Under the guise of a minor software upgrade, Netcom has changed its newsgroups access list to totally exclude "alt" groups altogether. Since there is no way to sign up for a newsgroup other than via the selection menu that Netcom provides, it appears that Netcom has managed to censor access to all those discussion groups.
Can you say B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T ??? Man, this place is like a bunch of guerilla fighters preparing for war. People are really on edge. Make one wrong move and everybody starts shooting. I'm afraid that sooner or later it could be real bullets too. BTW, Netcom splits its newsfeed between two servers. Currently the netcom.*, comp.*, and rec.* are all on one, and everything else is on the other, although they move them around every few months. Occasionally one or the other server starts acting up, causing the respective heirarchies to be temporarily inaccessable.