newsgroups

how save is it, to surfe newsgroups? I mean, they promote with "uncensored content". When you download groups that maybe are forbidden in some countries, how sure can I be, on the other end of the line is not sitting FBI or someone else?

sorry for my bad English

First of all Bad English is the best kind of English.

Second. you will need to know what the law is in you country/state. Most places are +18 is A ok.

Most of us here totally disagree with U-N-D-E-R A_ge shit if someone posts something which we/you feal is a push on the law we/you ask for it to be removed. GS is very good and fast he will delete posts with this shit on. If it starts to be attracted to the forum we will lose the forum. So keep it clean and we are all happy. We do see posts which look like the feds and you might get personal post asking or offering it to you just pas it on to GS he will clean them up.

And on that note if you start to post your grandmother on this forum I will personably hunt you down for burning my eyes.

The most important thing on this forum is to keep me happy. And to do that I need P.Bum shots. If you don't know what a P.Bum shot is. It is a Mr.Paranoid Bum shot. If you are still puzzled. It is called a font bum shot. Still uncertain look at the photo below.

Keep me happy and everything is good.


Mad but soon to be happy.

Newsgroups are the most anonymous way to obtain just about anything you want. But of course technically the newsserver provider can keep logs of everything you download and post, but it is not possible to keep track of who downloads what on whole usenet. But most will however keep track of what you post.

Of course if you use the one the FBI controles --> bad luck. So the best way to find a good server is to surf the Internet and look how the companies really deal with privacy.

If you want to post securely --> use proxies. There is also a provider which doesn't require creditcard payment, but I forgot the name.

In the end, select one which offers SSL encryption. (This will become important when network sniffing will be allowed by police in the EU.)

If you are posting to Newsgroups, you can be traced. If you only post things that are legal in your country, it doesn't matter and they will never trace you.

If you download from Newsgroups, you are more anonymous, but as Alex has said, certain servers may be monitored for downloads as well.

Personally, I prefer newsgroups to most websites. I do not look for U_N_D_E_R_A_G_E models, but sometimes you find them by accident on a newsgroup. Message headers often to not accurately describe the content of the post. If you go to a website that advertises this kind of model, you will certainly have your identity recorded.

The best rule is to simply try to stay legal and never be the person who posts illegal material.

Elmo is right. News servers will keep record of those who post material and some will keep a 3 day record of what you download and where you went. Others don't keep tabs at all.

Also, Elmo is right about the stupid spam It'll say something like "This lovely teen likes to have sex 50 billion times a day, with her shoes on." And it'll be a pic post of some ilegal content. You'll sometimes see RE replies to these posts where they say they are going to report them. Unfortunately, as stupid as those assholes were for posting the material, they are smart enough not to leave any traces

So, just be careful what you download, and especially what you post.

Now don't make him afraid of using usenet.

I use it for many, many years now and never ever had any problems. But I admit I am a leecher. I think, in the 8 years a used it, I only wrote 2 messages.

But of course spam is a problem. Especially in porn related groups. But after a while I got used to it and now can select the interessting stuff in a group with >2k messages in under 15 minutes.

What I may have forgotten. Select a good newsreader. Don't even think about using Outlook! You definitely will need one which won't open any links/picture in the article. What helps anonymous download of messages if your newsreader will contact the writer's/spammer's server for picture download?

With the popularity of yEnc encoding now, Outlook Express is becoming less popular on Usenet and therefore is less of a security issue. (Of course there are ways around OE's problems as well, but many people just go out and get a yEnc-enabled newsreader. There are many free ones available if you Google for them.

what exactly IS yEnc coding? I see alot of whining about it on the Newsgroups. What is so 'bad' about it?

The only bad thing about it as I see it, is that Outlook Express doesn't support it yet. (No mention if support for it will appear in Internet Explorer 7.)

The good thing is that it compresses better than standard MIME or UUencoding, which therefore means faster downloads and less space used on servers.

With everything good there must be a bad and the only other complaint I have heard is that yEnc is more "lossy" than other encoding techniques. You might be able to detect a slight loss of resolution if you open a pic in something like Photoshop and compared two photos at the pixel-level. The average pair of eyes don't see the difference though, so yEnc is just a more efficient way of moving binaries over the web.

Elmo wrote:

This is a big plus, if it discourages people from using
non-standards-compliant mailers. Of course, if you're
trying to do get many big files from usenet with either
Outlook or Internet Exploder, you're going to spending
a lot of extra time anyway. They have an idiot-friendly
interface, but it's not very productive compared to tools
intended for serious users.

Elmo wrote:

This is not at all true. yEnc is not 'lossy'. It is a conversion
from binary to ascii, and the reverse coding will reproduce
the original binary file exactly bit for bit. Assuming, of course,
that you have all of the yEnc file. The main advantage
of yEnc is that the overhead is low. The ascii file it codes to
is only about 10% larger than the original binary, so it saves
bandwidth. Base64 and UU encoding add about 50%.
yEnc is also advertised to be more robust about missing
parts, so that an incomplete file can be reconstructed
more completely. This only matters, of course, if you have
par files to fill the gaps, but the combination of yEnc and
par is enormously more robust than the old days when
we had to try to depend on UU encoding. For jpegs, which
usually fit in one part regardless of encoding, yEnc just
saves about 25-30% of download time.

sleeper_shark wrote:

Hey, I was just repeating the two sides of the argument as I have seen
them in binary groups on the web. Although the yEnc haters are
beginning to fade away, there were HUGE debates when it began to
evolve into a standard. One side said, "Less taste." The other side
said, "Less filling." I never really noticed a difference, partly because I
don't have the original scans to compare against a yEnc post. If I did, I
wouldn't de downloading anything.

Speaking of news readers, does any of you know of any that can automatically pic out series? I think that alone would filter away tons of the spam. I don't think it would be that hard to write some really smart spam filters into a news reader either, where like gmail, you tell it what is and isn't spam and it learns from those choices, just don't know if anyone has done this.

Also, what programs do you guys use for browsing pics on your hard drive? I found that to be one of the more incessant things to do after downloading a ton of pics from usenet, especially when people don't give their posted files unique filenames. I used ACDSee, but I feel like there should be better things out there. Once again, something that could skip from series to series would be great, and of course, it has to be very fast and support all of the standard full screen, slide show, ****ming, basic rotating and batch renaming, etc.

Super Pornicator wrote:

Don't forget the biggest feature: You have to be able to operate it with one hand.

Elmo wrote:

Better yet, none for us three-legged-monsters types.