Episode: 93
Title: HPR0093: Newsgroups for Media
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0093/hpr0093.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:25:13

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Hey, it's Steve Geek and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today's topic is news groups, which I have recently discovered has been improved for one of its main uses.
Shouts to Wi-Fi for turning me on to a recent improvement.
So, since I want to talk later in terms of background, I want to keep though what is it part of the program brief?
Essentially, news groups, which includes its most famous family of news groups, non-collectively as use net, is a traditional internet system of sharing information.
News groups form a transition point between bolt and board systems and the interweb, as well as being a transition point between text-only internet and graphical internet.
So, I want to talk more historically later on in the program, but suffice it to say here that just because news groups form a transition point in computer-based communication, that we should not deprecate it,
news groups solve many problems that are and will continue to be classic and recurring problems in computer communication.
Therefore, there is a definite advantage in using them.
Nearly every ISP has a new server, either they run their own or they subcontract it out to a big news server company.
This forms a solution to a very old problem, which is that of internet and file next.
If I want to download a large video file, let's use a concrete example.
Let's say hack TV issues a new episode and I want to download it.
Guess what? So do many other people. Thousands of other people.
Now, on the interweb way of doing things, hack TV would put the video file up on their website and thousands of people would log into the website and initiate downloads.
While modern routers are great and do a lot on their own to use multiple pathways around the internet efficiently.
Such a load could easily cause an internet traffic jam around that individual server.
In bygone days, this was possible with larger text files.
Since there are many news servers and they are constantly mirroring each other, they form a distributed way of moving public chunks of data.
So instead of going to a central site to download such a file, if you used news groups to distribute the file, you would go to your ISP's new server and download there.
Basically, there would be a faster connection because there are less connections within an ISP's user base to a distributed network of servers.
Add to this idea that news groups have this back room of the internet aspect to them.
Many people don't use them or may not know about them and therefore less users mean more speed.
Give yourself a pound of back if you notice the special feature of doing this.
That is the fact that the people who put out the hack TV episode don't pay for the bandwidth. That payment is made by your ISP.
So I can almost hear the question, why not BitTorrent?
Again, it is a matter of speed. BitTorrent relies on many people seeding a file.
The more people who leave BitTorrent clients running after the download is complete, the faster it is.
And it can get very fast indeed. But there is still a big difference between having hundreds of individual computers trying to make their uplinks to the internet for a solid cumulative download speed.
And having a dedicated server on an internet backbone having a solid download speed.
All with no overhead of managing dozens of connections.
Going back to news groups for media files, I have seen download speeds that I have never seen on BitTorrent.
Also, I don't have to open my computer up to dozens of connections from strange computers.
I can keep my firewall settings much tighter while enjoying faster download speeds.
Now that you know why I am talking about news groups, let me touch on the format of this episode.
I am going to try something a little different. I am going to make a bunch of appendixes to this episode for the information that will only be of interest to some people.
So, this classic technology of news groups.
It was invented in a day when the connections to the internet were a lot slower.
And in that era, video and audio over the internet were something they were still working towards.
Not only did they not have the compression yet, but the majority of people were all on dial-up.
People really weren't doing the media over the internet. People were using text.
News groups were designed for text. And as people interested in using news groups for media, we need to get around the limitations that the text-based design of news groups has.
The good news is this. These workarounds are now all automated.
To be brief, the problems with news groups for media people are that there is a limit of length of a post.
And that a post to news groups must be made in text. Back to the example of a new episode of a hack TV.
It would have to be converted into text. And then the text would need to be broken into as many small segments.
And each segment posted. In order to download, you need to gather all the segments up, download them, join them together, and convert them back into the hack TV episode.
My first newsreader was called Agent, and was made by a company called Forte.
And it was known for being good with binaries, which is what you call all things non-text.
It knew when something was incomplete. It would take a list of segments and make them into one line on your display.
But here's another problem with news groups for binaries. You had to download all those headers.
A line for each part of the multi-plot posting and read through the headers for searching for what you wanted.
Which was time consuming and made an avenue for you to be spammed.
Because sometimes the name of this file segment was spammed.
And to the last step of automation, the NZB file.
A NZB file is an XML file which leads each segment of a post to news groups.
You take one of these small files and you give it to an NZB compatible newsreader.
And you won't have to mess around with reading headers.
Your newsreader takes the information from the NZB file and downloads all the parts and makes them back into the original binary file.
NZBs are great enhancement because there are a number of ways of getting them.
I would love to hear from anyone in our community who is interested in sharing these.
Because I figure if your taste runs to listening to this program, then our taste probably are common enough that I would enjoy your finds on news groups.
If anybody wants to contact me about getting and giving NZBs, please do so.
Getting NZBs is easy. You can email them around.
Put them on thumb drives hand to your buddies.
Post them to forms. Even post them on news groups so you have a group with a line for each file which makes news groups that much more efficient.
But the most popular way of getting them is in the way they were designed to be used.
Off of web pages.
That's right, this technology brings the whole thing full circle and makes news groups part of the global Intel Web again.
Not only could you put them on a personal web page if you wanted to, but these were invented by a web based search engine that indexed news groups.
You use the search engine, get the NZB file for a desired file and bank instant high speed download.
So, I use the newsreader pan and it is just an app getaway for most Linux people.
I can personally recommend this newsreader as well as having the confidence to recommend Fort A's agent newsreader.
I will mention more clients later, but pan is modeled on agent, but written for the Unish world.
When I first heard of NZBs, I actually looked around for one that advertised that it could handle these.
However, in my general interest of the current news group scene, I happened to be looking at the man page for pan and lo and behold, it can already do the NZB thing.
Turns out, it is one of those programs that runs graphically, but if you type in pan, a space, and an NZB file name, it will download the files that the NZB refers to.
Pretty sweet to find that feature was already in a newsreader that I am using.
Pan also automatically consolidates multiple parts of a post and makes them into one line, which you can right click and save conveniently.
Actually, you can highlight many lines of files, whatever, you know, a few hundred images, a few dozen songs, a video, whatever, and save them with one click.
It has its own queue manager that may give you my examples in pan and, you know, I'll try to do it in general tips for other readers you might try.
How about we roll through what it's like to do the news group thing?
Step zero is, I'm sure you guessed, is to apt get your newsreader, so I apt get install pan.
Next, is to find out what my news server is.
So I use Google, and I have two ISPs now, but the big one is Verizon.
So I use this query at Google, quote, news server site Verizon.net.
This tells Google to search Verizon.net for news server.
In most cases, you can just glean the name of the news server from the Google page.
You will see in the summary something like news.verizon.net or nntp.verizon.net.
If you want, you can also call your ISPs customer service.
Hunt around the menu line and find something like edit servers and go into that and do what you have to do to add a server.
So you put news.verizon.net into the server box, type your username into the account name, and account name box, and password into the password box.
Pretty standard stuff.
Now, step two is to get the list of groups your new server carries into your program.
There is usually a menu tab called groups, which will have an entry called something like update groups list.
Click that and your client will contact the server and download several dozen thousand group names.
Okay, we are ready to have some fun.
Now, to help you get your feet wet, when I began to write this podcast, I began uploading episodes of podcasts to the news group system.
So, if you ever wanted a library of the podcasts without having to whack us for bandwidth, here is your chance to download old episodes of the fun internet radio shows.
Benrev, HPR, RFA, TWATEC.
I also figured, hey, maybe this counts as promotion.
First day, I uploaded all the episodes numbered one, and et cetera, up to this episode, you are listening to now, is being originally aired on Hacker Public Radio.
So, if you want to follow along, you find your new client search function, which is usually something where you type FU in a box, only groups with FU in the name will show.
Use NCB and find a group named alt.binaries.nzb-files.mp3s.
They will see a computer hacker freak internet talk radio thread, and a bunch of lines with day one, day two, et cetera.
If you look at the poster author line, you will see DeepGeek.
Find the mousebook you need to do to save article attachment and save daywhatever.nzb.
Close the application out and hit a command line, CV into the directory you saved into, and type in, this is from my reader.
panspacedaywhatever.nzb. After doing this, you will see pan or whatever reader you choose, begin downloading a group of MP3 files. Enjoy!
Now, that was the world-wren tour, but you have enough to get you started, at least for audio files.
If you try this, you can now fool around with it until you get it right.
Let's wrap up the within the news client thing.
There is a practice known as subscribing to a news group you need to know about.
What this means is this. Let's say we are talking about a more active group, like the one where the example files were actually posted to, which is alt.binaries.nzb.nzb.
That's spoken dashboard. Alt.binaries.nzb.nzb.nzb.nzb.
Now, if you download the headers to read them today, you don't want to download the same headers tomorrow.
These new servers keep between a few days and a month or so on their system.
If you subscribe, your news reader will keep track of the last header it downloaded.
Tomorrow, you can click on something called get new headers in subscribed groups and get only the new headers.
In the more busy groups, people will post the NCB files after posting the content.
So, I like to check out a few news groups daily and then put NCB in a search box.
Doing this, though, is an option. There are a few groups I want to mention.
Alt.binaries.irdashbook.technical. North
The inventor of this NCB stuff was newsmen.com
a new group indexing site, but you know how I am.
I found an alternative that is free.
The alternative is HTTP, colon slash slash,
alt.binaries.nl.
Kind of a weird URL, but it works.
Here, you can type in different words and see a file
which match her out there.
You can also click a button for an NCB.
Now, video is a tough one because the files are really huge.
So, you may see things on the screen where you see a file
named repeated over and over again, and each line will have a
Part01.RAR, Part02.RAR, Part03.RAR at the end.
These are files that have been compressed further,
and if you want a video encoded like this,
you need to download all the parts.
Use a command called UnRAR.
Again, it's an apt-get away.
And for this to work, you need to run the command
on the Part01.RAR file.
And UnRAR will correctly merge the other parts.
How do you get all the parts?
Well, you checkbox each of the parts on the webpage
and click Create NCB link,
which will bring up your web browser's saved dialog.
The Create NCB file will contain all the parts you checked off.
Alt.binaries.nl has another neat function.
If you click the List News Group link,
or search for news groups with a certain word in the name,
the resulting list will be sorted by default
with the amount of gigabytes or megabytes the group currently has out there.
This is good for finding groups you may want to scan daily.
Okay, I told you about news groups and binaries.
There are advantages.
How to get stored with a news reader.
How to get going on a free news group indexing site.
Looks like it's time for the gig tidbit and appendices.
Today's gig tidbit, I want to tell you how I personally
overcame my Verizon problems.
Verizon totally sucks.
Because where I am, they are the only broadband provider,
so I have to have them.
The actual connection is good,
but all this service sucks,
and their customer people.
Well, they are just dumb in the sack of hair.
Verizon Tech Support does not admit the existence of Linux,
so you have to lie to them about what you are using.
They also hire complete idiots.
I hate having to report a service not working.
Let me tell you a story.
The other day, I could not check my email at my own domain,
and I found out that Verizon's DNS service
were not resolving it,
so I called them and got this girl to whom I told this to.
She asked me, quote,
this DNS server, is this a part of Windows?
I'm not kidding.
This was the person Verizon expected to support me.
Somebody who did not even know how a domain name is converted
into an IP number.
Jesus Christ.
So I bit my tongue, said no.
That would be glad to help or simulate the problem on her end.
And she said, well, it is not in my scripts,
which I am supposed to stick to,
so I am going to have to give it to my supervisor.
I told the supervisor about the problem,
adding, I know you guys can't fix it.
I just want you guys to let maintenance control know about it,
so they can look at when they get in.
She said she could only contact maintenance control
for a line down or a line slow issue.
I said, so.
You guys are just as locked away from Verizon's staff as I am, huh?
I got a little satisfaction, though.
She then offered me enhanced technical support
for a recurring monthly fee.
Can you believe this stuff?
So I told her the truth.
I said, it's not meant about you in particular, ma'am.
But after the last dozen times I actually called Verizon
for internet support.
I left me with the impression that your organization
simply is not capable of giving support.
Now, the first time I realized what a gaping black hole
of stupidity Verizon customer support was.
I drove to my old dial-up ISP and asked them for DSL.
They couldn't.
And I must have been shaken pretty bad
because they sent me down and offered me coffee
and called me down.
This time I went back to my old dial-up provider
and I said, look, I know you guys don't have DSL in my neighborhood.
But I want to connect to you guys through my DSL.
I want to use your new server, your email server,
your DNS server, and call you for support
if something goes wrong.
Guess what?
They had a limited dial-up plan
that includes a little dial-up just in case my DSL goes down.
What I just mentioned to you and a free Unix shell account
all for a big 60 bucks a year.
Best part is, if I call them,
and they are only open during business hours,
but I can talk to somebody who knows about computers.
Amazing!
Now, I should never have to talk to a Verizon ISP division person again.
All right.
Appendix 1.
Some application names.
Here are some names of programs that you may want to check out.
Pan mentioned before, a GUI newsreader
that has command line support for NZB uses.
Pan also has great control over ahead of control files
with some reader slack.
Hela NZB is a command line Python-based binary grabber.
K, Lib, Ido, and NZB
are a few other Linux GUI grabbers I have not tried,
but mentioned in case you want to try them.
Unison is a Mac client,
but features support for NZB.
Fortay's agent is a commercial newsreader for Windows.
It lists NZB support and has pre-trial offer.
You may want to search Wikipedia.org
for, quote, comparison of news clients, unquote,
for more ideas on what to try.
Appendix 2.
Newsgroups for discussion.
If you think after listening to all this
that I am saying that newsgroups are dead for discussion,
you have misinterpreted me.
They are not dead at all,
but the system itself is very much prone to spam.
It was just designed before spam became a problem.
In regards to spam,
there are a bunch of newsgroups which are termed moderated.
They typically have some form of robot moderation these days,
but some still use people to moderate.
When you post to these groups,
it's intercepted and reviewed.
Whoever or whatever is doing the moderation then,
if they think it is okay,
repost it under your name.
The security is amazingly lax.
There is no password for this process,
and if you read RFCs,
or compare post headers between moderated and unmoderated groups,
you will see the header whose existence puts the post through.
I don't say this in the spirit of telling you how to get around something,
but instead because we have a special thing on newsgroups.
If you ever read some hacker groups,
you will see that there is spam,
as well as there being a hell of a lot of childlike behavior.
To combat both,
hackers from the day,
created alt.hackers,
a special group that is moderated,
but has no moderator.
So if you want to post there,
you need to set the headers yourself to get them through.
Every once in a while,
somebody can't figure out how to post there,
and they go with an old config and complain about this misconfigured group,
jokes on them though.
There are other groups that are not binary,
and really shine on the newsgroup system.
And they are tech support groups and special digest groups.
Tech support groups are groups that support people on certain computer platforms.
These are great news groups
because you really don't want to read a thread of posts
unless you want to get involved in it.
So you read the subjects and only look at something if it interests you.
Try the Comp.Lang Groups,
like Comp.Lang.Python.
Also, Linux.Debian.User is another really good example.
Digest groups are really special
because there are a few things that have such a wide audience
that running an email list for them becomes problematical and costly.
The hugely popular Comp.Risks is a lot like this.
A periodic digest of incidents of people rushing ahead
and trusting technology too much without analyzing the risks.
Published under the auspices of the ACM
and using an editor to summarize posts
because they are so volumous.
You can read all about mishaps with computers
like ships and airplanes going to the wrong places,
people driving off bridges that were under construction
but not marked as such in a direction's database,
stuff like that.
Using news groups for discussion is very dependent on you.
You need to find a topic header
and then look about to see if the group is active.
Some groups have died long ago,
but there are some out there.
Alright, third appendix, news group naming.
So you've just downloaded the names of dozens of thousands of news groups.
Don't think, yes.
But here are some explanatory notes.
First thing you should know is that the names of backwards
and comparisons to sites on the interweb.
On the interweb, you have a top level domain like .com
and then you have a site within that domain like IBM.com.
Then if IBM decides to have a subdomain,
you might have something like Linux.ibm.com.
On the news group system, you have hierarchies
and the two most important being alt and the big eight.
When you get subdivisions, you get alt.binaries.
When you get, then you get alt.binaries.multimedia.
What is alt?
Well, it is a huge and very freewheeling hierarchy of news groups.
Originally, it's to it for either alternative or anarchist lunatics and terrorists.
Take your pick.
In the day, somebody could create an old group
by looking up and issuing the right command
by posting a post with special headers.
As you probably guessed by now,
there are a lot more news groups than we have now.
Nowadays, you discuss it in alt.config,
wait a while, and then issue the commands.
It is up to the new server companies to allow the commands.
To go through their systems or not.
So be nice on alt.config.
There are big shots reading it.
What was alt and alternative to it?
To use net, which is the proper term for groups of hierarchies known as the big eight.
These are considered the official news groups.
And starting a news group here has tougher standards.
If you want to know more, have a look at big-8.org.
These hierarchies are comp, news, sigh, humanities, wreck, suck, talk, and missk.
They deal with computers, news groups, science, humanities,
recreation, socialization, discussion, and a miscellaneous hierarchy.
After that, there is a hierarchy for individual states like CO.whatevergroups for Colorado
and NY.whatevergroups for New York.
Countries and languages have their own hierarchies too.
Then, there are groups for institutions.
There are, for example, hierarchies for MIT.
The Massachusetts Institute for Technology.
Microsoft maintains a news group hierarchy.
There is a whole Linux dot hierarchy.
So, you should be able to find almost anything out there.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net.
So, head on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us here.
Thank you very much.