41–50 of 61 posts
There's still "eternal-september.org", which offers the non-binary USENET groups. The "comp.lang" hierarchy is still widely used, and the main discussions of changes to the C and C++ standard are still on USENET. There is almost no spam.
The fact is, it is now confusing for most end users. I tried explaining usenet the other day, and people just can't wrap their head around something other than "a web page" or "an app." Not only is it a different protocol, but it is a different interface as well. But I realize this post was meant more towards Usenet's intended audience. I know for me, I really started migrating away from Usenet around 2005-06 when th…
could you explain here?
Posts were (at least after https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Renaming) organized hierarchically, with the hierarchy created by consensus/voting.
I was a loyal giganews user for 10+ years. Then the content creators started getting content pulled very quickly, sometimes within days of upload, and the whole thing started becoming a huge hassle. By this point I was making enough money that $30 a month split between a few streaming services and a few bucks occasionally for a movie on amazon prime wasn't a big deal. It feels good to pay for quality. But as a young…
In the past 3 years on usenet, something has changed though. Perhaps in response to this article and/or the others talking about it. Some studios are getting drastically faster at getting their content pulled within minutes of nzb's appearing on the index sites. It's not as if its difficult to scan the groups and topics and issue take-down's on posts to the NSP's.
I was surprised nzb didn't get attacked more often. Posting an index of a post before the post it indexed could have meant an attacker grabbing the index, and then uploaded a bunch of junk to poison that index. If they're posting little 1 MB files and you're posting 20 MB split rars their posts are going to propagate faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if you could convince cperciva (Tarsnap) to exploit Usenet as an encrypted block store (as a cheaper alternative to S3). > I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet instead of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it would lead to pollution of the Usenet network. > Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use this without polluting…
Not sure about being the middleman yet. What if the big Usenet providers decide to delete data or we violate their non-business-usage policies? But on the other hand it's really cheap indeed! We can cancel our Usenet subscription and renew it when the data is needed. So I thought it's maybe better to cut out the middleman by giving the software away. About the abuse: I imagined that the method could be used like some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about being the middleman yet. What if the big Usenet providers decide to delete data or we violate their non-business-usage policies? But on the other hand it's really cheap indeed! We can cancel our Usenet subscription and renew it when the data is needed. So I thought it's maybe better to cut out the middleman by giving the software away. About the abuse: I imagined that the method could be used like some…
I don't understand how you could use newsgroups for storage, except in a "I don't care about data loss" kind of way. I haven't used USENET in decades, but NNTP is a messaging protocol it says nothing about storage AFAIK. I do recall that back in the day, messages in busy newsgroups would expire rather quickly (probably due to limited storage on my news server at the time). So if I post a message containing my backup…
Even if it isn't infinite, you can download and repost every 7 years if you care about having backups for longer than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
could you explain here?
Usenet (NNTP) is a protocol somewhat similar to email. Unlike email, the default communication style is in "groups" (sort of like a mailing list for a specific topic). One posts individual messages (like one email) to a group; replies are threaded, much like mailing list discussions. Historically the groups were organized somewhat hierarchically. The end result, with a good news reader program, is somewhat like a lar…
> One posts individual messages (like one email) to a group
Messages can be posted to more than one group; this is called "cross-posting", much like with email mailing lists.
> The end result, with a good news reader program, is somewhat like a large global collection of topic-specific forums.
You can also choose to "subscribe" to a subset of the available groups; your news program is able to pull metadata only for that subset you care about. You can also download individual messages on demand, much like IMAP email access. It's fairly bandwidth efficient for clients.
I am a former usenet user. I used it first for actual discussion threads (like HN!) but later for binary content. I tried it again a couple years ago and the commons are being abused. An example of it is password-protected binary content that requires going to a website to get the password which of course requires additional actions like viewing an ad or signing up for a large number of mailing lists (with embedded r…
I am a former usenet user. I used it first for actual discussion threads (like HN!) but later for binary content. I tried it again a couple years ago and the commons are being abused. An example of it is password-protected binary content that requires going to a website to get the password which of course requires additional actions like viewing an ad or signing up for a large number of mailing lists (with embedded r…
There are Usenet indexers that filter out password-protected archives and provide well-organized listings of high-quality binaries.
Usenet is also usable for backups. Normally you would upload a huge encrypted RAR. Some time ago i built a tool where you can store files/folders incrementally on Usenet with encryption, parity etc. I put much effort into this. It was possible to restore a directory tree by a unique ID (which you could write on some piece of paper) that securely resolves to a chain which links to meta/raw blocks via Message-IDs and y…
I wonder if you could convince cperciva (Tarsnap) to exploit Usenet as an encrypted block store (as a cheaper alternative to S3). > I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet instead of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it would lead to pollution of the Usenet network. > Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use this without polluting…
I suspect that if Tarsnap was over half of Usenet's traffic volume, it would start getting filtered.