Usenet: What is it and how do I use it?

Factual Questions
21

Another way to look at it is that the servers storing this data are constantly being fed new data. This means that the oldest data expires at a certain time, and falls off the server permanently. Your ISP may have only the most rudimentary Usenet access, and they may only retain new files for a couple of days - maybe less. If you aren’t there to get them when they come in, you’ve missed your window.

My brother also uses Usenet. Awhile back, I was helping him set up his new version of Agent reader. He had to download a list of the newsgroups his ISP carries. The total was somewhere less than 15,000 groups. The Usenet files on that server last a few hours. The premium server, for which I pay a small fee, carries close to 110,000 groups. The retention has just been increased to 100 days for binaries, and to forever and ever amen for text messages. So you can’t begin to tell what’s out there unless you have a decent NNTP server to feed the groups to you.

Just remember that Usenet doesn’t come with a search engine. You have to browse through it to find the groups you’re looking for and subscribe to the ones that interest you, then download all the headers from each one, to see if anyone has posted what you want to find. This is where I must mention that if you are on dialup, FORGET IT! Downloading the headers for one group could take all day, or longer. There’s obviously a learning curve, but I managed to overcome it, and once upon a time, I’d never heard of Usenet before, either.

22

Aaaahhhh…I am beginning to see the light.

Let’s take the $15/month example above and calculate $145/year:

So for discussion and simple fact finding I should pay my $14/year to the Straightdope.
I should find a pr0n site for $25/year and stick…ewww…with it.
Then I can spend just over $100 at Fictionwise on new and old books (some of which are $0.50).

And this will save me tons of time and frustration and will be 100% legal…Hmmm…tough decision…

Thanks all!

-Tcat

23

Couple misconceptions I’d like to clear up:

Baraqiyal I would take issue with the statement “Usenet isn’t very good for looking up specific files”. In fact usenet is extremely consistent for most popular files. If you’re looking for obscure german tv broadcasts from the 40s, you might have a problem, but iif you’re looking for anything remotely popular, than you’ll find it 99 times out of 100 if you know where to look.

fishbicycle Its true that usenet ‘does not come with a search engine’, but there are many very useful search engines available. Easynews has a full http interface (you can both search for and download whatever you want from the web) for their realtime search tool. There are also many usenet indexing services out there which label and organize all the postings, these generally use files known as ‘nzb’ files which are similar to .torrents in that you can download the nzb from anywhere and it will ‘point’ you to the item you’re trying to get.

NZB - Wikipedia has lots of good info, and helpful links under ‘external links’

24

Oh, so you’re going to give up before you even check it out? What, is it too hard?

Oh well, your loss.

25

Too hard? Maybe. But, I work 50+ hours a week, have two kids, a loving wife and tons of friends. I use my computers and the Net as tools. They get the job done or they don’t get used. I was thinking that Usenet would be one of those OpenOffice vs. MS Office arguments…that there was this secret society of information out there that THOSE people don’t want us to know about. I spend my socializing time on the Dope (and far too much of it I might add). I read my news at BBC, CNN and a few others. I get my music and TV & radio shows from iTunes (I don’t watch Czech TV…but I should for the language lessons). I was really looking for ebooks, maybe old video games to kill 15 minutes over lunch, and, yeah, sure, amateur pr0n, but…it seems that the investment of time is too great for my demands.

In my aging process my time is becoming more important than intrinsic considerations of coolness and whatever. I haven’t owned a car in almost 10 years, but when I do buy one it will be efficient, an automatic, with a full warranty for repairs…I want to get in it and go from point A to point B with as little hassle as possible. Yeah, my friend’s BMW M3 racing car is cool…his brakes cost more than I want to spend on a car (18,000 Euros for brakes!). He tweaks it. He fiddles. He customizes. He cares. I don’t.

-Tcat

26

It is kind of like a secret society. Usenet is dark and hardcore (not just in the pornographic way either). There is plenty of information there that is not available anywhere else including the web. It has a much higher anarchy factor than the web as well. It is funny how the media always talks bout the dark corners of the web and the rest of the Internet but I have never heard them mention Usenet at all. That is a little odd because Usenet is (or at least was) the place with the most potential for bizarre things. It is like the SDMB in a way but there are tens of thousands of groups and people can post files and everything else as well. Due to its nature, the user interfaces that you can use are ad hoc and not usually as clean as something like the SDMB viewed through a browser.

27

If you want to read posts on Usenet, what’s wrong with Google Groups, (esp. since things never fall off the server)? If you want to download files that I will charitably assume are legal in the Czech Republic, :wink: what’s wrong with bittorrent? It’s free and very easy to use (though I can’t tell you how on this board). If you honestly want to download a text file of Frankenstein, what’s wrong with Project Gutenberg? If you want dwarf porn, what’s wrong with the rest of the World Wide Web?

Unless you’ve exhausted all of those resources (or exhausted yourself using them), or have already been using Usenet and want to upgrade your reader for a specific reason, I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for anything to do with Usenet.

28

Google Groups is pretty neat in this respect. When it first started up, I was able to find posts that I had posted in college back in 1990!

(Actually, I just looked again. A handful of my old posts from that time period are still there to this day, but most are apparently missing now. They’re not showing up in a search, anyway.)

29

Old days? I loaded my first news reader, on a tape from the University of Illinois, about 1984-1985. I browsed it from my UNIX PC when there was only one, low volume, alt.sex group. I actually found the Dope from a reference on talk.origins.
But if you look at any reasonably high volume groups, it will chew up your time like crazy - even more than this place. At least that was true five years ago when I finally gave up on it.

30

Ok first of all, what do y’all mean by “binary groups” and “binaries”?

Also, with Google Reader out, and it has everything archived, why would you use a paid service? And does Google Reader contain all of the “groups” out there? Or just a certain portion of them?

31

Ok so I was on Google Groups and clicked on “Browse all of Usenet…” and got “1 - 50 of 1011” So does that mean that GG only has a small portion of all the groups out there? If so, how do they choose which groups to have?

32

I would heartily recommend Easynews to anyone who is interested in downloading any sort intellectual property. It has a great search interface and anything you see is actually there. There’s no question of whether you can connect, whether the torrent is no longer active, etc.

33

I second Easynews as a warez goldmine. I am a member for over six years now.

The Dr. Demento shows are alone worth it to me. Every show within two days and classics to boot!

Nice.

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dr_demento

(Then there is the porn… ijsklontje!)

alt.binaries.ijsklontje

34

Google Groups is fine for searching for specific posts, or hunting around for past discussions, but it’s completely hopeless for following anything but the shortest of threads, since it doesn’t deal properly with thread branching.

For those that don’t know, the way threads branch is one of the nice things about Usenet, and is almost completely absent on web forums such as this one, which just treat threads as a list of posts in time sequence.

For example, say someone posts a Usenet message on alt.widgets, asking for recommendations for widgets suitable for his ex-wife. Someone replies to that message, saying ‘I didn’t know you two had split up’. Then the OP replies to that with an explanation, and a conversation ensues about their divorce.

Meanwhile, someone else replies to the OP, saying that widgets aren’t as good as they used to be, and someone replies in agreement, saying that he first started using widgets in 1986, and this sparks off a long debate about who’s been using widgets the longest in the group.

Then someone else replies to the OP with a good recommendation for a new widget that’s just come out, and sparks a lively discussion about this development.

To get to that last post in a non-threaded forum, you’d basically have to read all sorts of stuff about divorce, mixed in with stuff about how long people have been widget-users, before you get to the third sub-thread, and even then the posts will be all mixed up together.

Dedicated newsreaders will display the hierarchy of posts, showing sub-threads separately; good ones will allow you to kill sub-threads (say, you’re not interested in reading about divorces), or you could just navigate through direct replies to the OP … well, there’s a lot more you can do. And that was a simple example.

Trying to read complex threads in Google Groups is slow, frustrating, clunky and time-consuming in comparison with using a dedicated newreader.

35

Usenet is primarily a text-based medium, meant for conversations. As such, it transmits messages as 7-bit ASCII. However, “binary files” such as computer programs, images, movies, etc., have eight bits in every byte of information.

So to send binary files over the 7-bit usenet system, that binary file has to be encoded in such a way that it only uses the 7-bit usenet “alphabet.” The good news is that all modern newsreader programs handle this automatically for you.

Also, did you know that email is also the same 7-bit standard? File attachments to email get encoded into 7-bit streams exactly like on usenet, and your mail software handles this all for you transparently.

Out of all the usenet groups, most are text-only and do not allow binary file attachments. The servers will reject messages with binary attachments for these groups. But there is a whole section of usenet set up to allow binary attachments, the infamous alt.binaries section. This is where binary attachment messages are allowed.

Now I mentioned that most groups are non-binary, but I think that, since binary attachments are typically large files compared to simple text messages in other groups, the bulk of usenet traffic is actually binary content.

Hope that helps.

36

To expand a tiny bit on this: one advantage of keeping all the binary content in the hierarchy alt.binaries is that a news server can decide if it wants to take on the immense cost of providing such data to its customers. If the provider decides “okay, we’ll provide news groups, but only for discussion purposes, not trading porno and MP3s” then all they have to do is eliminate alt.binaries.* from the list of groups they provide. Since the vast overwhelming majority of data on Usenet is kept in those groups (I think many terabytes a day are posted) they can significantly cut back on the amount of bandwidth and data storage they need, and still provide their customers with the discussion aspect of Usenet. I don’t know if this is still the case, but it used to be that ISPs would frequently omit the alt.binaries hierarchy from the free news server they provide all their subscribers, which meant that someone wanting to access them would need to get a pay server such as easynews (or in some cases, your ISP would have a separate pay server for this purpose that you could order).

For this reason, posting binary content anywhere outside of the alt.binaries hierarchy was (and presumably still is) frowned upon, though I don’t think all such messages are instantly rejected by all servers. It used to be a problem that WebTV users would sometimes post in non-binary groups with humongous HTML based posts with embedded images and MIDI files, which were nearly unreadable in older news readers and took forever to download for dial-up users. This was particularly irritating for people that downloaded all messages in a specific group at once, and especially for people that used ISPs that charged on an hourly basis (this is probably nowhere nearly as big an issue as it was 10 years ago). It gets kind of frustrating when you’re trying to update your favorite news group, and you have to download 40 identical sets of pictures of some woman’s cats.

I wouldn’t know much about the current state of Usenet though since I haven’t touched it in about 7 years or so now :stuck_out_tongue:

37

If you ever get the May 19, 1991 playing of the show, the third song played “Zamfir’s Evil Twin” by the Sponge Awareness Foundation also stars the voice of ME! :d as the announcer!

(I’d love a copy of that mp3 too… my tape recording is long since gone).
Alas, that was probably my 22 seconds of fame. :cool:

38

Tomcat, I’d say you understand the situation. If you’re looking for a copy of Frankenstein, then Usenet isn’t for you. If you’re looking for 1000’s of different books, then Usenet could make sense.

Barrington, I post gigs of video that I have created from scratch in Maya to Usenet as part of the 3D animation community and I can assure you that much of binary traffic is legitimate. I’m 100% positive than there is no binary traffic on Usenet that is a copyright violation by definition. Hundreds of thousands of musicians post their music, programmers post their applications, writers post their manuscripts, photographers post their photographs, kinky couples post their home made porn, whatever category of binary you care to name, you will find tons of legitimate traffic that is not a violation of copyright. Just because some of the traffic is violating copyrights doesn’t mean all of it is.

39

These people have an awesome deal: 90 gig for $25. [/shameless plug]

40

I really can’t see any reason to do it these days, unless you’re attracted to the retro aspect of it (which, I must admit, is nice). The spam is in total overload.

I post on an Australian railway forum (I’m an enthusiast). It is a message board run on similar software to the SDMB. It’s moderated, etc. Before it existed, there was aus.rail. This was a once great source of information for the enthusiast, but now, alas, no longer. To give an example, there is a spammer who uses the names of the several hundred railway stations on the commuter network in and around Sydney, and he posts the following: “I did a shit at Warrimoo, and IT WAS SMELLY”. Substitute “Warrimoo” for another station and repeat. The “gems” are becoming increasingly not worth it. My new ISP does not support usenet, and I don’t miss it.