alt.binaries.e-book

[David C]

For those who can:

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.spoken-word

"In Their Own Words"

[David C]

Yep, there are viri on usenet.

ANY file you download to your PC is potentially dangerous in that respect.

Simon the firewall is just to prevent unauthorised access to your system. It is to stop folks hacking in and trojans from phoning home.

To protect against viri you need a virus checker program. I would recommend Norton AntiVirus 2004. You need to keep your virus checker up to date. You can configure it to check for updates automatically. Keep it up to date and you would have to be VERY unlucky to get hit by a virus.

You'd be surprised how much more virus safe your system becomes when you dump MS Outlook too!

Cheers,
David.

[Si1964]

chaps
Thanks for the links, I havenpt tried it yet but will..

What about virses etc?? Do they exist here?? Will your
firewall prevent infection??

Thanks

[David C]

This might help explain;

It might Brian, it just might

Guys don't think that usenet is slow and crappy. I can download at a constant 62kB/second on my standard broadband connection. That is to say a whole 700MB CD comes down in about 3 hours. In a day it can bring a DVD down for you.

Cheers,
David.

[Brian S]

What is Usenet

This might help explain;







What is Usenet?Long ago, back when computers were hand cranked, there were BBS's (bulletin board systems). You would dial up to a particular BBS, sit quietly watching the lights flicker on your modem as you read and posted replies to messages from others. As the internet grew from a very few locations to a nation wide connection, the need for a similar system grew, and usenet was born. More and more messages were posted, and a "grouping" of messages was developed to provide for easier finding of a desired subject. The "Big 8" groups are:

news.* For information and Information about Usenet News



biz.* For Business products, services, reviews
rec.* For Games and gamers, hobbies, sports
comp.* For Computer information of all sorts - Hardware, software, consumer info
sci.* For applied science, social science...
humanities.* For Fine art, literature, philosophy
soc.* For Social issues, culture...
misc.* For Employment, health, and much more...
alt.* For everything else, which we'll delve into in much more detail






Within the alt.* groups, their developed a group sharing binaries - pictures and programs, which caused the creation of a subgroup -

alt.binaries.* for the exchange of this type of message - which brought on it's own problems as the entire system had been set up for text only. This problem is addressed here. For now, it's enough to know that the groups split further into sub interests;

alt.binaries.*software-of-one-or-another* - groups like alt.binaries.warez, alt.binaries.auto-cad, etc.



alt.binaries.pictures.* - as it's name implies - for photos
alt.binaries.multimedia.* - for motion photos - movies, clips, you name it.
and of course, many sub groups of a.b.m

and many more of a.b.*

And there are also what are refereed to as "local" groups - those not really intended to be picked up outside of a particular area or network. Some are *.uk - for groups of the United Kingdom, and rr.* - for Roadrunner newsgroups.

As always in human nature, the busiest of these are the binary groups, simply because they use the most volume (bandwidth) to transmit and store on the different servers. Sadly, the net heads that set the protocols for Usenet weren't video heads as well, so the system they designed was set up to handle SMALL posting units (much smaller than the data contained on this page).









<CENTER>







<HR width="100%" SIZE=4>How Big is Usenet?</CENTER>At last count (Jan 2004), and not counting "bootleg" (those groups not properly set up) and "local" (those groups set up to be seen only by a service providers customers or for in house chat) there were somewhere north of 85,000 different groups on usenet. And the volume on the groups - the amount of data being passed through the feed is running about 1,080 GigaBytes each day - that's one Tera Byte. This is up from 200 Gigabytes 2 years ago and 2 gigabytes 5 years ago. Simply put, there are a lot of us out there using usenet very heavily. And as broadband connections become the norm, this is likely to continue to put a strain on the resources. The current servers in place are having problems keeping up, are replaced, more come on line and more is posted, and the cycle is repeated.




Think of the most congested road in the city where you live, then pass a law requiring every car in the city to drive both ways on that road each and every day. Pretty jammed up, uh? Now what would be the easiest way to fix up that road so it would handle the traffic? Shut it down, close it off, and rebuild the whole thing from the beginning - but then no one could use it. And chances are that during the time the road was being widened to handle the existing load, the traffic trying to use it would get even bigger, so that when it reopened it would still be jammed up.

Now go back and replace the word "city" with "usenet", "car" with "data packet", "road" with "bandwidth", and "jammed up" with "missing packets" and you might begin to understand what can go wrong between the poster's house and yours.

And this for clarity;

Usenet is Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), with articles sent from one news server to another like email,. Each article is first stored on that server's hard drive, then forwarded to the server's "mailing list" of other news servers. Each of them in turn stores it on their hard drive, and sends the articles to their list of servers, and so on. Usenet article "packets" ripple out from the originating site, taking varying amounts of time and various routes to travel to you. Usenet was never meant to handle binary material; just ASCII text. To work around this block, methods were devised to convert (encode) binaries into text for posting, and then back to their original binary form (decode) after downloading. Many encoding schemes are available, but UUencode/UUdecode are the most accepted Usenet standards. yEnc is the current "Hot" trend in encoding binaries due to it's reduced transmitted file size.

[David C]

Ah,.. I wasn't aware that you could use Easynews through a web based frontend.

This is the one stop shop then folks.


Cheers,
David.

PS. Stay away from the "erotica" hierarchy you could go blind you know.

[Simon O.]

Not to mention that many if not most ISPs don't carry the 'interesting' groups.

I just use my web browser through easynews, much less hassle IMHO.

[David C]

Thanks Simon, I'm glad someone got there

For everyone else some advise:

You may be wondering why we use our isp's free news server and pay for another. Well typically your isp's news service will be pretty crappy should be okay for e-books but anything larger you will have problems finding all the parts.

The paid for servers will have all posts complete going back for weeks.

First thing you need is Freeagent from www.forteinc.com don't try and use Outlook for binaries it can be made to work but Agent/Freeagent is much better.

If your isp's news server doesn't have the Bismarck post then it is crappy. You will need to go to a news providers website and sign up for a free trial.
Simon posted one above or you could try www.giganews.com.

When you get your e-books then go here www.gowerpoint.com for the best reader on the planet both the PC and pocketPC versions are superb.

Best of luck guys. Believe me Usenet is definitely worth the effort to setup

Cheers,
David.

[Simon O.]

David is absolutely right (thanks for the tip BTW, i hadn't looked at that group before). I've been using Easynews for the last 3 years or so and pay $10 for 6 gigs a month. Usenet is still streets ahead of any crappy p2p service\program.

http://www.easynews.com/

[David C]

Okay guys.

I don't think I can help you any further.

What we are talking about here are binarie newsgroups. I strongly advise all of you who do not know what they are to find out. You will never have to buy anything software/media related ever again. This post was an attempt to direct you folks to Four WWII Naval books that have been scanned and converted to html documents (webpages), text and images, for you to download and read.

All illegal of course and this thread may well have to be deleted, depends I suppose.

I hope the more technically minded folks were able to benefit.

For the rest of you here is the cover of the first book:

You really would be doing yourselves a favour to get to grips with a news server you know.

Sorry guys,
David.

[Si1964]

Sorry David
Your talking IT I am talking gibberish I'm affraid. My luditte brain is still catching up with typewriters

I am with Tom on this one

[Tom Mumby]

Erm,.. potentially dodgy post so be quick.

If you were to go to the above newsgroup and search for Bismarck then you may find something interesting.

If you checkout the posters other posts you may find more goodies.

Cheers,
David.

I haven't got a clue what this is all about

[David C]

Usenet guys.

Newsgroups.

Nearly all isp's provide newsgroup access. Check your isp's website for info on how to access their news server.

I'm using Nildram, my isp and Giganews. The Nildram server is bundled with my isp account, Giganews costs me $100/100GB.

Sorry, I assumed everyone would have binarie newsgroup access, hope you can work it out from there.

Cheers,
David.

[Si1964]

Hi David,

couldn't get anywhere with that, could you PM an address??

[kris simoens]

What's the nntp server David ?

Kris