webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) (05/29/87)
In article <5164@necntc.NEC.COM>, jeff@necntc.NEC.COM (Jeff Janock) writes: > > In article <922@maynard.BSW.COM> campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell) writes: > >I agree. I, also, was annoyed to have spent real money and tied up valuable > >disk space for binaries for a machine I don't even own, ... Surely, whether or not you own the machine has nothing to do with it. > This is a very narrow view of things - you are not forced to accept > any and all news groups that exist; that is what the backbones are > there for. And this is even narrower. If backbones were the only sites that carried all the groups, we would soon be in a mess (hmmm, maybe that explains some things ...). Actually, there are two things potentially going on when you see a binary posting. Both are deep dark secrets of the net, so listen closely and make a hardcopy of this message because as soon as one of the netgods sees it, there will certainly be a `cancel' message chasing it. First you have to realize that the net is for communication among people and hence no one would be foolish enough to waste net resources on something that wasn't meant to be read by people. The people posting `binaries' fall into two camps: 1) Old time hackers that still like to work in machine code. On any decent architecture this would make sense, but these people haven't realized that there are no decent architectures yet. You can distinguish these postings because the `binaries' are actually hand typed in and an occasional typo passes them by. While there are very few people that actually read their algorithmic riddles, when you consider the amount of effort that it takes to type them in, you can realize why the net humours them. 2) Various people that want to make use of the net bandwidth but do not want to overtly post encrypted messages. The most frequent offenders are the netgods themselves that use this as a means to conspire to create such things as moderated sources groups. aaaa43tv ^Cv5q 23v324v53wy456i68o5,p98-.9356b +++ MESSAGE ABORTED