Free Republic

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Online forums where thousands of child-porn images have been posted have been stricken from three Internet providers, including two of the nation's five largest, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday. Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests. With the agreement announced Tuesday, Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the...

PERSPECTIVE The world's largest ISP is cutting off direct access to one of the oldest, coolest -- and strangest -- parts of the Internet. America Online has quietly announced that it will discontinue providing member access to Usenet newsgroups next month. In recent days, AOL subscribers who access keyword "Newsgroups" are greeted with a pop-up message informing them of the change: "Please Note: The AOL Newsgroup service will be discontinued in early 2005." According to a notice on AOL's Web site, the newsgroup shut-off will occur in February, severing subscribers from the thousands of discussion groups that make up Usenet....

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- The state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Minnesota woman who wrote a message on the Internet critical of an Alabama scholar cannot be sued for libel in the scholar's home state. The woman's lawyer said the ruling shows that free-speech rules covering newspapers, magazines or television also apply to a new medium like the Internet. The high court vacated a $25,000 judgment against Marianne Luban, whose criticism on an Internet newsgroup devoted to Egyptology was directed at Katherine Griffis, a scholar living in Alabama. The Internet posting mentioned that Griffis had ties to Alabama,...