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The beginning of the end of anime via usenet? (bogus)

 
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LaughnCynic



Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 8:03 am    Post subject: The beginning of the end of anime via usenet? (bogus) Reply with quote

Things might not be looking so great for the future of anime fansub/rip distrabution via usenet.

It would seem from This blurb at The Register Time Warner has begun to take the first steps to cripple binary file transfers across usenet.

Of course it might be a bit premature without confirmation from TW since in my experiance with RR (when I had service from them [Tampabay.rr.com]) thier usenet servers worked well most of the time but every couple of weeks they'd 'pitch a fit' and shred virtually every multipart for hours or even days at a time. Of course this was a local occurance since RR's sytem is a bunch of regional hubs each with it's own nntp servers (I think). If folks are seeing this behaivior across different regional hubs then the story might be true.

I don't relish moving to P2P systems for my anime fix. Even though they seem to be gaining in popularity and usage for anime fansub distrabution I think they offer the corporate snoops a much easier route for tracking/logging copyright violation. Not to mention those of us behind NAT/firewalls can have trouble getting them to function (I'm behind 2 and have 0 control over the first which is my hick ISP's). Perhaps I'll give BT a try just to be see.


Last edited by LaughnCynic on Tue Nov 18, 2003 9:38 am; edited 1 time in total
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(inc)



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 356
Location: San Diego

PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 9:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I read that last night then checked san.rr.com in Agent (as I get binaries with Newsbin from multiple servers and follow the text threads on Easynews' server, it's not always apparent when RR is having a problem except when I'm checking my own posts for propagation). Nothing looked amiss at all. (...checking abma again...) And it looks fine now -- out of 800+ new (joined) posts, only 20 or so look incomplete, including the tails of things currently coming up. Not bad at all.

I do remember a week or so ago that a lot of RR folks in the eastern US seemed to be voicing a lot of complaints over completion problems, but that's kind a faded recently. Have they just gotten used to it or has it been *cured*, is the question? Whatever, that may have been the result of what that article was talking about.

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LaughnCynic



Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 9:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmmm... Hehe, perhaps I should have chosen a less "The sky is falling" subject for this. Wink Read article, think for 5 seconds, whack out post = asking for trouble.

If you're not seeing trouble now then I suspect the author of the article jumped the gun (as did I). Embarassed

On the P2P issue: I was just looking at BT (FAQ, etc.) and it looks like it's not an option for me till I can get some kind of broadband again. Being behind 2 NAT/firewalls is a PITA since I have no way of controlling the first one (which is my hick ISP's gateway) to pierce and forward connections to a BT client box. Crying or Very sad

On the bright side I guess the above linked article is a bogus rumor (The Reg's usually pretty accurate).

However, I think I am noticing that fansub posts to usenet are a bit less consistant than they used to be. Lack of fansub group official posters or rise of BT or both? I suspect both. This was disscussed over the summer (a thread Chung started here) and I was of the opinion then that it was just all the college kids being away from thier fat pipes for the summer. I suspect now that BT is taking a bigger role than I thought then.
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(inc)



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 356
Location: San Diego

PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 11:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I guess *something* was going on with RR last week, at least back East, so who knows... The Reg's story could easily be an Urban Legend to explain it.

Quote:
However, I think I am noticing that fansub posts to usenet are a bit less consistant than they used to be. Lack of fansub group official posters or rise of BT or both? I suspect both. This was disscussed over the summer (a thread Chung started here) and I was of the opinion then that it was just all the college kids being away from thier fat pipes for the summer. I suspect now that BT is taking a bigger role than I thought then.
Unfortunetely some of the best subbing groups don't seem to have an *official* poster -- one of their own who will put the stuff on Usenet at the same time it goes into BT release. What aba/abma ends up with are random posts for certain series. And sometimes they're the best of the new season. Also, in a lot of cases, and understandably, the first subber's version that shows on BT is what gets posted. Subsequent later (and usually better) arrivals don't show in aba/abma, so it takes some effort to ensure that the better versions get at least some consistant presence in the groups. A case in point might be Peace Maker Kurogane -- AF-F and A-Keeps were the first two versions posted; IMHO, the better AonE's didn't get put up for weeks.

Even though it will obviously dominate the initial releases of new shows, I don't really see BT supplanting Usenet as it is not really a *general* solution, even discounting security issues. Especially those who are restricted in their upload BW usuage may run into trouble (at least using the *normal* software). Also, it's really best for what's *hot*; the new releases are painless to get. But what's torrmenting is sitting there with a client at "97% finished" day-after-day for something that's just a little bit old. And it happens all to easily.

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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 5:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Reading the article and remembering past experiences with my own ISP, I don't think there's anything worth worrying over. Note that I work for a large, highly-visible, locally well-known corporation that makes the local papers on a regular basis-- reporters take issues (small, big, newsworthy or not) and twist peoples' facts/statements to make an issue seem bigger than it really is. Sometimes they outright lie (as was the case in a project that I was significantly involved with last year...)

At any rate, here are the things that I noticed in the article:
-It doesn't say how long these incomplete articles have been a problem for (Did the problem crop up last night? Two days ago? A week or two or three ago?)
-There's no statement from Time-Warner.
-They talk about "modern linking computer files such as Par2," which tells me that the author hasn't a clue what a PAR2 file actually does, or how common the use of RAR/HJSplit files is.
-Limiting filesizes to 10MB? The individual parts of each file should only be a few hundred KB, so they'd have to have some pretty nifty server software to keep track of and kill each RAR file that's bigger than 10MB.
-The author also seems to indicate that there's also an MP3 filter (imposed at the same time??) that's killing tons of text messages. (I don't know what kind of company would release a filter that poorly-tested)
-It tries to demonize Time-Warner for filtering binary posts out of non-binary newsgroups, trying to associate the "next step" of content filtering to be blocking binaries, as the author asserts they are.

Of course, with all these wild ideas, the simplest theory seems to have fallen by the wayside: a server hiccupped and they started dropping parts all over the place, and none of their techs noticed the problem, so nobody noted the network status was having issues.

I remember once a year or two ago with Shaw (or maybe it was Rogers back then), their usenet servers were much less reliable than they are now, and you could count on them being down for a day or two each month or so. There was once when the service went down and stayed down for two or three weeks, never coming back online. I kept on assuming it would get fixed (I figured somebody must've complained about it), but it never got any complete articles. After two or thre weeks, I called my ISP's support line, and talked to the Tier 1 tech who tried to talk me through using my newsreader, but eventually came to understand that I knew more about newsgroups than he did. He searched their support system and found that there hadn't been any complaints logged about the newsservers (this is after binary groups being down for 2-3 weeks!). He offered to send a letter to their sysadmins, so I dictated to him what I wanted it to say.

Two days later, completion rates were back to normal!

I was amazed that they had no clue that the servers were acting up for weeks, with a spectacular 0-10% completion rate.

My current webhost (canaca.com, hosting japanese-animation.net) has been down a handful of times since I signed up with them. On one occasion, the network status page indicated they were having problems (this was when they were down for a day and a night). The rest of the time, when they've gone down for a few minutes to an hour, there hasn't been anything listed on the status page. Note that I'm quite pleased with this webhost-- they're already doing *much* better than my last webhost in terms of actual uptime (canaca promises 99.5% uptime, which they do actually achieve), and I'm quite pleased with them so far. The plan that I'm on is dirt-cheap, too-- US$8/month is getting me 10 gigs storage and 40 gigs transfer per month, not that I'm using much of it...

My last webhost (bluedomino.com), sucked. They promised 99.999% uptime, but never ever achieved that. There was once, their customer accounts went down for a week (I was on vacation at the time, if anybody sent emails to me, they were bounced back with a "no such user" error, not to mention that I couldn't check my mail...). During that week of downtime, their sales website was 100% active, and their network status showed no problems whatsoever. Problems were confirmed to be the same for all customer accounts when I called them up to ask about the problem. That wasn't the only downtime when they rejected emails-- it seemed to happen that way a couple times a year, not to mention a few hours down here and there each month. Bastards.

I can't remember where I was going with this email. I hate my old bastard webhost. They also didn't close my account after I submitted their account cancellation form, so I got a couple months of extra charges on my credit card, and when I compained they only refunded one of those charges. No response when I complained again. Bastards. Now I've got to write a letter to my credit card company.
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LaughnCynic



Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to put and end to this thread *cough*I wish I hadn't jumped the gun Chicken Little style*cough* The Reg has cried out 'My Bad' here.

End of (bogus) story...
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