubt), it's UTTERLY dwarfed by their legitimate business and directly
> threatens it, so it is certainly not a motivating force for the typical
> cloud provider.

I shouldn't have painted with such a broad stroke, as I didn't mean to imply
that the large cloud providers mentioned had such business models or
interests, but the service provider realm is broad and complicated.

In the early 2000s I worked for SAVVIS (now Lumen) and at the time they were
harboring a lot of very bad actors within their hosting platform as well as
providing IP transit services to such entities, mostly stemming from the
acquisitions of Cable & Wireless and Exodus/MCI, but it was a bigger spectrum
than the "spammers" that were represented in the media at the time.

I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while this
was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and man power
to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups let it drag out
for a year or more before finally terminating contracts. It wasn't until it
started to hit the news and they began receiving external pressure that they
changed their tune, and very slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this
is not exactly the same scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at
executive levels that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.

Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot more than
they should, and we're going through another phase where that is being
re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a man-in-the-middle
of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm not exactly sure where I
stand on most of it either.

Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

> I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
> this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
> man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
> let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
> contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began
> receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
> slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same
> scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
> that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.

> Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
> more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
> is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a
> man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
> not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.

Yeah, this is all very fair and I agree with everything you say here. The
smaller the provider, the more likely that the response to platlform abuse
will be... shall we say, random. Some companies will take immediate
action; some companies will avoid doing anything for as long as possible.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think in *most* cases the lack of
action is some combination of the fact that dealing with this stuff
requires spending money that doesn't make any profits and small companies
are more likely to feel like this is unfair and be very grudging about
doing it, plus the general human tendency to believe that any problem that
one doesn't want to deal with can't possibly be as bad as people claim it
is. I think actual malice is rather rare, but cutting corners and not
spending money where it seems avoidable is very common.

There are also, of course, folks with strong libertarian principles,
probably more common among the sort of folks who often start small
businesses, and as long as the argument feels like it's on the level of
abstract principles, it's easy to decide that the libertarian principles
should win. (Again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I don't think this
tends to survive direct contact with the worst types of platform abuse.
But thankfully that sort of abuse is relatively rare, so the debate
sometimes stays abstract for a long time.)

The larger companies do not have the luxury of ignoring this sort of
problem and already have frequent contact with law enforcement due to the
simple fact that people live large amounts of their lives on cloud
providers these days, so legal investigations constantly go there.
They're more likely to have thought somewhat seriously about this and have
employees whose job it is to figure out what to do, although even in those
cases they tend to be underresourced compared to the size of the problem.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

On Jul 20, 2023 at 12:34:24 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>
>> I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
>> this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
>> man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
>> let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
>> contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began
>> receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
>> slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same
>> scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
>> that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.
>
>> Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
>> more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
>> is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a
>> man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
>> not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.
>
> Yeah, this is all very fair and I agree with everything you say here. The
> smaller the provider, the more likely that the response to platlform abuse
> will be... shall we say, random. Some companies will take immediate
> action; some companies will avoid doing anything for as long as possible.
>
> Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think in *most* cases the lack of
> action is some combination of the fact that dealing with this stuff
> requires spending money that doesn't make any profits and small companies
> are more likely to feel like this is unfair and be very grudging about
> doing it, plus the general human tendency to believe that any problem that
> one doesn't want to deal with can't possibly be as bad as people claim it
> is. I think actual malice is rather rare, but cutting corners and not
> spending money where it seems avoidable is very common.
>
> There are also, of course, folks with strong libertarian principles,
> probably more common among the sort of folks who often start small
> businesses, and as long as the argument feels like it's on the level of
> abstract principles, it's easy to decide that the libertarian principles
> should win. (Again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I don't think this
> tends to survive direct contact with the worst types of platform abuse.
> But thankfully that sort of abuse is relatively rare, so the debate
> sometimes stays abstract for a long time.)
>
> The larger companies do not have the luxury of ignoring this sort of
> problem and already have frequent contact with law enforcement due to the
> simple fact that people live large amounts of their lives on cloud
> providers these days, so legal investigations constantly go there.
> They're more likely to have thought somewhat seriously about this and have
> employees whose job it is to figure out what to do, although even in those
> cases they tend to be underresourced compared to the size of the problem.

In my personal experience I find that companies which are controlled by a
Board of Directors generally lean towards doing and spending as little as
possible in order to retain valuable customers or prevent legal penalties, and
have no issue directing those below to ignore their conscience.

The smaller or privately held providers whom are controlled by founders or
'techies' tend to take such matters more seriously and with a lot more
conscience (unless their only business model is the trouble makers).

It all depends on who is at the top and what sort of conscience they have, or
don't, I suppose.

On Jul 20, 2023 at 10:44:34 AM CDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

> Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
>> Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:
>
>>> I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
>>> providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
>>> handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
>>> near the NSA.
>
>> Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?
>
> Lots of communications infrastructure and power to serve Fort Meade?
> Seems like the right place to site a server farm.

I have no substantial evidence to support what I'm about to throw out here,
and it is my own wild speculation.

There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain reliable
power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn VA. US-based
commercial Usenet providers' corporations are not based out of Virginia (last
I checked most were based out of Florida and one in Texas). In the USA, before
full-feed Usenet turned into a commercial venture, providers were spread out
and their infrastructure lived close to their headquarters. To my knowledge
(in this area it is more limited), there are no longer any non-commercial
entities exchanging a full Usenet feed in the USA, perhaps apart from a few
research facilities.

Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose profits
center around the exchange of copyrighted material and pornography are all
located in the one geographical location in which the US government
semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

(Let's not kid ourselves, I know the full-feed Usenet operators are swimming
in such content, and I don't believe anyone is paying for Usenet access to
text-based discussion or share family photos.)

I'm not convinced the US government doesn't want Usenet and the commercial
Usenet providers to exist, contrary to what some lawmakers have stated in the
past, but instead could care less about the profits made as long as the
providers are cooperating with the surveillance and whatever is required for
prosecution of end-users/bad actors/criminals/etc.

Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

> There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
> reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
> VA.

There are a lot of good reasons to put your stuff there that were even
stronger a decade or more ago when a lot of those hosting decisions were
made. There are really good reasons why Amazon's us-east-1 region and
their original S3 storage was there, entirely technical reasons.

Some of them:

1. It's no longer the cheapest region for power, etc., but it is still
very cheap, particularly compared to, say, New York or New Jersey.
2. It's very close to where most of the people in the United States live,
which matters a lot for latency.
3. Huge amounts of legacy infrastructure is based there, going all the way
back to ARPANET, so it's very easy to get peering (this is changing
over time).
4. It's physically close to Wall Street, which is a huge central point for
network infrastructure, without actually being in Wall Street and
having to pay the costs designed for algorithmic trading.

It was only very recently that Amazon started pushing us-east-2 in Ohio,
and basically everyone in the first round of businesses that hosted on AWS
have significant infrastructure in us-east-1.

I think people reach a little too far for conspiracy theories about stuff
like this. The reason why the national government, Wall Street, the CIA
and NSA, the FBI, a bunch of network infrastructure, tons of ISPs, and
tons of servers are all in the same place is because that's where all the
people lived in the early United States and therefore that's where all the
cities were and it's still where the major population centers of the
United States cluster. Obviously, California, Texas, and Florida are
changing that, but there's a ton of momentum behind those patterns and I
believe the imbalance of US residents towards the eastern time zone is
still quite large.

Virginia actively tried to be the cheap state close enough to all the
expensive states but far enough away that you're not paying the expensive
state premium, and that worked really well for them.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

On Jul 20, 2023 at 1:55:56 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>
>> There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
>> reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
>> VA.
>
> There are a lot of good reasons to put your stuff there that were even
> stronger a decade or more ago when a lot of those hosting decisions were
> made. There are really good reasons why Amazon's us-east-1 region and
> their original S3 storage was there, entirely technical reasons.
>
> Some of them:
>
> 1. It's no longer the cheapest region for power, etc., but it is still
> very cheap, particularly compared to, say, New York or New Jersey.
> 2. It's very close to where most of the people in the United States live,
> which matters a lot for latency.
> 3. Huge amounts of legacy infrastructure is based there, going all the way
> back to ARPANET, so it's very easy to get peering (this is changing
> over time).
> 4. It's physically close to Wall Street, which is a huge central point for
> network infrastructure, without actually being in Wall Street and
> having to pay the costs designed for algorithmic trading.
>
> It was only very recently that Amazon started pushing us-east-2 in Ohio,
> and basically everyone in the first round of businesses that hosted on AWS
> have significant infrastructure in us-east-1.
>
> I think people reach a little too far for conspiracy theories about stuff
> like this. The reason why the national government, Wall Street, the CIA
> and NSA, the FBI, a bunch of network infrastructure, tons of ISPs, and
> tons of servers are all in the same place is because that's where all the
> people lived in the early United States and therefore that's where all the
> cities were and it's still where the major population centers of the
> United States cluster. Obviously, California, Texas, and Florida are
> changing that, but there's a ton of momentum behind those patterns and I
> believe the imbalance of US residents towards the eastern time zone is
> still quite large.
>
> Virginia actively tried to be the cheap state close enough to all the
> expensive states but far enough away that you're not paying the expensive
> state premium, and that worked really well for them.

I absolutely accept all of that, you're right, many of us reach pretty far.

However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense that
commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia and migrated
elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what happened with the full
Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince
anyone to give you a full feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet
services/feeds exchanged there is based on common financial benefit of them
all living/exchanging the feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

> However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
> that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
> and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
> happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
> Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
> feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
> is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
> feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that
aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's
often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.)
For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech
companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but
still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?

Standard economic theory says that a lot of this is due to network
effects. Once there is an industry concentration in an area, it tends to
become more concentrated because it's just so convenient. In northern
Virginia, there are a bunch of well-established data facility companies
that know how to run data facilities and are competing with each other.
There is a huge trained local population of data center workers so it's
easy to hire techs. All the local power equipment and installation
companies do data center work so they're good at it. There are a bunch of
local HVAC companies that know how to cool data centers. There's a big
Dell service center right there to repair your servers and they have all
the parts. All the servers are already there so the transatlantic cables
terminate there because why not. Etc.

If you start out as some small business back in the day when that meant
physical servers (these days, everyone just starts on AWS or GCS or
Azure), you probably want those servers close by because you're going
there yourself to fix them. So you start with some local hosting provider
wherever you are physically located.

But then if you succeed and grow, suppose that you want to provide a
high-bandwidth service, and you want it to be low latency for the majority
of the US population while still having reasonable latency to Europe and
the rest of the US. Where do you rent a data center? You're a US company
and don't want to deal with international corporate law, so Toronto is
out. What are the other options?

Virginia looks really good, and ten years ago looked even better. That's
where all the expertise is, it's centrally located for both the US and
Europe, there's a lot of market competition so you can shop around, it's
close to all the peering... looks great. Sure, you can probably get
cheaper buildings in, oh, Charleston, South Carolina or Louisville,
Kentucky or whatever, but that supporting network of specialization isn't
there. You could go to Miami, but that's both probably not cheap and also
you have to worry about hurricane-related disruptions. You could do
Pittsburgh, or Ohio, or whatever, but Virginia is really appealing.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
>Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

>>However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
>>that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
>>and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
>>happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
>>Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
>>feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
>>is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
>>feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

>So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
>places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that
>aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's
>often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
>instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.)
>For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech
>companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but
>still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?

Movie production is in Los Angeles because that's about as far from New
York as you could get a century ago, without sending the black sheep
brothers in the family to China, the ones exiled from New York to run
several of the studios. The other brothers stayed in New York to raise
money.

There's also reliable sunshine.

For a few years, in early days, there was a number of movie studios in
Chicago, but that would not last.

>. . .

On Jul 20, 2023 at 2:37:14 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>
>> However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
>> that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
>> and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
>> happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
>> Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
>> feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
>> is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
>> feed there than dispersed over transit providers.
>
> So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
> places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that
> aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's
> often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
> instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.)
> For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech
> companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but
> still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?
>
> Standard economic theory says that a lot of this is due to network
> effects. Once there is an industry concentration in an area, it tends to
> become more concentrated because it's just so convenient. In northern
> Virginia, there are a bunch of well-established data facility companies
> that know how to run data facilities and are competing with each other.
> There is a huge trained local population of data center workers so it's
> easy to hire techs. All the local power equipment and installation
> companies do data center work so they're good at it. There are a bunch of
> local HVAC companies that know how to cool data centers. There's a big
> Dell service center right there to repair your servers and they have all
> the parts. All the servers are already there so the transatlantic cables
> terminate there because why not. Etc.
>
> If you start out as some small business back in the day when that meant
> physical servers (these days, everyone just starts on AWS or GCS or
> Azure), you probably want those servers close by because you're going
> there yourself to fix them. So you start with some local hosting provider
> wherever you are physically located.
>
> But then if you succeed and grow, suppose that you want to provide a
> high-bandwidth service, and you want it to be low latency for the majority
> of the US population while still having reasonable latency to Europe and
> the rest of the US. Where do you rent a data center? You're a US company
> and don't want to deal with international corporate law, so Toronto is
> out. What are the other options?
>
> Virginia looks really good, and ten years ago looked even better. That's
> where all the expertise is, it's centrally located for both the US and
> Europe, there's a lot of market competition so you can shop around, it's
> close to all the peering... looks great. Sure, you can probably get
> cheaper buildings in, oh, Charleston, South Carolina or Louisville,
> Kentucky or whatever, but that supporting network of specialization isn't
> there. You could go to Miami, but that's both probably not cheap and also
> you have to worry about hurricane-related disruptions. You could do
> Pittsburgh, or Ohio, or whatever, but Virginia is really appealing.

Excellent points.

I don't know why, but the one thing I've completely overlooked until you
pointed out, having the transatlantic peering points there may be a big draw
since most of the commercial Usenet providers are now also operating in parts
of Europe, or exchanging feeds directly with the European providers, so that
makes a lot of sense.

It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
>> Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
>> relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
court cases on this very topic.

>I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers
>in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds
>are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.

The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

It appears that Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> said:
>Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:
>
>> I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
>> providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
>> handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
>> near the NSA.
>
>Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?

Since it's not true, probably not.

I expect some are in Ashburn since that's where vast numbers of cloud
providers are. The NSA is in Ft Meade, 50 miles away, but why let
facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

According to Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com>:
>Movie production is in Los Angeles because that's about as far from New
>York as you could get a century ago, without sending the black sheep
>brothers in the family to China, the ones exiled from New York to run
>several of the studios. The other brothers stayed in New York to raise
>money.

I have heard it was as far as possible from Thomas Edison who had a whole
bunch of patents they hadn't licensed.

>There's also reliable sunshine.

That too, and fairly close to Mexico in case of (legal) emergencies.

>For a few years, in early days, there was a number of movie studios in
>Chicago, but that would not last.

In the really early days they were in Ithaca NY, but if you've ever spent
a winter in Ithaca, you know why they moved.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

According to Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com>:
>However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense that
>commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia and migrated
>elsewhere, versus the other way around, which ...

which, as previously noted, never happened.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>According to Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com>:

>>Movie production is in Los Angeles because that's about as far from New
>>York as you could get a century ago, without sending the black sheep
>>brothers in the family to China, the ones exiled from New York to run
>>several of the studios. The other brothers stayed in New York to raise
>>money.

>I have heard it was as far as possible from Thomas Edison who had a whole
>bunch of patents they hadn't licensed.

That is an excellent point.

>>There's also reliable sunshine.

>That too, and fairly close to Mexico in case of (legal) emergencies.

>>For a few years, in early days, there was a number of movie studios in
>>Chicago, but that would not last.

>In the really early days they were in Ithaca NY, but if you've ever spent
>a winter in Ithaca, you know why they moved.

On Jul 20, 2023 at 4:39:29 PM CDT, "John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
>>> Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
>>> relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
>>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
>
> There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
> delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
> court cases on this very topic.
>
>> I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers
>> in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds
>> are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.
>
> The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
> surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
> looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

From https://giganews.com/peering:

We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement
free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following
facilities:
Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)

It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
>> The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
>> surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
>> looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?
>
>From https://giganews.com/peering:
>
>We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement
>free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following
>facilities:
>Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
>AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)

For reasons everyeone else has explained, it's not surprising they
have a point of presence in Ashburn, since that's where everyone else
is and it is a whole lot cheaper to peer with a bunch of people at an
IX than one at a time with separate links.

But the company is mostly in Texas and always has been.

Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you
read it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing
something with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM,
which is not the same thing as being an FBI front. Again, considering
how big they are, it's not very surprising the FBI would ask them to
do that.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

> Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you read
> it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing something
> with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM, which is not the
> same thing as being an FBI front.

I suspect this is not uncommon because it makes a lot of sense given how
CSAM trading rings work. From the perspective of the provider, their
service is being abused by an organized criminal gang, and they've
probably only sure about a small fraction of the activity because that's
how anti-abuse measures usually work. But they probably have enough data
to connect a series of accounts that *might* be part of the same activity,
which they can't prove that without police powers to subpoena other ISP
records, etc.

So they turn that all over to the FBI and the FBI maybe says "don't do
anything for a moment, let us get some more data and see if we can roll up
the entire gang rather than just pick off some low-hanging fruit." If it
works, the FBI gets to arrest a whole bunch of people at once and the
provider gets an entire organized *network* off their service in a way
that makes it less likely to crop up again, *and* they get a reputation as
a dangerous place to do CSAM trading. From their perspective, it's a
nearly ideal outcome.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

On Jul 20, 2023 at 9:19:19 PM CDT, "John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
>>> The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
>>> surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
>>> looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?
>>
>> From https://giganews.com/peering:
>>
>> We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement
>> free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following
>> facilities:
>> Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
>> AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)
>
> For reasons everyeone else has explained, it's not surprising they
> have a point of presence in Ashburn, since that's where everyone else
> is and it is a whole lot cheaper to peer with a bunch of people at an
> IX than one at a time with separate links.
>
> But the company is mostly in Texas and always has been.
>
> Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you
> read it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing
> something with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM,
> which is not the same thing as being an FBI front. Again, considering
> how big they are, it's not very surprising the FBI would ask them to
> do that.

I agree, the "FBI front" claim as a whole is a stretch; however, from what I
know about where and how full binary feeds are being exchanged today, it is
not far-fetched to believe the operators may be allowed the privilege of
operating with minimal interference from law enforcement for the privilege of
"eavesdropping" or other high-level cooperative efforts.

Commercial Usenet operators adhere to DMCA in the USA, but that doesn't cover
CSAM or other illegal content outside of copyright. If Usenet providers are
not monitoring and detecting CSAM or other illegal content, it makes sense to
me that the only other invested and capable party would be law enforcement at
the national level. Encryption and obfuscation are the most common way binary
data is posted to Usenet today, so there likely has to be a high level of
cooperation between the providers and law enforcement on access to the content
as well as ease of tracing back to the origin. Within the realm of monitoring
and tracing, again, I find it not far-fetched to believe the government would
provide their own "employees" to perform this work for the providers whom may
or may not be financial/technically able to do so on their own.

I'm not making any proclamations about GigaNews or other Usenet providers and
their relationship with law enforcement, but pointing out interesting
coincidences that did not exist when larger numbers of Usenet operators were
exchanging full feeds and within the USA specifically, the Usenet network was
far more decentralized. Full feed exchange has become completely centralized
within the USA to the Ashburn EQ-IX (as best I can tell since Altopia shut
down, their infrastructure is still sort of in play, assume someone purchased
it and may be reselling, but the alt.net Path element goes in/out Ashburn
based on my inflow data). The consolidation to the Ashburn area did not happen
until ISPs and other entities dropped full feeds when Usenet became a dirty
word, also around the same time law enforcement became highly interested in
monitoring it and other Internet traffic on a large scale.

I like to speculate, and am distrustful of the government and service
providers (having been on the inside for enough time), so why would GigaNews
operate servers in Texas or anywhere else for that matter, when their feeds
are exchanged exclusively in Ashburn? Backhauling 200-400TB of traffic per day
over IX or similar cheaper transit links, is not usually efficient or cost
effective, especially if the majority of your IP traffic originates in/out a
location hundreds of miles away. They may have some redundancy where they are
storing data outside of Ashburn, but replicating the entire feed and keeping
any kind of retention in multiple locations seems very cost prohibitive for
businesses claiming to operate on thin profit margins. HighWinds Network
Group, in my opinion, has been the leader in Usenet from an infrastructure and
network architecture standpoint. They have a vast global network that they
primarily own and operate themselves, but again, their Usenet feeds are
exchanged in Ashburn within the USA and their other Usenet server farm is in
Amsterdam. If the largest global player isn't replicating beyond their two
primary points of presence, I doubt GigaNews would be capable from a cost
standpoint alone.

GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix
announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to
GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most
opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4
years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer
or adjust feeds with them.

Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
> Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
> profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
> pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
> the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
providers?

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On Jul 21, 2023 at 2:42:00 AM CDT, "Richard Kettlewell"
<invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>> Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
>> profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
>> pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
>> the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?
>
> The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
> anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
> providers?

Why would they trust anyone to hand them a potentially filtered feed for
surveillance?

Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
> "Richard Kettlewell" <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
>>> Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
>>> profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
>>> pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
>>> the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?
>>
>> The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
>> anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
>> providers?
>
> Why would they trust anyone to hand them a potentially filtered feed
> for surveillance?

Easy risk to mitigate: take multiple feeds, use a front organization,
etc.

If a peer does start filtering then that represents an interesting line
of investigation l-)

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
>>> Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
>>> relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
>>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
>
> There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
> delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
> court cases on this very topic.

I’m not very familiar with US law. The reason I’m puzzled is that the
point of carrying binary groups is, rather obviously, to facilitate
large-scale copyright violation, not some more innocuous pursuit that
happens to be troubled by the occasional pirated movie.

Can you really get away with that (at least in the USA) as long as you
respond to notices from the rights holders who actually bother to check?
If so then how is it that Napster was destroyed?

(Has it not occurred to anyone to automate ‘NNTP to DMCA notice’?)

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

Richard Kettlewell wrote:

> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
>>>> Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
>>>> relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
>>>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
>>
>> There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
>> delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
>> court cases on this very topic.

> I’m not very familiar with US law. The reason I’m puzzled is that the
> point of carrying binary groups is, rather obviously, to facilitate
> large-scale copyright violation, not some more innocuous pursuit that
> happens to be troubled by the occasional pirated movie.

> Can you really get away with that (at least in the USA) as long as you
> respond to notices from the rights holders who actually bother to check?
> If so then how is it that Napster was destroyed?

> (Has it not occurred to anyone to automate ‘NNTP to DMCA notice’?)

Most binaries are now hidden behind file names and subjects that give
no indication of what is there. You need to be part of one of the roving
groups sharing the hidden_name -> real_name conversion to know what to
download.

So, browsing the groups does not give the info needed to submit a DCMA
notice.

--
Retro Guy

According to Retro Guy <retro.guy@rocksolidbbs.com>:
>>> There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
>>> delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
>>> court cases on this very topic.
>
>> I’m not very familiar with US law. The reason I’m puzzled is that the
>> point of carrying binary groups is, rather obviously, to facilitate
>> large-scale copyright violation, not some more innocuous pursuit that
>> happens to be troubled by the occasional pirated movie.
>
>> Can you really get away with that (at least in the USA) as long as you
>> respond to notices from the rights holders who actually bother to check?

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act

>> If so then how is it that Napster was destroyed?

A combination of not taking the DMCA seriously, bad lawyering, and bad luck.

>Most binaries are now hidden behind file names and subjects that give
>no indication of what is there. You need to be part of one of the roving
>groups sharing the hidden_name -> real_name conversion to know what to
>download.
>
>So, browsing the groups does not give the info needed to submit a DCMA
>notice.

Media companies have spiders scouring the web looking for infringing
stuff. I'm sure they could do the same with a usenet feed, but I have
no idea how much they do, since usenet is so relatively tiny these days.

For an example of how not to do this, see the current case in which the
entire music industry is suing Twitter.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23761680/twitter-music-lawsuit-nmpa-copyright-infringement
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

For your reference, records indicate that
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

> Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
> satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away. Maybe
> the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math forever, but
> they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long enough to tell
> the men with guns to go take your money.

That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument
I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do
what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that
their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time).
None of the legal measures put in place have stopped copyright
infringement, kiddie porn, or a host of other problematic data that exists
on the Internet. In the end, Usenet was made irrelevant, and my only
interest here is to find out if that can be fixed.

> This is a bizarrely confused history of Usenet. The binary groups were
> going strong for years after the text groups were dying.

Well, they’re *still* “going strong” if you look at their increasing
traffic. But that argument is disingenuous unless you’re trying to say
that the binaries posted have been “legitimate” messages, like people
posting silly cat videos or whatever.

By that logic, Usenet is not dead, because traffic to those binary groups
has been increasing steadily over time! But Usenet *is* dead, because
those binary groups are *not* full of people sharing their own content.

Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their
group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries
being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made them easy to
drop completely. If Usenet can’t even support messages that *email*
supports in 2023, what’s the point?

> What killed
> Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually worked for the
> average person, only complicated and weird filtering experiments that
> never quite worked right.

There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to
suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.
Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to greatly
reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on why the
abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory here).

> Spoiler: Still has exactly the same problems. Usenet is just too dead for
> spammers to care about it (mostly). If it were ever revived, the same
> problem would immediately come back.

Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those problems
decades ago.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly