I wonder what is going on with USENET news. It is an old, sort of, social networking service. It is more like a system of forums and interest groups organized in hierarchy. The service existed even before World Wide Web, and requires special client software to access it. Client software is called News reader. All major email clients can also act as news readers. Also, there are WWW gateways, most known one is owned by Google (Google Groups).

 

What does it have with this topic. Well, there are two things one can find on USENET news. One is excellent and competent advice, especially if you are in IT business. The other is enormous quantity of freak, lunatics, political extremists of all kinds and radicals, especially left wing ones. And, yes, tons and tons of pornography, categorized. Most of the sincerely believe that they are posting anonymous, because one does not have to register. But they are wrong. Major news servers are owned by Internet providers, and they log IP addresses. And all messages posted have origin IP address in its header. So, finding a poster is just matter of comparing news server logs, and IP address usage logs. There are news servers which do not follow such policy, but the messages posted on them are often blocked by other servers, because of spam.

 

So, what we got here ? A community which, in significant part, consists of political radicals, who are communicating with others like them, and who believe that they are posting anonymously. All the messages are always plain text, never encrypted. Looks like excellent hunting ground for security people.

 

DG