| It's hilarious Really this is just funny. Cuomo is getting political credit for doing basically nothing.
The ISPs have wanted to remove the newsgroups from their machines just to save money but never did because it would piss off their users. Along comes Cuomo and says remove it and tell them it was because of me so he gets the heat from the users, but in the process gets political credit for "protecting" the children by doing nothing.
I can't speak for all ISPs, but at least with Verizon FIOS users, the blame for the "children" getting access to these groups rests solely on the parents. To gain access to the Verizon newsgroup server, the owner of the Verizon account has to make a user account for the person and click a box that says "enable newsgroup access". If a parent gave unrestricted access to the newsgroups to their kids it's their own dam fault. Verizon didn't have to remove the newsgroups, they already had the facilities built in to let the parents block their kids from them if they wanted. Verizon removed the newsgroups because they wanted to remove them, and with Cuomo out there wanting to take the credit for it, it gave Verizon the perfect chance of removing them and saying it wasn't our fault it was NYAG Cuomo that "made" us do it.
AFAIK that leaves Cablevision as the last NY company that has newsgroups as part of their service. Which is also funny as their service has no way to restrict access to the news server. You have full access to all the groups as long as you are on their IP block. So unlike the Verizon case where it's the parents fault for giving the kids access, this one could be Cablevision's fault since they don't give the parents a way to restrict access to them. |
