Re: [Pan-users] Pan logging

[Duncan]

Dave posted on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 23:44:57 +0000 as excerpted:

> Yup, ISP server set as primary, pay server set as fallback.  The ISP
> server used to be excellent (for up to about 10-14 days worth of
> retention anyway),
> but was missing one or two groups I use.  Recently they dropped some
> high traffic groups and rumour is that they may be dropping usenet
> completely so sadly this might not be a problem anyway in a few months.

It's pressure from the RIAA and friends.

The one thing that has been both news' savior and its curse over the 
years is that it isn't as easy or as popular as some other binary sharing 
techniques, primarily P2P like napster and now bittorrent, which has 
survived only as it has decentralized.  That has been to news' benefit as 
due to the obscurity it hasn't had the attention from the censors that 
more popular formats have had, which has made it a rather obscure 
treasure trove of goodies, but that has in turn had a couple of effects 
of its own, one of which was that eventually a few too many people 
started noticing this treasure trove, so the censorship crowd began to 
put more pressure on it, the other one being that because so few folks 
/did/ use it, and because it /was/ a cost center, it was an easy thing 
for the ISPs to drop, particularly when the censors applied pressure.

For about a decade and a half the forces kind of balanced out, nntp, 
being more difficult and geeky, stayed somewhat obscure, but then got 
more people interested, which got the censorship crowd riled up, which 
made it more obscure again as the popular ISPs dropped binaries and often 
times new entirely, but then it got more obscure again so the pressure 
lessened, until the next round.

But then the censorship forces played the kiddy-porn card, and while some 
ISPs only blacklisted particular groups and kept  binaries or at least 
text for awhile, many ISPs at that point decided it simply wasn't worth 
the trouble, and dropped it entirely.

Which did again lessen the censorship side pressure some for awhile, but 
not for long, as now they could point to the competitive angle as well, 
the cost of the service vs. the very few users, using news' obscurity 
against itself, as well as the fact that the competitors didn't have that 
cost center to deal with any more.

And that about did in news at the ISP level.  A few geeky ISPs do keep 
text-only groups, but while at one point enough users used it that it was 
almost like email and web pages, as service that the ISP pretty much had 
to provide, the kiddy-porn card pretty much broke that entirely and it's 
no longer an expectation, tho the geeky ISPs can still get a few extra 
geek points by carrying text groups, but so few ISPs carry binaries any 
more that news is more obscure than ever, and the remaining ISPs carrying 
binaries are REALLY feeling the pressure now, both for the extra cost 
center (including legal!) they can now easily jettison that their 
competitor ISPs don't have, and even more censorship pressure because it 
can be focused on ever fewer ISPs, to get them to drop it as well.

But on the other side of the coin, unless you're doing multiple full TV 
series or the like, block accounts aren't nearly as expensive as people 
might think (astraweb, $50, 1000 gig), last quite some time, and really, 
paid providers *ARE* much more reliable, because it's their core business 
and if they aren't reliable, they quit getting paid.  Unlike ISPs where 
it always was an extra service they provided on top of the primary one, 
the connection, and as an extra service, particularly one used by only a 
small minority of subscribers, they really had no reason to care 
particularly much about retention and reliability, as particularly after 
other ISPs started dropping it, very few subscribers would drop the 
service no matter how bad news got, until at some point they could simply 
drop it entirely, which most eventually did.

And if you really are doing multiple full TV series and the block 
accounts get used up too fast, then the monthly accounts really aren't 
that expensive, if you look around anyway.  Yes, they're monthly, but if 
you're using that much bandwidth, $10-20/month isn't /that/ bad, 
particularly when it's for effectively unlimited downloading.

And the thing is, if you /are/ that active on binaries that a monthly 
account is cheaper than a block account, then in general, you /really/ 
should care about reliability, and the difference that few dollars a 
month makes to reliability really /is/ astonishing, and arguably well 
worth it.

Plus, most ISPs put your plain-text IP in the nntp-posting-host header, 
which can attract unwanted attention and attacks, because it's simply not 
worth the trouble to encrypt it.  (Tho some outsource to a paid provider 
and don't, but then it's even more of a direct cost sink to the ISP, one 
that they can see hitting their bottom line directly, and in my 
experience, once it's outsourced, it's only a matter of time until it's 
shut down entirely.)  But paid providers almost always use an encrypted 
form that they can track if you're reported for abuse, but that others 
can't simply read themselves, as they can with the plain-text form the 
ISPs generally use.

As for posting stuff that may draw unwanted attention... if you try that 
on your ISP, it's your entire internet connection at risk.  If you try it 
on a paid news provider, it's only that one news account (until it's bad 
enough to call in law enforcement, with warrants, etc, so don't get that 
bad).

But the thing to do then is to get a cheap/small block account, and use 
it only for posting.  Nearly all paid providers don't charge for uploads 
because being a provider hosting popular uploaders attracts paying 
downloaders that more than make up for it, and besides, they'd otherwise 
simply be downloading it from one of their peers after you posted it 
elsewhere, and ultimately that ends up costing them money too, because 
peering relationships that aren't roughly equal generally end up with the 
one doing more downloading than uploading paying the other one to keep 
the peering going.  So get a cheap/small block account for uploading, and 
don't use it for downloading, and if/when it gets taken out by censorship 
complaints, get another.

Meanwhile, while there's dedicated uploading software, if you do use pan 
for uploading to a different account, it's possible to run multiple pan 
instances, by pointing pan at a non-default home folder by setting and 
exporting the PAN_HOME variable before you start that pan instance.  
Here, I use that to keep separate text, binary, and test instances, tho 
text is the only one I use anything like regularly.  But you could use 
the multi-instance idea to run a separate posting instance, too, thus 
allowing you to use it for posting without having to manually set your 
posting server to 0 connections to avoid it downloading too, thereby 
using up your posting account block.  Tho really, if you're posting 
seriously enough to want a separate posting account, you probably do want 
to use separate, dedicated posting software, as well.  Among other 
things, dedicated posting software without the ability to download, setup 
with an entirely different posting account that isn't even in your 
downloading software, makes it pretty hard to get the two mixed up!

-- 
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