It’s a shame Usenet has become fully paid. It’s what ultimately pushed me into torrents.
And the fact that small communities don’t have all the content out there for you to download via Usenet.
Pirated media(images, movies, ebooks, ROMs) uses binary posts, not text. There are different limits and retention policies for binary versus text articles, and most Usenet servers, particularly cheap or free ones, don’t host a lot of the categories a pirate would want at all.
Please don’t imply that all Usenet providers facilitate piracy.
Thanks for the pointer! I took the opportunity to learn a bit about more recent NNTP by reading the standard: RFC 3977. It looks like nntp v2 circa 2006 added MIME encoding, so I would guess that may be how a service provider would differentiate.
I haven’t used Usenet since the turn of the century. Back then it was all text (including every article under alt.binaries), and even pirated media needed to be split into a multi-part format (often rar) then each part uuencoded so it could be included in an article.
I mean, you made me look at it again myself, as the multi-part rar files on Usenet are still very much a thing. The allowable “article” sizes for binary content are larger than for text articles, but still too small for video or high-quality audio.
It’s a shame Usenet has become fully paid. It’s what ultimately pushed me into torrents. And the fact that small communities don’t have all the content out there for you to download via Usenet.
Downloading large files from Usenet was paid pretty early on. If the core functionality of Usenet is now paid, this is news to me.
What do you consider large files? Isn’t the article size usually limited to something like 1mb (it’s been a while since I used Usenet)?
So it would technically be about the number of articles rather than the eventual size of the combined archive? At the core it’s all still text right?
Pirated media(images, movies, ebooks, ROMs) uses binary posts, not text. There are different limits and retention policies for binary versus text articles, and most Usenet servers, particularly cheap or free ones, don’t host a lot of the categories a pirate would want at all.
Please don’t imply that all Usenet providers facilitate piracy.
Thanks for the pointer! I took the opportunity to learn a bit about more recent NNTP by reading the standard: RFC 3977. It looks like nntp v2 circa 2006 added MIME encoding, so I would guess that may be how a service provider would differentiate.
I haven’t used Usenet since the turn of the century. Back then it was all text (including every article under alt.binaries), and even pirated media needed to be split into a multi-part format (often rar) then each part uuencoded so it could be included in an article.
I mean, you made me look at it again myself, as the multi-part rar files on Usenet are still very much a thing. The allowable “article” sizes for binary content are larger than for text articles, but still too small for video or high-quality audio.
There weren open test servers though and sites with limited trials but no data limit.
That’s what I used back in the day. Sadly all these trial offers are gone now and demand credit card information upfront.
My dialup ISP in the 90s included Usenet.
Magical times before my own on Usenet.