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  • Usenet in China (or lack thereof) [was: Big tech Russia bans and Usenet

    From Javier@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Mon Mar 7 09:13:03 2022
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

    Other big names in tech, particularly social media, are blocking Russian clients.

    We are witnessing what may be the first steps of a significant fracture
    of the Internet, and thus in many ways, Usenet. The coming days / weeks
    will show ho significant the fracture will be.

    BTW, as a side question, does anybody knows how Usenet is doing in China?
    A decade ago there were messages with originating paths like !news.neu.edu.cn!news.cn99.com. I don't see them anymore.

    Does China have any usenet servers at all nowadays? Is it possible to
    host an independent server of any kind in China? Gopher or anything?

    Regretably it looks like they want to copy the Chinese style internet
    in the west. We will need to learn samizdat from the russians.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Spiros Bousbouras@21:1/5 to Javier on Mon Mar 7 16:28:44 2022
    On Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:13:03 -0600
    Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

    Other big names in tech, particularly social media, are blocking Russian clients.

    We are witnessing what may be the first steps of a significant fracture
    of the Internet, and thus in many ways, Usenet. The coming days / weeks will show ho significant the fracture will be.

    BTW, as a side question, does anybody knows how Usenet is doing in China?
    A decade ago there were messages with originating paths like !news.neu.edu.cn!news.cn99.com. I don't see them anymore.

    Does China have any usenet servers at all nowadays? Is it possible to
    host an independent server of any kind in China? Gopher or anything?

    I don't know but there is a regular poster on comp.unix.shell who I think
    is Chinese and perhaps would be willing to discuss the issue through email.
    He posts through googlegroups though. See for example
    <a101ca81-0f9d-43bd-b750-8448693ef84bn@googlegroups.com> .
    Sebz: "ubatl...@tznvy.pbz" <ubatlv.munb@tznvy.pbz>

    Regretably it looks like they want to copy the Chinese style internet
    in the west. We will need to learn samizdat from the russians.

    If anyone has been thinking of starting their own newsserver , this is a
    good time to do it. It's also good to visit every now and again news.admin.peering to learn about new ones. A few weeks ago I learned
    of news.cyber23.de which works fine. No registration required and you
    can read and post.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Computer Nerd Kev@21:1/5 to Spiros Bousbouras on Mon Mar 7 21:53:51 2022
    Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
    On Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:13:03 -0600
    Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    BTW, as a side question, does anybody knows how Usenet is doing in China?
    A decade ago there were messages with originating paths like
    !news.neu.edu.cn!news.cn99.com. I don't see them anymore.

    Does China have any usenet servers at all nowadays? Is it possible to
    host an independent server of any kind in China? Gopher or anything?

    I don't know but there is a regular poster on comp.unix.shell who I think is Chinese and perhaps would be willing to discuss the issue through email. He posts through googlegroups though. See for example
    <a101ca81-0f9d-43bd-b750-8448693ef84bn@googlegroups.com> .
    Sebz: "ubatl...@tznvy.pbz" <ubatlv.munb@tznvy.pbz>

    Google (and googlegroups.com) are blocked by the Great Firewall of
    China. So unless they're taking the significant risk of using a VPN
    there, they can't be posting from mainland China.

    Running some newsservers through the Chinese firewall test here: https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/

    The only one I found blocked (besides Google, which obviously isn't
    targeted at their Usenet content specifically) is "giganews.com".
    You need to use "nntp.aioe.org" and "news.eternal-september.org"
    for those servers to be recognised by the tester, for some reason.

    Of course they might be using some sort of packet inspection to
    detect NNTP and block the protocol entirely. I believe they're
    known to do similar things to prevent/track other activities such
    as VPN usage. However I notice that "narkive.com" isn't blocked, so
    it seems unlikely that they'd block the protocol and yet miss a
    major web archive.

    Curious about the same thing in the past, I've looked around for
    Chinese groups but never found anything active. Maybe the Chinese
    just aren't interested?

    PS. "news.gmane.io" and "gwene.org" aren't blocked, so there's an
    easy way for Chinese to tap into RSS feeds from blocked
    websites!

    --
    __ __
    #_ < |\| |< _#

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From meff@21:1/5 to Computer Nerd Kev on Mon Mar 7 22:31:15 2022
    On 2022-03-07, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
    Of course they might be using some sort of packet inspection to
    detect NNTP and block the protocol entirely. I believe they're
    known to do similar things to prevent/track other activities such
    as VPN usage. However I notice that "narkive.com" isn't blocked, so
    it seems unlikely that they'd block the protocol and yet miss a
    major web archive.

    If you're using NNTPS and you have a non-compromised certificate
    chain, then you should generally be okay.

    Curious about the same thing in the past, I've looked around for
    Chinese groups but never found anything active. Maybe the Chinese
    just aren't interested?

    I suspect this is the thing. Why spend the energy to block something
    that very few folks use?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)