I see your free speech and raise you violated copyrights and failure to follow 2257 guidelines. Explain to me WITH COURT JUDGEMENTS how you are exempt. How can you run KP images without fear?

At the end of the day, newsgroups are the home of scams, spams, KP, lies and crud. Wading through it to get anything useful is a joke, like a million unmoderated chat boards filled with scam artists, theives, and liars. Usenet could die tomorrow and the web would be a MUCH better place.


Are you saying your service does not filter IN ANY WAY usenet? Does not group, selectively display, edit, filter, remove, or in any way present information outside of it's original format?

Jim, once you start filtering (specifically editing) material, you become a producer not just a delivery method. Selectively displaying only images from usenet, example (a common business model, sadly) means that the provider isn't just giving access to the usenet but is filtering, aggregating, and yes, editing the content you see. Google avoids this problem by providing UNEDITED but searchable results, and they always present the final results in context and in format. They don't just extract the images.

Sorry, but rebroadcasting and charging access fees to material that is most certainly illegal isn't exactly a brainy business model.

Alex

Being a newbie, I don't understand the usenet thing to be honest. But... doesn't google extract only images when you do an image search? Like I say, I'm very green when it comes to this, and seeings I just signed up for GUBA, very interested nonetheless :)
Also, does the safe search filter by it's very name not also give a filtered result?

Our concerns are pretty simple...

We've had a couple of people maliciously post libelous comments about our service on a public message board, in an effort to scare away potential customers and damage our business.

This is the equivalent of someone walking into a crowded theater and yelling "Fire!" when there isn't one.

If the harm still seems "mysterious" to you, it may help to step into our shoes for a moment....

You've operated a quality adult website for over a decade, which has been in complete compliance with federal and state laws.

In an effort to raise awareness for your site, and to expand upon your business, you run some advertising.

A few folks... competitors, anti-porn fanatics, whatever... go to a public discussion board, and in front of an audience of potential customers proclaim that you promote and provide child pornography. The statements are malicious, untrue, and scare the crap out of folks who may have otherwise purchased a membership with your site.

If this doesn't help to clarify, and personalize some of our concerns, there's really not much more I can offer at this point.

Interesting observations Alex... completely incorrect... but interesting none the less :)

As I've noted several times now, we've been providing Usenet services to retail and commercial customers for over a decade. Usenet continues to grow in popularity, and to date, over 2 million valid newsgroup postings pass through our news servers every day. This translates to approximately 800 GB of newsgroup content daily, which is comprised of text discussions and multimedia related to a variety of different topics.

Please note that adult webmasters have utilized the Usenet newsgroups for years to advertise their products, services, and websites. In fact we currently assist a number of adult websites with their promotional postings to the groups. In the end, if a few basic guidelines are followed, the newsgroups benefit by receiving quality content, and adult webmasters benefit by promoting their websites to a worldwide audience.

With our Usenet service, adult and non-adult webmasters can deliver 30,000+ newsgroups through their website, without having to use their servers, storage or bandwidth. At a time when webmasters are looking for new ways to drive and retain traffic at their site... to remain competitive & profitable... our Usenet service provides an inexpensive solution.

Our Usenet service is currently a popular component within a variety of adult websites, and its the same service that we deliver to our non-adult clients, such as ISPs, universities, government agencies, corporations, national newspapers, law firms, etc. It is also the same service that is available on Comcast, Adelphia, RoadRunner, Earthlink, and any other international/national/regional ISP.

The service is easy to use, fully supported by our technical staff, and can be brought online at most websites in less than 15 minutes. No hardware or software required, and our clients' end-users simply need a web browser to access, view and post to the newsgroups.

While you're references to "rebroadcasting", "filtering", "KP", "court judgements" are all very sensational and inflammatory... they ultimately have nothing to do with Usenet or the services that we provide.

As mentioned earlier, it would have been nice to have a productive conversation to see how are respective businesses could benefit one another, rather than get caught up in a bunch of chest pounding and territorial pissings.

With that said, if anyone has questions about our service, or the Usenet community in general, please feel free to contact us any time and we'd be happy to assist you.

(E) info@eroticusenet.com
(T) 408-720-7620

no territorial pissing, sorry, you misunderstand. You don't get it! Usenet is nothing but stolen images, images used without permission, and untraceable nudes in total violation of 2257. To resell it is to condone it - and now you let slip that you "help" companies spam newsgroups.

As for filter, kp , and "court judgements", well, I won't repeat myself again except to say that rather than addressing the issues, you are just spewing ad copy. Nice but not informative or an informed reply.

Nice business model. :)

Alex

There is a difference between "filtering" search results and filtering individual messages. If a message has 100 lines of text and an image, and you present only the image, you have filtered and edited the end product, presented the image without context, and general are profiting from that image without permission. That is not fair use or any other "public" thing. Google's search function for newsgroups already returns the entire message plus thread guide etc. Most newsgroup resellers usually offer some sort of image extraction service that allows end users to browse ONLY images taken out of messages, without the attached message.

The internet could live quite happily without usenet. In fact, it would be a much better place. Adult membership sites would be foolish to pay to support a network who's users turn around and distribute your content without permission.

Alex

Gotcha. That clears up that :)

OK close off communications? everyone knows how to get a hold of me cell, offfice, ICQ, webmail etc I am always available 24/7 I did not hear back from you guys regarding the matter and I never said fine i said I needed to review your 2257 docs. Feel free to call me if you want.

Bugbee

We've already corrected your comments about Usenet & our services in previous posts, so there's no need to rehash that information.

The majority of our interactions with adult webmasters, designers & developers have been very positive.

Rather than rush to make incorrect prejudgments... something that you're very good at Alex... most folks have taken a few minutes to actually inform themselves about Usenet, and were able to see the value it could bring to their businesses.

Those interactions have been very positive as I noted, and we're looking forward to developing similar relationships.

Knowing how to get a hold of you, and having you respond, are two entirely different things Stephen.

As I mentioned, the last time we communicated was on 4/8/05. I emailed you our statement regarding Usenet/2257, and in your reply message you said there was "No problem". You also said that you'd review the docs a little further and contact me on Monday regarding an editorial piece.

Monday passed without any reply from you. On Tuesday (4/12/05), I left an email and voice mail message for you.

On Thursday (4/14/05) our 2nd ad ran in the XBiz newsletter, and I still had not heard back from you. On Friday morning I contacted our XBiz advertising rep (Kristen).

Kristen said that she was heading into a meeting with you and Alex, and that the three of you would discuss our ad placement, as well as an editorial piece to inform folks about Usenet/EroticUsenet/2257.

Kristen said she would call me back in 1-2 hours... I didn't hear from her the rest of the day. I left a voice mail message for her at approximately 3PM with no reply.

Monday morning I called Kristen again. She thought I was another client, and began telling me about "artwork problems" until I refreshed her memory.

She said that she wasn't in the office on Friday (not true, we had talked by phone that day), and that she didn't have a chance to meet with you and Alex. She suggested that we email Alex, rushed off the phone, and the runaround continued.

In the end, all we had planned to do was run 3 months of advertising in your XBiz newsletter. After the 1st ad ran, you contacted us about 2257 concerns that were unwarranted & had nothing to do with our service.

You basically dropped a turd in our lap, and than disappeared. You never followed up on the 2257 issue, never responded to the initial posts on the Greenguy board, and we never discussed the editorial coverage that you suggested. We were basically left in the dark, despite the fact that we didn't initiate all of this.

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and shits like a duck???

I'm with Raw Alex on this one.
No offense Jim, and yes, I've been around usenet for many many years.
1600 baud. There is free speach and there isn't.
Especially now.

What does that even mean?

Is there any way we can see an example of this in action?

Here is a good way to clairfy the situation:

http://eroticusenet.com/images/window_drnexample.jpg

Images extracted from the messages, displayed as thumbnail pages. This isn't just usenet access, it is a content aggregator and presentation format. you can then download those images without ever seeing the newsgroup messages attached to them.

That crosses the line.

Alex

So what makes that any different than a site like Fusker, hiding behind the usenet name???? Except having someone else pay for the bandwidth? At least on the usenet groups the way I remember it being is that you at least had to sift through the messages and get the ads to see the content?

There definitely seems to be a huge difference between that and just offering usenet access......I am at a loss at how that could possibly help webmaster, designers or programs?

jaden someone keeps telling programs that having your url on pictures is the best way to get traffic. They package them up on newsgroups bit torrent, and any other way they can to try to drive traffic. it probably works to an extent, but now means that single girl model sites burn out mostly within a month or two from sheer over exposure. In the end, it hurts their business but most people look short term gains and dont care about long term pain.

Alex

Once again Alex this is yet another example of your misinformation, lack of knowledge, and ignorance about Usenet and our service.

I'd strongly encourage you to support your future statements about our service with factual information.

Once again... we do NOT filter, aggregate, extract or archive Usenet content.

While there are companies that extract, edit and archive Usenet content... I believe GUBA is one of them... that has nothing to do with our service.

We are a Usenet service, and we provide realtime access to unedited Usenet newsgroup content, through a web-based newsreader that we developed.

We have been providing this service for the past 12 years... along with other companies like Comcast, Adelphia, RoadRunner, etc... and there is nothing illegal about it.

Accessing the newsgroups through our web-based newsreader is no different than accessing the Usenet newsgroups with any other newsreader like Microsoft Outlook, Forte Agent, etc.

The benefit to using our newsreader is that end-users don't have to install any software (they use their web browser), and it's more intuitive for most folks because it is web-based.

Like any other newsreader... and any other Usenet service... end-users have the capacity to sort or organize content within a newsgroup realtime. They can sort content by date, author, subject line, content type, etc.

The URL that you referenced, simply highlights one of those sort options within the newsreader (thumbnail sort).

Regardless of the sort option that an end user selects... date, author, thumbnail, etc... they are sorting that newsgroup content realtime. The entire post is there, nothing has been edited or filtered.

To give you a general feel for the newsreader, you can view the screen captures at this URL...

http://eroticusenet.com/screens.htm

Like any other newsreader, an end user would view a list of the Usenet newsgroups. They'd select a newsgroup of interest, and view the content within that group realtime.

The end user has a number of options for sorting that content realtime. As an example there's a "Discussion Thread" and "Thumbnail" sort option, which are noted in the screen captures.

At this point, we've said all we can say on this topic, so this will most likely be our last post to this thread.

We've appreciated the opportunity to talk about our service, and if there are remaining questions please feel free to contact us by email or phone. Thanks!

As noted several times in this thread, we are a Usenet service provider.

We do not extract, edit or archive newsgroup content. We are not Fusker, we are not GUBA, we have nothing in common with any of those services.

We offer realtime access to Usenet newsgroups through a web-based newsreader that we developed. It's no different than the Microsoft Outlook newsreader, except that our interface is web-based and does not require end users to download/install 3rd party applications. They use their web browser.

We've been providing this service to retail and commercial clients for the past 12 years. It is the same type of service that Comcast, Adelphia, RoadRunner, Earthlink, etc. provides to their retail and commercial customers.

ISPs, telcos, web portals, universities, government agencies, national newspapers, law firms, corporations, etc. come to us when they want to provide Usenet newsgroup access to their end users, but they don't want to operate the servers, storage & bandwidth required to sustain a Usenet service that conveys 800 GB of newsgroup content daily.

They can outsource that headache, overhead, and cost to us for as little as $75/month... and make the newsgroups accessible to their end users through a web-based newsreader that they can brand to match the appearance of their site.

That's just a few of the ways that our service helps webmasters, designers and developers.

Like any other product/service it may not be a good fit for everyone, but if you had any questions please feel free to phone or email our staff. We're available 7 days a week.

Can I please see an example that is not screen caps? PM me the info you don't want to post it in public.

We'll do you one better... if you operate a legitimate adult entertainment website, we'll let you run our EroticUsenet service at your site for 1 month... free of charge!

No credit cards, no checks, no invoicing. If the service doesn't meet your needs for whatever reason, you can simply let it expire at the end of the month without any cost or obligation.

With the exception of Alec... who has already arrived at false conclusions about our product without ever trying it... this would give folks a legitimate opportunity to check out our service first hand, and arrive at their own conclusions.

If you'd like to take advantage of this, please email (info@eroticusenet.com) or phone us (408-720-7620) and we'll get you setup.

Can we throw it on here?

eroticusenet, you don't understand... I have already seen your service. I need not say more.

Oh yeah, Alex, not Alec... that is for Sir Alec Guiness, not me.

Alec :)
Is it really just the filtering that bothers you? When looking at images on usenet, I really only see spam for the text included. Do you really ever see more than that?

Jim, the filtering bothers me because if I took images from usenet and just put them on my site, I would get my ass banned all over the place and have content providers send C&Ds all over. Filtering, the showing of images without the context is a real problem. NO 2257, no license, no contract... usenet wide open with the end user doing the filtering is UP TO THE USER. When the usenet provider has built in filtering, thumbnailers, and generally allows people to quickly enjoy content without context, well, they pass the line.

Just one of those things.

Alex

Alex - since you've seen it, maybe you can answer mine & Jim's question - Are the image still on the Usenet server or are they extracted from it, sorted & then uploaded to a regular http server/location?