• MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
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    20 hours ago

    Pirated media(images, movies, ebooks, ROMs) uses binary posts, not text. There are different limits and retention policies for binary versus text articles, and most Usenet servers, particularly cheap or free ones, don’t host a lot of the categories a pirate would want at all.

    Please don’t imply that all Usenet providers facilitate piracy.

    • Arcka@midwest.social
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      14 hours ago

      Thanks for the pointer! I took the opportunity to learn a bit about more recent NNTP by reading the standard: RFC 3977. It looks like nntp v2 circa 2006 added MIME encoding, so I would guess that may be how a service provider would differentiate.

      I haven’t used Usenet since the turn of the century. Back then it was all text (including every article under alt.binaries), and even pirated media needed to be split into a multi-part format (often rar) then each part uuencoded so it could be included in an article.

      • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 hours ago

        I mean, you made me look at it again myself, as the multi-part rar files on Usenet are still very much a thing. The allowable “article” sizes for binary content are larger than for text articles, but still too small for video or high-quality audio.