The website is usenet.binaries (I don’t know if it is okay to publish links to it, so I will not do that here).
I found out about this site when someone commented in a thread that the Playboy photos of Charisma Carpenter could be seen there. I don’t surf the web a lot and had never heard of this site. A few questions:
is it privately owned? how is it maintained? Is it really a usenet group, like rec.music.maker.guitar or something like that?
some porn is available on it - how does that work? It doesn’t appear to be a porn site, per se - where one would have to pay a fee, but it is not age-protected, either. Does it exist in a “fuzzy” area of legality?
if I go there to check out something like the Charisma Carpenter photo spread, how paranoid to I have to be about cookies on my PC? Would I be setting myself up for x-rated spam in huge volumes?
Any recommendations for how to best approach this site so I don’t get spam or viruses or anything would be very much appreciated. Can you tell I don’t surf the web that much?
If the location of these pics is a name like < alt.binaries.placewithnudiepix >, then it’s not a website, it’s a Usenet newsgroup, specifically in the binaries hierarchy, where people post visuals in binary form. There are no cookies, and no spam waiting to be unleashed on you if you go there. If your ISP carries that newsgroup, you can access it through them. You may need to get a program that will download and decode binaries. It’s possible to do with IE, but that’s not what IE was designed for.
I have an account with Giganews, a Usenet server. They carry all the newsgroups (thousands and thousands of 'em). Your ISP, if it has newsgroup access, may not carry the group you want, but you can get a free trial from Giganews and several other services, long enough to find the newsgroup and get the pictures.
Hope that helps. If you have any more questions that I can answer, ask away!
Thanks, fishbicycle - I was envisioning looking at one pic and all of sudden getting deluged with penis enlargement and I’m-a-sorority-who-likes-to-be-spanked spam - ugh.
So, how does anyone make money on these usenet boards? Let’s say I go to this board, see that there is one pic of the delectable Charisma that I like and I download it - I haven’t paid for anything. Why would someone post the pic in the first place?
No problem, WordMan. Usenet communication is carried out in text. It was originally a collection of discussion groups. Now it’s morphed into a more sophisticated system of basically circumventing The Man[sup]TM[/sup]. You don’t just get pictures nowadays, you can download entire movies in several formats, every piece of recorded sound in history has been posted to Usenet at least five times… there’s stuff on there that you couldn’t have imagined people were interested in! No money is made by anyone. They all share their collections of pictures, movies, what-have-you. All you gotta do is show up.
It’s worth noting that WordMan might want to get a “Newsreader” program, which simplifies subscribing, reading, and tracking the various Usenet newsgroups. Most readers nowadays will also automatically decode binaries and join multi-part files, which beats having to track down “part 245 of 645” by hand.
And for straight, text-only perusal of Usenet, you can always try Google Groups.
So, how does anyone make money on these usenet boards? Let’s say I go to this board, see that there is one pic of the delectable Charisma that I like and I download it - I haven’t paid for anything. Why would someone post the pic in the first place?
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Just because they want to share it, and expect other posters to do the same with other pictures they’re interested in.
However, as already mentionned, there are internet sites that are going to charge you for access to the pictures they themselves retrieved for free on usenet groups.
By the way, there’s a lot of spam on the usenet, depending on the groups. Some are closely monitored by users, some are 75% spam, advertisment for internet sites, et… So, if you subscribe to an usenet alt.binaries porn group, you’re likely to find a lot of this.
By the way, I didn’t use the usenet for a long time. Is it still as active as it used to be, or are have most users left it for internet boards?
The strides made in file compression, and the efforts of sites like usenetjunkie and newzbin have led to an easy-to-use, fast, reliable source for… well… just about anything.
I’ve got a giganews account, same as fishbicycle, and co-workers who don’t know about usenet are constantly amazed at the stuff I have access to on a moments notice.
You will find spam AND viruses cleverly disguised as pictures or movies on usenet. Don’t allow your newsreader to automatically execute anything you download. Take a look at the extension name on the file before you execute it, you are probably going to be sorry if you execute a “.exe” file. If you aren’t sure if the file extension denotes a picture or movie or whatever, either find out what the extension means, or delete the download. Sometime Norton will detect a virus before you execute it, but not always.
I’ve been online for many years and I have visited the usenet (aka Newsgroups) from time to time. Now that I think of it, WordMan raises an interesting question.
How does anyone make money from this?
Better still, who pays for this? In order to get a website set up on the world wide web, you pay a webhost OR get a free host -Tripod, Geocities, etc (and contend with LOTS of ads).
But who the heck sets up these usenet accounts? What about what might be referred to as “domain names”? Does someone “own” the name alt.binaries.naughty.wench.punishment ?
Maybe I should have opened up a new thread for this but maybe there are enough folks reading this to come up with the answer.
Usenet has been around a long, long time, longer than ANY website. Rather than repeat the plethora of information that can be found on the web about usenet, try googling “usenet history”.
maybe so, wolfie, but I for one will be interested in what you find with your research.
Okay, so I have done the deed - gone to the usenet.binaries site and ogled the delectable Ms. Carpenter. A few points/questions:
I had to subscribe, but it was free to do so. I can supposedly download stuff for free.
Ah, but past a certain size, I need to pay some amount - I think $9.95 a month? - to get unlimited downloading. How is that not like joining a porn site?
I went to check my cookies folder, and sure enough, there were a bunch of cookies in there - do I have to delete them immediately so I can’t be found by spammers who saw that I was looking at Playboy pics on line, or am I safe because they are usenet cookies?
I didn’t download the pics - I just wanted a peek, honest! - but what if I did? ccwaterback and fishbicycle seem to indicate that, barring my downloading of a hidden spam or virus, I am okay since this is a usenet site. Any tips or tricks I need to know about?
Another thing, you can’t “see” anything in a usenet group, you have to download the files first. If you could see things without downloading, you are looking at a website.
Ah, that may explain it - the site is www.usenetbinaries (I won’t put the suffix there so I am not linking to improper stuff). I am assuming it is some sort of site that translates binary files to make them easier to see and download, but charges a fee.
When you subscribe to a newsgroup service(like Giganews) you get access to EVERY newsgroup they carry. Newsgroups vary in range from porno stuff to Star Trek discussions, to warez software, to pirated movies, to baseball card card discussion, ect; just about any topic of any interest to anyone can be found on Usenet. Unlike a porno site, a newsgroup service doesn’t add content, they just make available all the stuff everyone else places on Usenet.
Make sure to turn “Hide File Extentions” OFF in Windows, to make it harder for someone to pull the *.jpg.exe virus trick on you. As long you don’t download any exectible files, you will be fine.
It’s not like the website is totally ripping you off though. They are filtering out the spam and viruses, and constructing the image files so it’s easy (and safe) for you to access them.