NTL removing newsgroups

25-09-2004, 14:49

Didn't see any official statements but it seems like NTL is removing a lot of newsgroups!

For example, alt.binaries.cd.image, alt.binaries.startrek and alt.binaries.anime.report are no longer available. I rememeber last year a few went, with the promise they would come back (which they eventually did I think), but I didn't hear anything this time round.

MoJo

Tricky · 25-09-2004, 22:10

They started doing this a long time ago when the news service used to be really bad!!! - They removed all the obvious (porn) ones and then started with the big hitting groups such as binaries for Xbox, PS2 etc. there were some official statements in the NTL.announce groups (sorry cannot the exact names as I changed my news provider)

mutty_w4rez · 25-09-2004, 22:27

this is a bit lame

cd.image has some great stuff there, i hope they don't remove much more, if they do I'll have to leave ntl.

IanUK · 25-09-2004, 22:34

alt.binaries.misc and alt.binaries.multimedia don't seem to be working correctly, both are showing over 500,000 headers but I cannot retrieve any of them correctly, some seem to download, but then they are the wrong date and seem purged.

Looks like something has gone wrong with NTL's servers

Ian

mutty_w4rez · 25-09-2004, 23:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanUK

alt.binaries.misc and alt.binaries.multimedia don't seem to be working correctly, both are showing over 500,000 headers but I cannot retrieve any of them correctly, some seem to download, but then they are the wrong date and seem purged.

Looks like something has gone wrong with NTL's servers

Ian

possible, how long has cd.image been down for?

Paul K · 26-09-2004, 08:34

There are two possible reasons that stand out a mile for why those newsgroups would be removed, one is the severe impact that they have on the servers and bandwidth which affects all other newsgroups and the other is nicely pointed out be a member name in this thread. The ammount of illegal software/CD images being made available through binary groups.
NTL may just be having to re-work the newsgroup servers again to balance the workload or it might be that they are trying to purge some of the warez off their system

Peach · 26-09-2004, 08:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul

or it might be that they are trying to purge some of the warez off their system

IIRC they don't describe their newsgroups as a 'restricted service', when you sign up, I don't know of any other ISP that is restricting access in this way. Could be another reason to go ADSL.

Ignition · 26-09-2004, 15:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peach

IIRC they don't describe their newsgroups as a 'restricted service', when you sign up, I don't know of any other ISP that is restricting access in this way. Could be another reason to go ADSL.

1) Nor do they describe them as unrestricted.
2) You'll struggle to find an ISP that offers a complete news feed, generally that's something confined to premium suppliers.
3) From the pure cold point of view if I were a service provider I'd be quite happy to see the back of large usenet downloaders and especially posters. The only things in the newsgroups that are missing are illegal and mostly DVD images, 4.7GB a pop, ouch

4) There are numerous premium pay usenet services, titannews, giganews, astraweb to name just 3.
5) NTL are not filtering the newsgroups on content, to do this would be to acknowledge that they are moderating their news feed and would give them liability if they don't at least try and remove all illegal content from the newsfeed (99.99% of the alt.binaries hierarchy).

27-09-2004, 10:28

Most ISPs at least try and provide a news service... to be honest, I wouldn't mind if it wasn't even very complete (like it used to be!) because these days with PAR2 and premium news servers it's not a problem.

Actually, by not providing a full news service, NTL are costing themselves and everyone else money. They end up paying more because people pull in more data from outside their network (which is what the equally ****e proxy cache system was supposed to reduce) from premium servers, and it costs their customers to pay for more bandwidth on the preimium services.

I think even the web proxies are the same. In theory it should save them external bandwidth, but in practice people have to keep hitting refresh so it just slows web browsing down for everyone.

27-09-2004, 10:31

One more thing. If NTL really wants to reduce bandwidth, especially external network bandwidth, they should introduce spam filters. As long as people can disable them (but they default to on), a simple SBL based or distributed checksum based system would provide <0.001% false positives and cut bandwidth used for mail down by at least 60% (75% of my email is spam, about 140/day on average).