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Usenet Encoding: yEnc

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-your-base64-are-belong-to-us dept.

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?"

3 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. On a related note... by dimator · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I haven't been able to connect to my damn ISP's news server for over a week now. They just ignore my complaints. I can't ping news.gte.net from anywhere that I've tried.

    I'm dying here, a man can only live off the same porno for so long...

    --
    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
    1. Re:On a related note... by dimator · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      You post something they dont like or that someone complained about?

      Nope, just downloaded pr0n... not that much either, and not everyday. I get similar traceroutes from a couple shells I have as well, so I don't think they're blocking me specifically.

      --
      python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
  2. Am I the only one who.... by tomstdenis · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ...thinks distributing binaries through usenet is a huge waste of bandwidth? I mean if you really got to get your kiddy porn out or a hack of XP why not just post links to websites with it?

    What people don't realize is that when you post a 250KB attachment that 80,000 servers around the world will download that ... thats 19.3GB of traffic or so. Just for one measily attachment.

    Any ISP that bans attachements in usenet is fair game in my books. They are doing the rest of us a service.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.