Here's an interesting (or perhaps not so interesting) bit of news: A Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) has been declared on @Home. The penalty starts at 17:00 PST on Jan 18, 2000. At this time all participating Usenet carriers will refuse to carry any posts submitted by an @Home account. This actions is brought about because @Home has been used by a lot of spammers to spam Usenet. One of the reasons this being easy is because @Home has an open proxy server, meaning that anyone can use it to post messages without verifying who they are.

I'm not too sure exactly how this accomplished. From what I gathered, they are several sites with bots that scan Usenet posts, if any post originates from an @Home domain then a cancel post is sent. This cancel post is distributed like any other Usenet message, except that the News servers will take special action when they encounter the message (in this case, deleting the targeted post). This system is open to abuse and has been abused in the past, although offenders find themselves banned from Usenet.

So at first glance, many people declared that this is a violation of the First Amendment rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, among other things. This is what UUNet tried to do in court to get ISPs to carry their messages. The fallacy with this argument (and why it was summarily dismissed by the courts) is that other than your upstream provider, there is no contract with all the Usenet servers to carry your traffic. Usenet servers are voluntary operations, each site can carry whatever newsgroups they want, for however long they want, and whatever messages they want.

Nobody is forcing anybody to cancel messages. It is up to each site to set up their news program to allow a UDP sentence to apply. Many sites will not ban @Home messages, but many sites will ban them. It's very voluntary.

Why is a UDP necessary? People have been trying to get @Home to help them stop spammers for quite a while now. Apparently they have been ignored while the amount of spam from @Home servers has increased dramatically. In Usenet, you can't truly verify a sender's e-mail address, you can verify the server that's being used to send a message. So you can filter messages by IP address or domain and be sure that it will work. That's why a UDP is both effective and about the only option if the offending ISP is reticent about combating spam.

I saw it mentioned few UDP sentences are carried out, and none for more than a few days. The offenders are quick to correct their problems if it gets to this stage. UDP sentences are posted to news.admin.announce, and it seems to be a rather formalized process, one that's not undertaken lightly, as is anything dealing with Usenet. When doing anything official takes a cumulative thousands of dollars to do, everything is done proper and to the letter so it doesn't have to be done again.

One might argue that Usenet is a dying breed. The web is the big thing, with many sites carrying local bulleting boards. I doubt too many of the flood of people getting Internet access know anything about Usenet. It is not something that's sexy and graphical like the web or e-mail. You generally need a special news reader, or access to a web-based Usenet client, of which there are some.

Well, there are still a lot of people who read Usenet. I being one of them. I was surprised to find out that FidoNet is alive and strong, with some 30000 servers worldwide. It's only for e-mail and Usenet, and probably still the only Internet access that many people have in some parts of the world. Usenet will always be there, because it's a natural way to communicate with thousands of people.