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

What are standards?

[ndnet]

I really don't believe this to be a big issue. So yEnc isn't an official standard; big deal. Most 'standards' didn't start out as such, instead being what was adopted and then standardized. Look at basic hardware designs for great examples of this principal.

What is inportant is that it works, it is open format, and that it has a large enough user base now to become a standard. It can be changed to fix any problems it has.

I'm suprised that Slashdot posted this. It isn't a groundbreaking issue. Odd...

Re:yENC

[thogard]

So your saying I should upgrade my server (which has been running for nearly a decade) so that people can use it to pirate binary stuff?

The next time I do an update, I'll be adding a cute patch that kills all binary posts at the nntp level, not after the fact like now.

Re:A few words from the original author

[0x0d0a]

Mmm...I disagree.

USENET is wildly inefficient for binary distribution unless someone downloads every binary file from every server. I admit that most P2P systems don't allow offloading network load for files that you are publishing -- with Gnutella, you have to wait until someone else decides to share the file you're sharing if you want any load balancing.

But Freenet exists, though it's a bit rough at the edges and there is no non-Java implementation (blech). And it is much better for this sort of thing and much more efficient than USENET.