Usenet Encoding: yEnc

Motor writes "Anyone remotely interested in usenet binary newsgroups must have noticed the spread of yEnc. yEnc is an encoding scheme for usenet binaries which avoids the enormous (30-40%) bloat associated with the schemes currently in use - which all have to produce 7-bit data to stop ancient newsservers from choking. A good thing, surely? Well, not according to some people. The guy has some good points about yEnc and standards, but I can't help thinking that "standards" people have endlessly discussed better encoding schemes, and nothing has come out of it. yEnc may not be perfect, but it works and it's here - hence the rapid adoption. What do you think?"

Comments

Re:Intertia vs. Good Ideas

[Spy Hunter]

I would argue that the adoption of a standard is a much better indication of its "goodness" than its technical features. yEnc has been adopted by lots of people because it solves problems that they have, therefore it is proven to be good. If someone fixes the flaws that this author talks about and makes a new scheme that works better, then it might get adopted. If it does, it will be because it solves real problems people have with yEnc. If it doesn't, that means that it is too much of a pain for people to switch and that the problems yEnc has are not that much of a problem for real users. I think this is probably the case. So you can't use filenames with double quotes. Big deal! Change them to single quotes or something! So one out of a thousand posts will be corrupted because of mis-recognized magic strings or something. Its not any worse than it was before, and the downloads are smaller! If the problems really are THAT bad, a solution will come and people will use it.

Standards ARE important... here's why.

[gambit3]

In one sentence, standards ARE important because they allow for the most people to get the most benefit.

I work in an industry that relies heavily on standards, and my job deals specifically with standards. Making sure that WE follow standards, and making sure that other vendors follow standards.

Sure, they're slow to develop. But they're the best for interoperability, and that's crucial. In my line of work (for a major Mobile Phone System NSS provider), I have to deal with other providers that have to follow the same standars we do. That allows both of our products to communicate. This gives the end consumer (i.e., Cingular, Sprint, etc.,) the option to buy from different vendors. This forces us to make better products. This forces us to be more efficient. This forces our competitors to do the same thing. In the end, everybody wins.

The other alternative is what I see as the Micro$oft approach: Standards be dammed, I'm going to do it this way, and f*ck everybody else. It's the same approach that gives you security holes in your browser, because, well, who needs the standards?

I can't believe I'm reading comments like "well, it's here and it works so what's the problem?"
The problem is the future.
The problem is the inability to send an SMS from a CDMA service like Sprint to a GSM one like Voicestream. That's what happens when you blow off standards.
The problem is the inability to read an M$ Word doc that was sent to a Linux user.
Ignoring standards and going off on your own (especially, going off BADLY on your own) just divides us.
Good standards help us all. They give us better products. The lower costs.
CD-Rs. FireWire. PCI. countless others.

Besides, as the article begins by asking: Just what problem were they trying to solve?

Re:Intertia vs. Good Ideas

[Chasing Amy]

> it is needlessly wasteful now that we have hundreds of thousands of NNTP
> servers, it is just not necessary to have that level of redundancy to route
> arround censorship.

I disagree entirely. Never underestimate the government's ability to stretch censorship to new levels.

Unless the very way NNTP servers operate is to gulp down and pass on each article for each newsgroup, the government would easily target those servers that spcifically carried groups or posts it doesn't like.

Pressure for news providers to drop certain groups began several years ago when the Vacco busts of people trading in child pornography led a news service to be criminally charged for the content of some groups and led other news servers in that state and elsewhere to drop gcertain groups thanks to their content. The charged news service took a plea even though they clearly would have won at trial or on appeal by claiming common carrier status, but hey, nobody wants to be the expensive test case.

Some may not see the problem with news servers being coerced by the government to drop those particular groups thanks to their contents, but the principle it sets is horrid. Certain "content owners" have of late been threatening to use the DMCA as a club to get news servers to drop groups which share TV shows and other such copyrighted material. If groups were more "localized" to a set of specific servers, or articles were localized to their originating servers, that would make it exceptionally easy for the DMCA to be used to require the "closure" of groups or removal of articles from USENET.

Furthermore, in this time of anti-terrrorist hysteria, the government has gotten away with the USA/PATRIOT mess already and is continually making some questionable choices. If it finds a newsgroup dedicated to dissent, or more spcifically dedicated to anti-globalism, for example, it cannot easily dstroy such a group because of the nature of USENET--the damage would be routed around by servers in other countries, even if every U.S. server could be forced to remove a group or article (not that they could be).

However, if the architecture of USENET were redesigned to localize groups or articles to subsets of servers--the likelihood of a government censoring USENET speech is magnified considerably.

It is the redundant architecture of USENET which will keep it free of censorship long after the WWW has been tamed--as it will be. Just look at the broiling mess within ICANN over officials trying to hand control of the WWW over to government-appointed reps. Eventually something like that will happen, and governments will cooperate with each other to make censorship in their mutual interests easier. Thanks to the architcture and nature of USENET, it will remain free and uncensored long after the WWW has fallen to censorship.

Just my 2 pence, though...