From: root@cltr.uq.oz.au (Hulk Hogan)
Subject: Re: Newsgroups not received in Australia.
Organization: Centre for Language Teaching and Research, Uni of Queensland, AUSTRALIA.
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 06:36:35 GMT

emr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Elizabeth M. Reid) writes:
>u734120@bruny.cc.utas.edu.au (John Lamp) writes:
>>alt.sex.* is alive and well in Tasmania.  Perhaps it's because we're still
>>not regarded as part of Australia. :-} Maybe you should ask the University
>>of Melbourne if you have a problem.
>You are probably not getting your newsfeed from munnari.oz.au (the
>official AARNet Usenet source). Word from munnari's administrator
>Robert Elz (kre) is that alt.sex* and alt.drugs are proscribed, at the
>request of the US end of the AARNet satellite link. This was recently
>stated in aus.news - the article has not expired at my site, so it may
>still be at other sites which get that group, if anyone wants to read
>it.

News comes from  UUnet into munnari.oz.au, and then to the various states
and then into various departments and so on. You can see the path that
the article traversed by looking at the  Path:  line in the news article.
Most news readers don't show you this, but if you save an article and 
look at it, you should find the Path line there, usually as the first line,
or within the first few lines if the article was crossposted.

Articles which are cross posted to other groups which are NOT blocked
(such as this one) will also be imported, and will show up in alt.sex*.
However articles only posted to  alt.sex* and/or alt.drugs  won't show 
up. 

>Also - as some people have pointed out to me in email - I should have
>said that these groups are banned only by AARNet, not by all sites in
>Australia. I gather that a number of companies who pay for their own
>satellite time do import these groups.

Indeed...  If you wish to pay the satellite costs... and then the long
distance costs of transporting them around Australia, you can indeed
access such material...  Despite the satellite link being cited as the
reason, if memory serves, the transmission of such material across =any=
AARNet link was banned (including of course the interstate links which
were at the time  48kpbs and are now all at 2MB/sec, I believe).

Of course, the risk of being caught doing this is extremely small...
Even if someone with the necessary network access had the time or inclination
to do so.  Small enough that I wouldnt be surprised if a number of people
currently do it, and indirectly cause more traffic on the link than just
importing once it would.  I can't help but feel that if they would just
remove the ban, and prepare to stand up to hysterical media identities
who would scream about "pax payer dollars funding a porno net", it would
all be so much simpler..

Another alternative is to create an alt.sex.* hierarchy in this newsgroup and
get everyone to cross post all articles to alt.comp.acad-freedom.alt.sex.* 
:-)

/\ndy
--
Andrew M. Jones,  Systems Programmer, 	Email: {root,andy}@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au
Centre for Lang. Teaching & Research, 	UUCP: uunet!lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au!andy
University of Queensland,  St. Lucia, 	Phone: +61  7 365 6915 (Use 07 in Oz)
Brisbane,  Qld. AUSTRALIA  4072    	Fax: +61 7 365 7077    IRC: HulkHogan

"No matter what hits the fan, it's never distributed evenly....."
Xref: sparky alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk:3141 comp.admin.policy:1284