🚀 go-pugleaf

ad613@torfree.net (Nabil Mohamed El-Khodari) writes:
> 
> Long interesting post:
> --------------------
> 
> Thank you David, we carefully read your post. We want to ask you the 
> following questions which we supplemented with traceroutes among other 
> things. We also numbered the questions, so as we can follow to which part 
> you are answering. We hope that you maintain that in your answers.

This calls for a reposting of Val's freenet
cabal post:

From: val@io.org (Val Dodge)
Newsgroups: alt.online-service.prodigy,news.admin.policy,
            news.admin.misc,alt.censorship,alt.culture.internet,
            tor.general,alt.activism,can.infohighway
Subject: Re: Controlling posts to Usenet
Date: 24 Mar 1995 01:57:24 -0500

In article , ab330@torfree.net (Bob Allisat)
wrote:

>       And as for my record it's a little hard
>       to accomplish when everyone who has anything
>       to do with FreeNet also is sitting in all of
>       the Information Services Providers in the
>       city of Toronto. Try getting a cheap or free
>       feed with those odds against you. Can you
>       spell "Cabal" Colin?

Bob, I fully believe that the Toronto Cabal
has become oppressive and even dangerous; they are on the verge of
completely controlling access to information in this city. Think about
it: they set up the Freenet to whet the public's appetite for
net.access, then they make sure that the system is slow enough and has
too few modems so that Joe Shmoe will run right out to one of the ISPs
in town and get a *paying* account. The Freenet is nothing but a
publicly-funded bait-and-switch tactic where the winners are the
Caballeros, and the losers are the people who have to pay inflated
prices because of the lack of meaningful competition.

A freenet of some sort was inevitable in Toronto, and it was in the
Cabal's best interest to control it from the very beginning. Now just
who stands to gain the most if the Toronto Freenet is delayed for over
a year, and then is nearly unusable after it's finally launched? Why
the Cabal, of course. The number of users on Internex and Interlog
alone has more than doubled since the launching of the Freenet in the
autumn, and other ISPs like Passport and Inforamp have seemingly
appeared out of nowhere to take care of the overflow. As if that isn't
damning enough, what about the fact that a considerable portion of
Usenet news is drawn in over the Freenet's (taxpayer-subsidized)
high-speed net link, and then re-distributed on the cheap to the rest
of the Cabal member systems? Is it really a coincidence that the
Freenet serves the local ISPs before its own members? I think not.

The Toronto Freenet will never get a graphical interface or offer basic
access to ftp, telnet, or the Web, because that would adversely affect
business flowing into the Cabal's ISPs. It was deliberately designed to
be as useless and frustrating as possible to use. How are any and all
complaints answered? "If you don't like it here, why don't you pay for
an account on a commercial provider?" seems to be the only entry in the
Freenet's tech-support manual. Sounds like the Freenet "volunteers" get
kickbacks for directing potential customers to local ISPs, doesn't it?

But there's so much more. I discovered the full details of the plan
quite accidentally last month, and four members of the Cabal have
threatened to put me on a local access blacklist if I reveal what I
know. In fact, this article may be my last from a local provider,
assuming that it makes it past the Cabal cancelbots at all. However, I
feel it important that the people in this city know just what the
various conspirators are up to in their attempts to illegally control
the market. To that end, I will be revealing the true extent of the
Cabal Conspiracy in a series of posts over the next few days. I fully
expect to lose my accounts on three of the local Cabal systems as a
result, but I am currently negotiating with an American service to
obtain a low-cost, unfettered account. The Toronto Cabal will be
broken, even if I have to haul my own T1 up from Falls Church, VA to do
it.

--
Val Dodge                |  Tell me no lies, and I'll ask you no
Toronto, Ontario         |  questions.


-- 
"Different rules apply when it gets this late."

Visit the Conspiracy Arc-Hive!
http://www.netizen.org/Arc-Hive