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86-557: Several people have written stories about BOFHs, but only those by Simon Travaglia are considered canonical. The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation . Since 2000 they have been published regularly in The Register (UK). Several collections of the stories have been published as books. By extension, the term is also used to refer to any system administrator who displays

172-408: A CBS News poll in 2009, 58% of Americans who follow the file-sharing issue, considered it acceptable "if a person owns the music CD and shares it with a limited number of friends and acquaintances"; with 18- to 29-year-olds, this percentage reached as much as 70%. In his survey of file-sharing culture, Caraway (2012) noted that 74.4% of participants believed musicians should accept file sharing as

258-701: A European Citizens' Initiative "Freedom to Share" started collecting signatures in order to get the European Commission to discuss (and eventually make rules) on this subject, which is controversial. From the early 2000s until the mid 2010s, online video streaming was usually based on the Adobe Flash Player . After more and more vulnerabilities in Adobe's flash became known, YouTube switched to HTML5 based video playback in January 2015. Peer-to-peer file sharing

344-588: A charter, a rationale, and a moderation policy if the group is to be moderated. Discussion of the new newsgroup proposal follows, and is finished with the members of the Big-8 Management Board making the decision, by vote, to either approve or disapprove the new newsgroup. Unmoderated newsgroups form the majority of Usenet newsgroups, and messages submitted by readers for unmoderated newsgroups are immediately propagated for everyone to see. Minimal editorial content filtering vs propagation speed form one crux of

430-603: A cross post to the *.answers group at the head of the hierarchy seen by some as a refining of information in that news group. Some subgroups are recursive—to the point of some silliness in alt.* . Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7- bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute binary files as content. Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow

516-454: A disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles). Some ISPs outsource news operations to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP itself runs the server. Many of these sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and

602-453: A means for promotion and distribution. This file-sharing culture was termed as cyber socialism , whose legalisation was not the expected cyber-utopia . . According to David Glenn, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education , "A majority of economic studies have concluded that file-sharing hurts sales". A literature review by Professor Peter Tschmuck found 22 independent studies on

688-573: A moderator must bear the Approved: header line. Moderators ensure that the messages that readers see in the newsgroup conform to the charter of the newsgroup, though they are not required to follow any such rules or guidelines. Typically, moderators are appointed in the proposal for the newsgroup, and changes of moderators follow a succession plan. Historically, a mod.* hierarchy existed before Usenet reorganization. Now, moderated newsgroups may appear in any hierarchy, typically with .moderated added to

774-511: A modest increase in sales. "This increase in sales is small relative to other factors that have been found to affect album sales." "File-sharing proponents commonly argue that file-sharing democratizes music consumption by 'levelling the playing field' for new/small artists relative to established/popular artists, by allowing artists to have their work heard by a wider audience, lessening the advantage held by established/popular artists in terms of promotional and other support. My results suggest that

860-499: A news server might attempt to control the spread of spam by refusing to accept or forward any posts that trigger spam filters , or a server without high-capacity data storage may refuse to carry any newsgroups used primarily for file sharing , limiting itself to discussion-oriented groups. However, unlike BBSes and web forums, the dispersed nature of Usenet usually permits users who are interested in receiving some content to access it simply by choosing to connect to news servers that carry

946-682: A newsgroup under the Big Eight which contains discussions about children's books, but a group in the alt hierarchy may be dedicated to one specific author of children's books. Binaries are posted in alt.binaries.* , making it the largest of all the hierarchies. Many other hierarchies of newsgroups are distributed alongside these. Regional and language-specific hierarchies such as japan.* , malta.* and ne.* serve specific countries and regions such as Japan , Malta and New England . Companies and projects administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support, such as

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1032-507: A positive impact on album sales. Without iTunes, Amazon, and Best Buy, file-sharers would be just file sharers rather than purchasers. If you carry out the 'file-sharing should be legal' argument to its logical conclusion, today's retailers will be tomorrow's file-sharing services that integrate with their respective cloud storage services ." Many argue that file-sharing has forced the owners of entertainment content to make it more widely available legally through fees or advertising on-demand on

1118-412: A readership which is potentially widely distributed. These protocols most commonly use a flooding algorithm which propagates copies throughout a network of participating servers. Whenever a message reaches a server, that server forwards the message to all its network neighbors that haven't yet seen the article. Only one copy of a message is stored per server, and each server makes it available on demand to

1204-496: A result of such lawsuits, many universities added file sharing regulations in their school administrative codes (though some students managed to circumvent them during after school hours). Also in 2003, the MPAA started to take action against BitTorrent sites, leading to the shutdown of Torrentse and Sharelive in July 2003. With the shutdown of eDonkey in 2005, eMule became the dominant client of

1290-689: A server, just (local) telephone service. The name Usenet comes from the term "users' network". The first Usenet group was NET.general , which quickly became net.general . The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 119 for standard, unprotected connections, and on TCP port 563 for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted connections. Usenet

1376-570: A subsequent revaluation of the same data by George R. Barker of the Australian National University reached the opposite conclusion. "In total, 75% of P2P downloaders responded that if P2P were not available they would have purchased either through paid sites only (9%), CDs only (17%) or through CDs and pay sites (49%). Only 25% of people say they would not have bought the music if it were not available on P2P for free." Barker thus concludes; "This clearly suggests P2P network availability

1462-457: A takedown petition to be most effective across the whole network, it would have to be issued to the origin server to which the content has been posted, before it has been propagated to other servers. Removal of the content at this early stage would prevent further propagation, but with modern high speed links, content can be propagated as fast as it arrives, allowing no time for content review and takedown issuance by copyright holders. Establishing

1548-513: A telecommunications service, and assert that they are not responsible for the user-posted binary content transferred via their equipment. In the United States, Usenet providers can qualify for protection under the DMCA Safe Harbor regulations , provided that they establish a mechanism to comply with and respond to takedown notices from copyright holders. Removal of copyrighted content from

1634-418: A tree-like form. When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network. The later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it

1720-455: A violation of academic integrity at many schools. Academic file sharing by companies such as Chegg and Course Hero has become a point of particular controversy in recent years. This has led some institutions to provide explicit guidance to students and faculty regarding academic integrity expectations relating to academic file sharing. In 2004, there were an estimated 70 million people participating in online file sharing. According to

1806-512: A website and mobile app and can be easily shared with other users for viewing or collaboration. Such services have become popular via consumer-oriented file hosting services such as Dropbox and Google Drive . With the rising need of sharing big files online easily, new open access sharing platforms have appeared, adding even more services to their core business (cloud storage, multi-device synchronization, online collaboration), such as ShareFile , Tresorit , WeTransfer , or Hightail . rsync

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1892-409: Is a more traditional program released in 1996 which synchronizes files on a direct machine-to-machine basis. Data synchronization in general can use other approaches to share files, such as distributed file systems , version control , or mirrors . In addition to file sharing for the purposes of entertainment, academic file sharing has become a topic of increasing concern, as it is deemed to be

1978-403: Is a network manager when not working as a computational demonologist, the name is all too appropriate. In the novella Pimpf , he acquires a pimply-faced young assistant by the name of Peter-Fred Young. BOFH is a text adventure game written by Howard A. Sherman, which took part in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition and was placed 26th out of 38. Simon Travaglia (born 1964) graduated from

2064-405: Is also used by individual users to store backup data. While commercial providers offer easier to use online backup services , storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). The method requires the uploader to cede control over the distribution of the data; the files are automatically disseminated to all Usenet providers exchanging data for the news group it

2150-415: Is awaiting extradition. The case involving the downfall of the world's largest and most popular file sharing site was not well received, with hacker group Anonymous bringing down several sites associated with the take-down. In the following days, other file sharing sites began to cease services; FileSonic blocked public downloads on January 22, with Fileserve following suit on January 23. In 2021

2236-519: Is based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) application architecture. Shared files on the computers of other users are indexed on directory servers. P2P technology was used by popular services like Napster and LimeWire . The most popular protocol for P2P sharing is BitTorrent . Cloud-based file syncing and sharing services implement automated file transfers by updating files from a dedicated sharing directory on each user's networked devices. Files placed in this folder also are typically accessible through

2322-495: Is connecting to it. Some Usenet providers do keep usage logs, but not all make this logged information casually available to outside parties such as the Recording Industry Association of America . The existence of anonymising gateways to USENET also complicates the tracing of a postings true origin. Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer , David Wiseman. Copied with permission from File sharing File sharing

2408-403: Is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current Big Eight are: The alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the procedures controlling groups in the Big Eight, and it is as a result less organized. Groups in the alt.* hierarchy tend to be more specialized or specific—for example, there might be

2494-413: Is due to sharing". However, citing Nielsen SoundScan as their source, the co-authors maintained that illegal downloading had not deterred people from being original. "In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file-sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since

2580-684: Is generally credited as being the first peer-to-peer file sharing system. In December 1999, Napster was sued by several recording companies and lost in A&;M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. . In the case of Napster, it has been ruled that an online service provider could not use the "transitory network transmission" safe harbor in the DMCA if they had control of the network with a server. Gnutella , eDonkey2000 , and Freenet were released in 2000, as MP3.com and Napster were facing litigation. Gnutella , released in March,

2666-444: Is marketed as a tool for copyright infringement. On the other hand, not all file sharing is illegal. Content in the public domain can be freely shared. Even works covered by copyright can be shared under certain circumstances. For example, some artists, publishers, and record labels grant the public a license for unlimited distribution of certain works, sometimes with conditions, and they advocate free content and file sharing as

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2752-500: Is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was typically used for transfers, and phone charges were lower at night. The format and transmission of Usenet articles

2838-476: Is one such web based front end and some web browsers can access Google Groups via news: protocol links directly. A minority of newsgroups are moderated, meaning that messages submitted by readers are not distributed directly to Usenet, but instead are emailed to the moderators of the newsgroup for approval. The moderator is to receive submitted articles, review them, and inject approved articles so that they can be properly propagated worldwide. Articles approved by

2924-624: Is posted to. In general the user must manually select, prepare and upload the data. The data is typically encrypted because it is available to anyone to download the backup files. After the files are uploaded, having multiple copies spread to different geographical regions around the world on different news servers decreases the chances of data loss. Major Usenet service providers have a retention time of more than 12 years. This results in more than 60 petabytes (60000 terabytes ) of storage (see image). When using Usenet for data storage, providers that offer longer retention time are preferred to ensure

3010-456: Is reducing music demand of 75% of music downloaders which is quite contrary to Andersen and Frenz's much published claim." According to the 2017 paper "Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU" by the European Commission , illegal usage increases game sales, stating "The overall conclusion is that for games, illegal online transactions induce more legal transactions." A paper in

3096-491: Is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more specific recipients. Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums , blogs , mailing lists and social media . Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with

3182-400: Is sufficient storage allocated to handle the amount of articles being added. Without sufficient retention time, a reader will be unable to download all parts of the binary before it is flushed out of the group's storage allocation. This was at one time how posting undesired content was countered; the newsgroup would be flooded with random garbage data posts, of sufficient quantity to push out all

3268-496: Is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media , such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books . Common methods of storage , transmission and dispersion include removable media , centralized servers on computer networks , Internet-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking. File sharing technologies, such as BitTorrent , are integral to modern media piracy , as well as

3354-502: The alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data. There are also Usenet providers that offer a full unrestricted service to users whose ISPs do not carry news, or that carry a restricted feed. Newsgroups are typically accessed with newsreaders : applications that allow users to read and reply to postings in newsgroups. These applications act as clients to one or more news servers. Historically, Usenet

3440-712: The Pirate Bay trial ended in a guilty verdict for the primary founders of the tracker. The decision was appealed, leading to a second guilty verdict in November 2010. In October 2010, Limewire was forced to shut down following a court order in Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC but the Gnutella network remains active through open source clients like FrostWire and gtk-gnutella . Furthermore, multi-protocol file-sharing software such as MLDonkey and Shareaza adapted to support all

3526-713: The University of Waikato , New Zealand in 1985. He worked as the IT infrastructure manager (2004–2008) and computer operator (1985–1992) at the University of Waikato and the infrastructure manager at the Waikato Innovation Park , Hamilton, New Zealand (since 2008). Since 1999 he is a freelance writer for The Register . He lives in Hautapu , New Zealand. Usenet Early research and development: Merging

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3612-425: The sci.* hierarchy. Or, talk.origins and talk.atheism are in the talk.* hierarchy. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread . Most modern newsreaders display

3698-452: The (typically local) readers able to access that server. The collection of Usenet servers has thus a certain peer-to-peer character in that they share resources by exchanging them, the granularity of exchange however is on a different scale than a modern peer-to-peer system and this characteristic excludes the actual users of the system who connect to the news servers with a typical client-server application, much like an email reader. RFC 850

3784-505: The United States. In 2002, a Tokyo district court ruling shut down File Rogue, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit that effectively shut down Audiogalaxy. From 2002 through 2003, a number of BitTorrent services were established, including Suprnova.org , isoHunt , TorrentSpy , and The Pirate Bay . In September 2003, the RIAA began filing lawsuits against users of P2P file sharing networks such as Kazaa. As

3870-554: The Usenet community. One little cited defense of propagation is canceling a propagated message, but few Usenet users use this command and some news readers do not offer cancellation commands , in part because article storage expires in relatively short order anyway. Almost all unmoderated Usenet groups tend to receive large amounts of spam . Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among

3956-548: The advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply." Glenn Peoples of Billboard disputed the underlying data, saying "SoundScan's number for new releases in any given year represents new commercial titles, not necessarily new creative works." The RIAA likewise responded that "new releases" and "new creative works" are two separate things. "[T]his figure includes re-releases, new compilations of existing songs, and new digital-only versions of catalog albums. SoundScan has also steadily increased

4042-400: The articles arranged into threads and subthreads. For example, in the wine-making newsgroup rec.crafts.winemaking, someone might start a thread called; "What's the best yeast?" and that thread or conversation might grow into dozens of replies long, by perhaps six or eight different authors. Over several days, that conversation about different wine yeasts might branch into several sub-threads in

4128-447: The content to be suppressed. This has been compensated by service providers allocating enough storage to retain everything posted each day, including spam floods, without deleting anything. Modern Usenet news servers have enough capacity to archive years of binary content even when flooded with new data at the maximum daily speed available. In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet

4214-559: The data will survive for longer periods of time compared to services with lower retention time. While binary newsgroups can be used to distribute completely legal user-created works, free software , and public domain material, some binary groups are used to illegally distribute proprietary software , copyrighted media, and pornographic material. ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries.* groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. Commercial Usenet service providers claim to operate as

4300-510: The eDonkey network. In 2006, police raids took down the Razorback2 eDonkey server and temporarily took down The Pirate Bay . "The File Sharing Act was launched by Chairman Towns in 2009, this act prohibited the use of applications that allowed individuals to share federal information amongst one another. On the other hand, only specific file sharing applications were made available to federal computers" (the United States.Congress.House). In 2009,

4386-422: The effects of music file sharing. "Of these 22 studies, 14 – roughly two-thirds – conclude that unauthorized downloads have a 'negative or even highly negative impact' on recorded music sales. Three of the studies found no significant impact while the remaining five found a positive impact." A study by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf in 2004 concluded that music file sharing's effect on sales

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4472-494: The entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server. Petitioning a Usenet provider for removal only removes it from that one server's retention cache, but not any others. It is possible for a special post cancellation message to be distributed to remove it from all servers, but many providers ignore cancel messages by standard policy, because they can be easily falsified and submitted by anyone. For

4558-524: The feeds they want. Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as " FAQ ", " flame ", " sockpuppet ", and " spam ". In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via FidoNet 's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing

4644-399: The files reaches a server. Binary newsgroups can be used to distribute files, and, as of 2022, some remain popular as an alternative to BitTorrent to share and download files. Each news server allocates a certain amount of storage space for content in each newsgroup. When this storage has been filled, each time a new post arrives, old posts are deleted to make room for the new content. If

4730-738: The group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client. However, it is now possible to read and participate in Usenet newsgroups to a large degree using ordinary web browsers since most newsgroups are now copied to several web sites. The groups in alt.binaries are still widely used for data transfer. Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers for their users to access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. In early news implementations,

4816-476: The group name. Usenet newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy are created by proposals called a Request for Discussion, or RFD. The RFD is required to have the following information: newsgroup name, checkgroups file entry, and moderated or unmoderated status. If the group is to be moderated, then at least one moderator with a valid email address must be provided. Other information which is beneficial but not required includes:

4902-670: The historical gnu.* hierarchy from the Free Software Foundation . Microsoft closed its newsserver in June 2010, providing support for its products over forums now. Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include alt.* as well. The more general term "netnews" incorporates the entire medium, including private organizational news systems. Informal sub-hierarchy conventions also exist. *.answers are typically moderated cross-post groups for FAQs. An FAQ would be posted within one group and

4988-425: The idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts , and collectively termed news ) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups . Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded , as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on

5074-616: The identity of the person posting illegal content is equally difficult due to the trust-based design of the network. Like SMTP email, servers generally assume the header and origin information in a post is true and accurate. However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source. In this manner, Usenet is significantly different from modern P2P services; most P2P users distributing content are typically immediately identifiable to all other users by their network address , but

5160-614: The internet. In a 2011 report by Sandvine showed that Netflix traffic had come to surpass that of BitTorrent . File sharing raises copyright issues and has led to many lawsuits. In the United States , some of these lawsuits have even reached the Supreme Court . For example, in MGM v. Grokster , the Supreme Court ruled that the creators of P2P networks can be held liable if their software

5246-721: The journal Management Science found that file-sharing decreased the chance of survival for low ranked albums on music charts and increased exposure to albums that were ranked high on the music charts, allowing popular and well-known artists to remain on the music charts more often. This hurt new and less-known artists while promoting the work of already popular artists and celebrities. A more recent study that examined pre-release file-sharing of music albums, using BitTorrent software, also discovered positive impacts for "established and popular artists but not newer and smaller artists." According to Robert G. Hammond of North Carolina State University , an album that leaked one month early would see

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5332-435: The local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in the automatic proliferation of content posted by any user on any server to any other user subscribed to the same newsgroups on other servers. As with BBSes and message boards, individual news servers or service providers are under no obligation to carry any specific content, and may refuse to do so for many reasons:

5418-548: The major file-sharing protocols, so users no longer had to install and configure multiple file-sharing programs. On January 19, 2012, the United States Department of Justice shut down the popular domain of Megaupload (established 2005). The file sharing site has claimed to have over 50,000,000 people a day. Kim Dotcom (formerly Kim Schmitz) was arrested with three associates in New Zealand on January 20, 2012 and

5504-649: The manual deletion of infringing material using the provisions of World Intellectual Property Organization treaty implementations, such as the United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act , but this would require giving notice to each individual news server administrator. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP Port 119 for standard, unprotected connections and on TCP port 563 for SSL encrypted connections. The major set of worldwide newsgroups

5590-419: The network bandwidth available to a server is high but the storage allocation is small, it is possible for a huge flood of incoming content to overflow the allocation and push out everything that was in the group before it. The average length of time that posts are able to stay on the server before being deleted is commonly called the retention time . Binary newsgroups are only able to function reliably if there

5676-534: The networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Usenet ( / ˈ j uː z n ɛ t / ), USENET , or, "in full", User's Network , is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived

5762-456: The newly developed news software such as A News . The name "Usenet" emphasizes its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups , which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within

5848-596: The number of retailers (especially non-traditional retailers) in their sample over the years, better capturing the number of new releases brought to market. What Oberholzer and Strumpf found was better ability to track new album releases, not greater incentive to create them." A 2006 study prepared by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, published by Industry Canada , was "unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada". The results of this survey were similarly criticized by academics and

5934-461: The opposite is happening, which is consistent with evidence on file-sharing behaviour." Billboard cautioned that this research looked only at the pre-release period and not continuous file sharing following a release date. "The problem in believing piracy helps sales is deciding where to draw the line between legal and illegal ... Implicit in the study is the fact that both buyers and sellers are required in order for pre-release file sharing to have

6020-412: The origin information for a Usenet posting can be completely obscured and unobtainable once it has propagated past the original server. Also unlike modern P2P services, the identity of the downloaders is hidden from view. On P2P services a downloader is identifiable to all others by their network address. On Usenet, the downloader connects directly to a server, and only the server knows the address of who

6106-534: The qualities of the original. The early accounts of the BOFH took place in a university; later the scenes were set in an office workplace. In 2000 (BOFH 2k), the BOFH and his pimply-faced youth (PFY) assistant moved to a new company. The protagonist in Charles Stross 's The Laundry Files series of novels named himself Bob Oliver Francis Howard in reference to the BOFH. As Bob Howard is a self-chosen pseudonym, and Bob

6192-484: The rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), web front-ends (web2news) have become more common. Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one application and no Usenet NNTP server account. There are numerous websites now offering web based gateways to Usenet groups, although some people have begun filtering messages made by some of the web interfaces for one reason or another. Google Groups

6278-435: The server and newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate newsreader client software, a program that resembles an email client but accesses Usenet servers instead. Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet service), and

6364-544: The server sequentially. A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing set of news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post to a local (or simply preferred) news server, which can be operated by anyone, and those posts will automatically be forwarded to any other news servers peered with

6450-407: The sharing of scientific data and other free content. Files were first exchanged on removable media . Computers were able to access remote files using filesystem mounting, bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1979), and FTP servers (1970's). Internet Relay Chat (1988) and Hotline (1997) enabled users to communicate remotely through chat and to exchange files. The mp3 encoding, which

6536-507: The traffic. The oldest widely used encoding method for binary content is uuencode , from the Unix UUCP package. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited to 60,000 characters, and larger hard limits exist today. Files are therefore commonly split into sections that require reassembly by the reader. With the header extensions and the Base64 and Quoted-Printable MIME encodings, there

6622-404: Was "statistically indistinguishable from zero". This research was disputed by other economists, most notably Stan Liebowitz, who said Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf had made multiple assumptions about the music industry "that are just not correct." In June 2010, Billboard reported that Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf had "changed their minds", now finding "no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales

6708-515: Was a new generation of binary transport. In practice, MIME has seen increased adoption in text messages, but it is avoided for most binary attachments. Some operating systems with metadata attached to files use specialized encoding formats. For Mac OS, both BinHex and special MIME types are used. Other lesser known encoding systems that may have been used at one time were BTOA , XX encoding , BOO , and USR encoding. In an attempt to reduce file transfer times, an informal file encoding known as yEnc

6794-462: Was associated with the Unix operating system developed at AT&T , but newsreaders were soon available for all major operating systems. Email client programs and Internet suites of the late 1990s and 2000s often included an integrated newsreader. Newsgroup enthusiasts often criticized these as inferior to standalone newsreaders that made correct use of Usenet protocols, standards and conventions. With

6880-573: Was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University , over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus before the general public received access to the Internet ), making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET ", employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through

6966-429: Was introduced in 2001. It achieves about a 30% reduction in data transferred by assuming that most 8-bit characters can safely be transferred across the network without first encoding into the 7-bit ASCII space. The most common method of uploading large binary posts to Usenet is to convert the files into RAR archives and create Parchive files for them. Parity files are used to recreate missing data when not every part of

7052-566: Was proprietary and encrypted, and the Kazaa team made substantial efforts to keep other clients such as Morpheus off of the FastTrack network. In October 2001, the MPAA and the RIAA filed a lawsuit against the developers of Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster that would lead to the US Supreme Court's MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. decision in 2005. Shortly after its loss in court, Napster

7138-504: Was shut down to comply with a court order. This drove users to other P2P applications and file sharing continued its growth. The Audiogalaxy Satellite client grew in popularity, and the LimeWire client and BitTorrent protocol were released. Until its decline in 2004, Kazaa was the most popular file-sharing program despite bundled malware and legal battles in the Netherlands, Australia, and

7224-517: Was standardized in 1991 and substantially reduced the size of audio files , grew to widespread use in the late 1990s. In 1998, MP3.com and Audiogalaxy were established, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was unanimously passed, and the first mp3 player devices were launched. In June 1999, Napster was released as an unstructured centralized peer-to-peer system, requiring a central server for indexing and peer discovery. It

7310-516: Was the first decentralized file-sharing network. In the Gnutella network, all connecting software was considered equal, and therefore the network had no central point of failure . In July, Freenet was released and became the first anonymity network. In September the eDonkey2000 client and server software was released. In March 2001, Kazaa was released. Its FastTrack network was distributed, though, unlike Gnutella, it assigned more traffic to 'supernodes' to increase routing efficiency. The network

7396-450: Was the first formal specification of the messages exchanged by Usenet servers. It was superseded by RFC 1036 and subsequently by RFC 5536 and RFC 5537. In cases where unsuitable content has been posted, Usenet has support for automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled. Copyright holders may still request

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