[Pan-users] Re: Better processing of very large groups?

[Duncan]

Ron Johnson <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:10:47
-0500:

> On 2009-07-02 20:28, walt wrote:
> [snip]
>> 
>> The basic problem overwhelming usenet is that people are using it for
>> file sharing, a purpose for which it was not intended and is not well
>> suited.
> 
> Maybe (definitely!) not, but uuencode/decode have been around for a
> loooong time...

That, and yEnc is actually quite efficient at encoding, only about a 5% 
overhead, compared to the 33% overhead of either UUE or MIME/Base64.

Meanwhile, it's precisely that not-well suited, in the technical and 
usability sense, that keeps it out of popularity and the limelight enough 
to make it the long-term best mass distribution technology available for 
content various groups would otherwise censor, including porn, and bits 
in some particular order that happens to be be some form of media when 
decoded with a particular codec, where the law says that particular bit 
order belongs to someone that wants to charge an arm and a leg to give 
others the right to use it.

>> But you knew that already :o)  It would be an interesting novelty for
>> news servers to offer a well-compressed zipfile of article headers,
>> say, for each calendar month or week.
> 
> That's probably what giganews does with it's Accelerator Proxy.

That, and the indexed http:// versions many USENET providers have.  
Except the http:// versions bypass the technological issues that make 
USENET so popular for folks trying to avoid censorship, and I think some 
of them have been forced to cease operations after being targeted by the 
censors as a result.

An accelerator-proxy that deals with compressed headers, and possibly 
http or ftp or similar protocol over the WAN, then converts it back to 
standard NNTP for use with a news client, is probably a bit better 
solution in that regard, as it doesn't put it so directly in front of the 
nose of the censorship folks, due to the technological hurdles making it 
even more complicated than ordinary news for mostly computer-illiterate 
folks.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman