🚀 go-pugleaf

Industrial One  <industrial_one@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Dunno, kinda new to the concept of Usenet. As far as I know, this is
>how them aging dork hackers used to share/grab their loot back in the
>dark ages before there was modern P2P networks. But I've been told
>that you can max out any connection here, because the loot is stored
>on ISPs newservers.

No, Usenet is MUCH older than that.  Usenet started out in the eighties
doing store and forward text messaging over uucp lines.  I suggest that
you go to news.announce.newusers and read the general discussion about
what Usneet is and how it got that way.  Traditionally most newsreaders
would force users to read through n.a.n before going on to anything else,
but sadly this is not common any more.

>I got a couple questions:
>
>1. Is the traffic encrypted?

No.  Usenet came out of an era where privacy and security were not primary
concerns, and where users were trusted much more than they are today.

>2. Is your IP concealed. If so, how?

No.  Most news servers will put your sending IP address in the header.
Some won't, but it depends on your ISP's server.  It's generally polite
to do so.

There are still people reading news on machines without actual internet
service... in those cases, the path in the header will usually indicate
the server that the message came from and you know the users are logged
directly onto the server.

>3. How does it compare to modern P2P networks (e.g. Gnutella/
>FastTrack) overall, in terms of security, stability, upload/download
>querying etc.?

It's totally different and it's not intended for that.  It's a system
intended for discussion groups, which got extended to carry binary files
as well when bandwidth got cheap.  Although the binary files now make up
the majority of the traffic they actually are the least useful and important
part of Usenet.

>I'm also aware that unpopular content untouched for a week is
>automatically removed, which is one thing P2P networks have over
>Usenet, but also makes it depend on a users will to share (usually
>bullshit dial-up speeds of like 5 KB/s), which Usenet has over P2P, so
>meh.

That is something your server does.  In general, all messages get expired
after a certain time.  Some servers set things up so that messages get
expired faster if they are read more.  Some servers set things up so that
when they run low on disk space they start dumping the oldest messages until
the spool is at a reasonable level.  Different servers have different
expiration rules, and expiring after a week seems like a reasonable thing
to do.

Usneet is not for long-term file storage, it's for short-term transfer of
time-dependant messages.  Don't expect anything to last long.

>And one more thing: you mentioned decoding. Did you mean decrypting? I
>heard large files are split into chunks and re-ordering the chunks
>correctly requires much user input, and for the user to not be an
>average dipshit netizen who can only use idiot-proof apps like
>BitTorrent. I'm a fast learner, so that won't be a problem. Just put
>the process in a nutshell.

A lot of newsreaders do this automatically.  Some don't do it at all.
So it depends on what client you are using.  I use rn, which makes reading
multipart binaries a major pain.  Other folks use newsreader that make 
multipart binaries appear like a single message.

There are hundreds of different newsreaders out there for different computer
systems, and there are thousands of different news servers out there.  They
are all different because they're all set up by different people with different
aims and constraints.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."