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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?"
Uuencoded text will compress down to nearly the same size as its corresponding binary (or less, if the binary can be compressed). That kind of compression is now a standard part of modems, Internet protocols, and many file systems. Even the CPU overhead of compressing and decompressing that kind of data is negligible. If yEnc doesn't end up using less space on disk and doesn't end up using any less bandwidth than uuencode, indeed, "why encode" in yEnc and break a lot of software that expects USENET posts to be text-only?
I am seeing smaller binaries as a result of yEnc. This is fine. The problem is, my favorite binaries grabber has no idea what to do with the files, and won't even download them. I figured out how to make Agent download them, but A. I hate Agent (and don't understand why anyone likes it!) and B. the binaries don't always decode.
As I'm a lifetime lurker (well eight years, but it seems a lifetime!) I can only choose not to download yEnc encoded binaries. And no one will know! (my news server doesn't log downloads) It's all up to the posters to adopt or not.
I never post to it. (And after finding my ten year old posts to alt.drugs sitting in plain sight on Google, I doubt I ever will again!) But I do searches through newsgroups all the time when I'm looking for answers to obscure technical questions, or when I want to know if anyone's come across the same bug that I'm having trouble with at the moment. USENET might have more crap, but sometimes crap is what you want! You don't always want your search results to get choked up with corporate stuff. If you're doing Java programming for example, and you want to find out why class X doesn't work, a normal web search is difficult to control because all you get is bullcrap from Sun, and a zillion identical javadocs for class X that people leave around on their HTTP servers. I want to find out what people are complaining about, or whether anyone actually USES a certain API I'm considering. For getting a feel for what's going on in the field, without getting snowed under by marketing materials from a vendor, USENET is great. It isn't as corporatized.
Of course, the existence of alternate web based bulletin board systems like this one decreases its relevance for search purposes. And it's suffocating under the weight of all that spam. But USENET is still the biggest forum out there, and it's still the one that's the most easily searched.
One: yENC, when it was unveiled, did not really allow most conventional newsreaders any opportunity to adapt, til after the fact. This is akin to perhaps releasing zip files long before any archival software was actually available to open them... So do most of the folks using usenet for binaries get the opportunity to at least *choose* the way they do their downloads? Nope, they also are forced to adapt, or lose out...
Two: Loss in transmission... I've been downloading yENC attachments for the last month, and out of them, found over 50% loss/corruption in posting... Not due to retention/propagation either... Just files missing large chunks... Now this *could* be due to some problems on the senders' end, but it seems just a little *too* coincidental that almost all of the losses have occured with yENC uploads...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Betamax failed because it was a proprietary format. If Sony had allowed other companies to make it (like JVC did with VHS) it would still be around (20 years ago it was better than VHS is today). Betacam still dominates the broadcast world.
Now, yEnc looks like it was created by Microsoft. It's not a standard, it's a hack. The only way it can become a standard is by pushing it down people's throats and then using "public pressure" to force applications to support it.
To use a videotape analogy, it's like releasing magnetic tape reels after people had been using cassettes for years, just because the reels use slighlty lighter tape.
I hope yEnc in its current form is *not* supported by the industry. I think a company such as Forté could create a real standard using an encoding method similar to yEnc (it wasn't "invented" by yEnc's author, anyway). I think Agent's programmers, of all people, should know how hard it is to deal with these (non)standards, and could save themselves a lof of work in the future by making sure it's done right.
As it stands, yEnc is the same as UUEncode, only in smaller portions (actually it's worse, because you can sort of wrap UUE in MIME; you can't with yEnc).
But yEnc's bandwidth savings are real, which is a huge win for alt.binaries users. yEnc has been the most-requested feature for Pan over the last month. (0.11.2.90 supports it.) IMO yEnc is the format to use for multiparts right now.
Hopefully yEnc will motivate others to come up with a mime-friendly alternative encoding for Usenet. yEnc Considered Harmful is another yEnc opposition page that suggests mzip compression, but I haven't seen any public discussion of it yet.
If/when such a replacment comes along, Pan will support it too and add an are-you-sure dialog for yEnc postings.