From the Buffalo News:

Two of the nation’s largest Internet providers have eliminated access to newsgroups that featured child pornography, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday.

AT&T, the nation’s largest Internet service provider, and AOL, the third largest, also agreed to purge their servers of child porn Web sites.

Cuomo said ISPs can’t “drag their feet when it comes to protecting our children and instead must quickly purge child porn from their servers.”

He announced similar commitments last month from Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable.

The agreements came after investigators from Cuomo’s office reviewed millions of pictures over several months and found 88 different newsgroups that contained 11,390 lewd photos of prepubescent children. They developed a system for identifying illegal images by their unique “hash values” — a kind of digital fingerprint — that could then be used to search for the same image anywhere else it appeared on the Web.

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