I must have been asleep at the keyboard, as Giganews recently announced they will now have 200 days of binary retention by the end of summer!

That’s one heck of a lot of data. With a newsfeed currently pushing 3.5TB per day that works out to around 700TB and is high enough to now count in Petabytes at .7PB. That’s unheard of in all of usenet history.

In addition they are currently not expiring any text articles and are currently at 1400+ days of text retention.

Kudo’s go out to Giganews for kicking some butt in the retention wars.

One of the most annoying things on usenet is sporge. What is sporge some might ask?

Sporge is short for spammed forgery, simple enough in it’s name, but it’s use makes some users go mental.

When someone decides to sporge a group they typically take a popular posters nym (their name or nick on usenet) and make fake, false, incomplete or misleading posts using that nym.

So what eventually is supposed to happen is the sporger trashes the posters good nym. However this usually doesn’t happen since most of usenet is smart enough to be able to read headers and most sporgers are too dumb to know that headers exist.

Typically a sporger will post from a free account, or a proxy, or sometimes even their own ISP. Intelligent usenet users will see the change in the posters headers and know that the sporger is a total lamer. However for the few who don’t know anything about usenet other than it’s a place where they can talk kewl and get all sorts of free software and mp3’s it’s a different issue.

The newbies (I don’t care if they’ve used usenet for 20 years, if they don’t know what a header is and how to read it then they’re a newbie) whine and complain that the posts are garbage and they actually start replying to the sporger asking them to stop or to post par files for the incomplete posts and all sorts of other stupidity.

A good sporger will get an account on the same ISP or NSP as the poster and make sure their sporge is a true forgery of the origional posters. These guys are good at what they do, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Yes usenet is a great place, but if you’ve only got half a brain then shut off mommies computer and go back to your calculator. Learn something about the system you’re using (it might actually shock you to learn, but it’s good for you) and stop feeding the trolls.

Sporge sucks, if you don’t want to see it then learn to killfilter. Of course once the sporge has stopped the real poster will still be killfiltered, but at least the rest of usenet doesn’t have to deal with more stupidity.

I’m not elitist, I think usenet is for everyone. But I do think there should be a test before anyone is allowed to touch a computer. And if you fail, all the money in your bank account is donated to buy spam filters for third world countries.

People don’t learn do they? The latest dumbass spamming usenet with his paypal get rich scheme posted the following

“Remember, all of this is ABSOLUTELY LEGAL! You are creating a service! A Business… An Email List Service Business. If you have any doubts, please refer to Title 18 Sec. 1302 & 1241 of the United States Postal laws”

Section 1302 relates to mailing lottery tickets or related matter (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00001302—-000-.html

Section 1241 relates to injurious articles as nonmailable (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00001716—-000-notes.html)

Obviously these spam dumbasses are counting on the sheep they are fleecing to not be smart enough to actually check up on the laws they are quoting.

Get yourselves a clue people, smarten the hell up and don’t fall for this crap.

It’s truly sad to see that some people still assume that they can spam usenet with their ‘paypal get rich legally’ schemes and not run into problems.

So today I thought I’d take a look into it and see what can/will happen.

Not only will paypal close your account and freeze your funds for 180 days your usenet account will either have it’s posting disabled or the account will be closed on you.

If the person who reported the spam also contacted your ISP then your internet access could be disabled as well.

Some providers (ISP’s and usenet providers) are actually charging their clients for handling spam complaints. It’s about time too. If only people would pay attention and read the terms of service (TOS) they would have known that what they were about to do could result in fines and account closures.

So please, if you’re in the market to make some money then go get a job. Or start a website and beg for donations, but don’t be dumb enough to believe that spam is the way to go.

Excerpt from the book Electronic Mail by Jacob Palme

Usenet News is a distributed computer conferencing system. Conferences in Usenet News are called newsgroups, and messages are called articles.

The basic principle of Usenet News is that a local server handles most of the functionality. Usenet News standardizes two variants of the NNTP protocols: One for communication between adjacent servers, one for communication between a client and a server. Each server can download as much as it wants of what is available on any of the adjacent servers. Loop control is handled both by a trace list and a list of the Message-IDs of received messages stored by each server, so that the server can reject the same message coming back again. The procedure for distribution of news can be compared to pouring water onto a flat surface; the water flows out in all directions (see the figure below).

“Pouring water” principle of Usenet News distribution

The figure below shows how new articles are forwarded from server to server in Usenet News. A server tells its adjacent servers which items it offers, the server requests those it has not already got via another route.

This figure shows how new articles are forwarded from server to server in Usenet News.

Information about a user, such as how much this user has seen, is stored in the client. The server need not even know which users are using it. There are many different user-interface softwares for Usenet News, Some of them, of course, do not provide all the available functions.

In addition, Usenet News provides an interesting functionality which restricts communication to only those members of a newsgroup who work in the same organization or live in the same area or country. This functionality, however, is not used very much, and its existence is controversial, since it means that different users will get different views of the same newsgroup.

Usenet news has a cancel command, which can delete messages already sent out. Only the author of the cancelled message and the local newsserver administrator is allowed to cancel a message. Since, however, it is very easy to fake your identity, this command poses an obvious security risk, and the command is known to have been used to cancel messages for political reasons. The command is also used (not quite appropriate) by cancelbots, robots (= automatic programs) which cancel obvious spams by identifying messages with the same content sent to many disparate newsgroups. Usenet news also often has a Supersedes header field, which refers from a new message to an old message. This header usually cancels the old message.

Obsoletes in X.400 has some similarities to Supersedes in Usenet News, and can also be used to get an effect similar to the cancel command, by obsoleting a message with an empty message. However, cancel in Usenet News really deletes messages, while obsoletes is information to the recipient UA, which need not cause deletion. Many UA-s store both the new and the old version, so that the recipient can choose to see the obsoleted version if he so wishes.

The most important restriction of Usenet News is that closed groups are not well supported.

The Usenet News protocol is called network news transfer protocol (NNTP) and is specified in RFC 977 [46]. The standard for the format of Usenet News articles is specified in RFC 1036 [19].

The table below lists the most common NNTP commands:

There is a problem with the newsgroups header in a message sent via e-mail. Different systems use this header in two different ways:

To indicate that this message has also been sent via Usenet news to the indicated newsgroups.
To indicate that this is a personal reply, sent only via e-mail, to a message posted on the indicated newsgroups.

Because of this problem, it is better to use the Posted-To header in e-mail to indicate that a message has also been sent to certain newsgroups, and e-mail recipients should ignore any newsgroups heading in an e-mail message.

Traditionally, Usenet News has not been using the MIME standard for binary attachments like images. Instead of BASE64, UUENCODING is often used in Usenet News to include binary attachments, even if MIME is slowly gaining foothold also in Usenet News. Because of message size restrictions, large attachments are often split into several messages in Usenet News. This also occurs in e-mail, but is more frequent in Usenet News, since some Usenet News servers try to save space by not accepting articles above a certain size limit. Both MIME and Usenet News have methods of indicating how a client can automatically combine parts into a complete message or attachments.