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 Binary Floodgates on the Internet Backwaters

Back in the days before the World Wide Web, when computers connected directly to each other over telephone lines, we had a piece of software called a Bulletin Board System or BBS. BGAMUG operated a BBS from about 1989 through 2001 and aside from being responsible for the marriage of at least one member we know about, we amassed a collection of files that totaled, at last count, some 45 gigabytes in size, which was pretty impressive when you consider that there was not one among them that was copyrighted and marked as non-distributable material. Unlike many “boards” of the day, BGAMUG took special pains to make sure that the material we funneled through our member’s modems was all above board and free of distribution issues.

So-called pirate BBSs, where copyrighted software was swapped like recipes at a county fair, were not illegal to visit, but there were a few high profile cases with big fines involved and even jail time for the pirate system operators. For the most part, though, our legal system didn’t seem to be effective in prosecuting even the most flagrant cases, and the most that a copyright holder could hope for seemed to be a civil remedy by bringing suit. Now the stakes have certainly been raised in terms of the volume of material swapped, and the material that is swapped today seems to be music more often than the latest PC game, but the copyright system in this country is still not very clear on the issue of sharing binary information. What is evident is that it’s the user’s responsibility to determine whether or not a given body of information has a copyright assigned to another individual, and also to figure out how much of it can be used (viewed, listened to, stored, forwarded, sold, whatever) and still fall under the “fair use” doctrine. Instead of this turning into a dissertation on copyright law, I will instead offer the foregoing as simply a caution. Please do not download copyright material and don’t use it unless you have clear permission or fair use rights. And please don’t take any of the following as a cookbook for copyright subversion because it’s not meant that way. Having got that caveat out of the way, let’s go somewhere where the World Wide Web doesn’t go – USENET! [Pronounced YOOZ net]. Usenet is the bulletin board of the internet, and like a real bulletin board, its information is emblazoned on the internet like a ten foot high plasma billboard on Times Square in New York City. Usenet was conceived by a pair of graduate students, John Ellis and Tom Truscott at Duke University in 1979. Now lurid and lawless, Usenet has been given the unseemly reputation of being the Las Vegas of the internet because of the terabytes of binary pictures posted minute by minute in an unending stream of first-amendment fodder. And we can find some dandy files on Usenet. Clip art, genealogical records, MIDI music and classical music, sound libraries, electronic books, recipes, quilting patterns, maps, GPS info, high quality desktop wallpaper, icons, and almost anything you can think of. This material is not usually found on the World Wide Web for several reasons, but primarily because people that put up web sites generally want to sell you something, and you can’t very well sell what is found on Usenet because it is sometimes difficult to find out if it’s under copyright or not. You can usually find someone to charge you for a collection of postage stamp images (for example) on the web, when in fact the sellers of the collection most likely just downloaded it from Usenet in the first place (probably in violation of a copyright or two!) Usenet is and always was just text messages posted on internet machines known as news servers. Old timers still refer to Usenet as “net news” even though most of the posts have nothing to do with news. News servers use a protocol known as NNTP to transmit new messages on to other news servers down the pipe. The effect is that a new message posted to an NNTP server gets copied again and again over the course of hours or days until all of the news servers of the world have the message or file in their database. This copying occurs a little like e-mail, except that there is no way to make a post private. In fact, there is no way to address a Usenet posting to anyone but “ALL.” Usenet bears another resemblance to e-mail, and that is there is a LOT of spam (or pointless messages, ads and porn). But if you know where to look, or just exercise some very patient trial and error, you can find some great repositories of information. If you are looking for one specific file though, you had better be really lucky! Trolling for files on Usenet is a bit like fishing on a commercial fishing boat: you’re going to pull up just about everything that gets caught in your net! Even though it’s text based, binary files (images or programs, for example) can be uploaded and downloaded to Usenet with ease, thanks to some very clever programming that allows seamless conversion from text to binary and back again. The difference between text and binary is not that important – just think of text as messages you can read, and binary as graphics, video, audio or program files. Messages are organized by topic into a system with the following “top level” names: Comp [computers] Misc [miscellany] News [internet news, such as new groups or new policies about usenet] Rec [recreation] Sci [science] Soc [social and behavior, religion, philosophy] Talk [just that, talk, mostly of the flapping jaw variety!]

Subgroups are separated by periods – for example, rec.sports.tennis, and this fully formed topic name is called a newsgroup. Unfortunately, the process for creating new newsgroups is not overseen very well, and over the years the list of newsgroups available has become truly massive and quite often inane, vulgar or pointless. There is also not a good standard convention for naming newsgroups, and thus we have many more “top level” domains that I’d really rather not see.

The top-level newsgroups can be considered the backbone of Usenet and, with the exception of the advertisements and some dramatic grandstanding in some of these groups, they can be fairly informative. In particular, Usenet news is a good place to obtain an anecdotal history for just about any given industry, profession, product or technology.

But now comes the red-headed stepchild of Usenet: alt.

ALT is a top level newsgroup hierarchy that was created to dump whatever didn’t fit in the other, more official newsgroups.

The alt groups carry most of the message traffic on Usenet, and as the tag implies, this is where the alternative thinking comes out in the Usenet crowd! The alt.binaries newsgroups collectively carry thousands of gigabytes of information across the internet daily. And where do you complain if someone posts something objectionable? You don’t. There’s no help desk and no complaint center. Usenet runs itself, as there is no news server that has any special authority over any other server. US courts have consistently held that the ISP that houses this information Is no more responsible for its content than the owner of your local news stand would be responsible for the content of the magazines he or she sells.

Most of the files on Usenet are found in the alt.binaries section of newsgroups, and it is from these newsgroups that your news reader software (see below) will automatically process the messages into finished files that are ready to view, listen to or execute on your computer.

This seems like a good time to point out that executing any file obtained from an untrusted source really has to be scanned by a good, up-to-date viral scanner before you execute it. The safest policy is to just not run these files unless you do so on a computer on which you won’t lose any sleep over, should it become infected. However, it is difficult to obtain an infection from a document or audiovisual file, so these are probably safe to read or listen to.

You will find some groups on Usenet that end with ‘.d ,’ which stands for “discussion.” So for example, we have the alt.binaries.sounds.midi newsgroup, which contains actual MIDI files (Musical Instrument Digital Interface files), whereas alt.binaries.sounds.midi.d would be a group devoted to the text based discussion of the material found in the former newsgroup. In this context, the word discussion means posting information about a given topic, as opposed to real-time chat in a split-screen “chat room” environment. There is nothing real-time about Usenet because each client computer can be expected to update its Usenet database at different times, quite at random.

There are some groups that are moderated, where a real person is charged with the task of vetting everything that’s posted before you actually see it. This person or group, naturally, is known as a moderator, and they are really the only thing close to an authority on Usenet. As you might expect, some moderated groups have a better track record than others in keeping out the riff-raff and spam.

There is an interesting history of Usenet and how newsgroups came to be named at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

You can receive and post Usenet articles (or binary files) by employing a news reader which is also sometimes referred to as an NNTP reader (nntp is the Network News Transfer Protocol).

If you would prefer not to have to download and install a news reader, you can skip the hassle of learning the ins and outs of a new program. Try going to http://groups.google.com in your browser, and clicking on some of the links. Google Groups is a “front end” or interface to Usenet without the news reader. However, unless things have changed since I last took a look at Google Groups, they don’t support the alt.binaries newsgroups, therefore you won’t find any files on Google Groups.

My favorite news reader is called XNEWS, created by a fellow named Luu Tran. There is a user manual posted on the internet at this link: http://xnews.newsguy.com/manual.html 

Xnews is a free download and there is no expectation for you to pay anything to the author of this utility. You can get the program at this link: http://xnews.newsguy.com/release/xnews.zip

The program does not need to be installed, you can just unzip it to a directory somewhere on your computer and run “xnews.exe.” Setting up “Xnews” is probably more easily accomplished in a workshop setting than a newsletter.

This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

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