When I signed up with TMNet (now they probably call it TM after we change the ‘e’ to ‘u’ in N*t) many years ago, they had several major services listed on their brochure. One is http service for surfing the net, another is the email service. Less known to the common public are a file depository and retrieval service known as ftp and nntp service which connects us to what we call ‘usenet’.

As most of you are well-versed with http and email services, I’m not going into them.

To use their ftp service, you’ll need to connect to ftp://ftp.tm.net.my/ using ftp protocol. You can access this service by typing in ftp://ftp.tm.net.my/ into the address bar on your Internet Explorer browser. Please note that this service is only available to TMNet’s subscribers.

A few months ago, they started censoring filtering their ftp service by allowing uploads only in compressed format, namely .zip and .rar. The regular users soon realised that by uploading a certain type of file of a certain nature, they might get the ISP into trouble under the watchful eye of the government. So they protected their compressed files with passwords. But the fact that how come the users can guess each other’s password, is another story, a story that you can tell your grandchildren how once things were and feel proud. But as I say, it’s another story. So I won’t elaborate here.

As for their nntp service, also known as usenet, you’ll need a newsreader to access. The most common newsreader or nntp client, to be precise, is Outlook Express, with which you can connect to news.tm.net.my. The other common clients are Agent, Xnews etc.

With nntp service, you can connect to one of the most ancient services in internet history. Usenet is one of the very old places where internet veterans lurk. It’s THE place that made internet where it is today. To get an idea of how vast this nntp service is, you can visit http://groups.google.com/. From which, you can access the group soc.culture.malaysia and many many other groups of special interest. From there, you can venture into other realms which you might have never dreamt of.

But it’s until recently, on August 23rd to be precise, that usenet linkage from Malaysian ISPs have been severed from the rest of the world.

While we can still access the service from Google’s usenet service like http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.malaysia, the local service from news://news.tm.net.my/soc.culture.malaysia has been frozen.

Is our government tightening the noose on our local ISPs?

Here are the latest screenshots from my Outlook Express.

You can’t fight them, you join them. You can’t fight them and don’t want to join them, ban them. Hehe.

Update August 30th, 12.00 noon : The nntp service is back!