On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Derek Trotter <expat.arizonan@gmail.com> wrote:

These usenet index posts and the files they point to are something new. Any I've seen only go back a few weeks. Normally a usenet post would have a subject that gave some clue as to what is in that post.

Well, they do or must have such - a post can't exist without it.

Excerpt:

Types of newsgroups [edit]

Newsgroups generally come in either of two types, binary or text. There is no technical difference between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage. Generally, Usenet conventions and rules are enacted with the primary intention of minimizing the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage. Typically, the newsgroup is focused on a particular topic of interest. Some newsgroups allow the posting of messages on a wide variety of themes, regarding anything a member chooses to discuss as on-topic, while others keep more strictly to their particular subject, frowning on off-topic postings. The news admin (the administrator of a news server) decides how long articles are kept on his server before being expired (deleted). Different servers will have different retention times for the same newsgroup; some may keep articles for as little as one or two weeks, others may hold them for many months. Some admins keep articles in local or technical newsgroups around longer than articles in other newsgroups.

Back when the early community was the pioneering computer society, the common habit seen with many articles was a notice at the end disclosed if the author was free of, or had a conflict of interest, or had any financial motive, or axe to grind, in posting about any product or issue. This is seen much less now, and the reader must read skeptically, just like in society, besides all the privacy or phishing issues.

There are currently well over 110,000 Usenet newsgroups, but only 20,000 or so of those are active.^{[citation needed]} Newsgroups vary in popularity, with some newsgroups only getting a few posts a month while others get several hundred (and in a few cases a couple of thousand) messages a day.

Non-Usenet newsgroups are possible and do occur, as private individuals or organizations set up their own NNTP servers. Examples include the newsgroupsMicrosoft runs to allow peer-to-peer support of their products and those at news://news.grc.com.

Binary newsgroups [edit]

While newsgroups were not created with the intention of distributing binary files, they have proven to be quite effective for this. Because of the way they work, a file uploaded once will be spread and can then be downloaded by an unlimited number of users. More useful is that every user is drawing on the bandwidth of his or her own news server. This means that unlike P2P technology, the user's download speed is under his or her own control, as opposed to under the willingness of other people to share files. In fact, this is another benefit of newsgroups: it is usually not expected that users share. If every user makes uploads then the servers would be flooded; thus it is acceptable and often encouraged for users to just leech.

There were originally a number of obstacles to the transmission of binary files over Usenet. First, Usenet was designed with the transmission of text in mind. Consequently, for a long period of time, it was impossible to send binary data as it was. So, a workaround, Uuencode (and later on Base64 and yEnc), was developed which mapped the binary data from the files to be transmitted (e.g. sound or video files) to text characters which would survive transmission over Usenet. At the receiver's end, the data needed to be decoded by the user's news client. Additionally, there was a limit on the size of individual posts such that large files could not be sent as single posts. To get around this, Newsreaders were developed which were able to split long files into several posts. Intelligent newsreaders at the other end could then automatically group such split files into single files, allowing the user to easily retrieve the file. These advances have meant that Usenet is used to send and receive many terabytes of files per day.

There are two main issues that pose problems for transmitting binary files over newsgroups. The first is completion rates and the other is retention rates. The business of premium news servers is generated primarily on their ability to offer superior completion and retention rates, as well as their ability to offer very fast connections to users. Completion rates are significant when users wish to download large files that are split into pieces; if any one piece is missing, it is impossible to successfully download and reassemble the desired file. To work around the problem, a redundancy scheme known as PAR is commonly used.

A number of websites exist for the purpose of keeping an index of the files posted to binary newsgroups.

Major NSPs have a retention time of more than 1700 days.^[1] This results in more than 9 petabytes (9000 terabytes) of storage.^[2]

In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet is also used by individual users to store backup data in a practice called Usenet backup, or uBackup.^[3] While commercial providers offer more easy to use online backup services, storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). The method requires the user to manually select, prepare and upload the data. Because anyone can potentially download the backup files, the data is typically encrypted. After the files are uploaded, the uploader does not have any control over them; the files are automatically copied to all Usenet providers, so there will be multiple copies of it spread over different geographical locations around the world.

Are you sure these are not just backup files?

On 06/30/2013 10:15 AM, Lisa Kachold wrote:
Hello Derek,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Derek Trotter <expat.arizonan@gmail.com> wrote:
Tonight I'm messing with a usenet reader and found something I've never seen before. There are posts each with a subject like this. Usenet Index Post 1372363474_2 These are text files. Open one and you'll see something like this:

Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815 - Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815.par2 yEnc (1/1)%122935*Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815 -Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815.part001.rar yEnc(1/622)%217941490*Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815 -Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815.part002.rar yEnc(1/622)%217922437*Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815 -Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815.part003.rar yEnc(1/622)%217938677*Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815 -

The poster is always, as far as I can tell NzbIndexder@followed by the name of the group they're posted in. Forexample: NzbIndexer@alt.binaries.teevee

Then I'll find posts with names like this:Vv0smCatI4I08qoLd815.part170.rar

I've seen people here give me tips on usenet harvesting so I'll ask if any of you how I can use these usenet indexposts? I've read that some usenet indexing sites havebeen forced to shut down. I'm guessing these files are anattempt to get around the people who are trying to shutdown the usenet indexing sites. The names of the rar files give no clue as to what's in them. If you don't know ahead of time what's in these files the only way to find out is to download one, which may be several GB in size.

Does anyone know how to use these files?

Thanks

Derek

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