In "John Smith" writes:

commander:

Furnish me with a URL to a document by usenet on the false specs you are
attempting to pass off on the un-witting hams, and others, here. Where is a
usenet "Official Faq" stating what you are claiming?


Try any of the following:


http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...1d33dcfe1ff321

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/finding-groups/general/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroups

http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/http/nobin.html


Even if you don't want to accept any of these articles as authoritative,
consider the validity of their basic arguments, which I've summarized
below:


- Many sites choose to carry only the discussion newsgroups, as the
binary newsgroups represent the overwhelming majority of Usenet
traffic volume (by an astonishing ratio of 300:1 as of 2002, according
to the first article referenced above).

- Sites can easily limit their news traffic to the much smaller
discussion newsgroups volume if binaries are restricted by convention
to newsgroups that have "binaries" in their names.

- Even if one poster posts "just one little binary" in a discussion
newsgroup, it can add up if others join in, especially multiplied over
many newsgroups (see "Tragedy of the Commons" at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons ).

- If this results in very little meaningful distinction in traffic
volume between discussion and binary newsgroups, such that sites that
carry news can no longer easily filter out the binary material, and
keep their bandwidth and storage requirements to a manageable amount,
many sites may choose to drop many discussion newsgroups, or even drop
news altogether. The latter has already happened at many sites,
including AOL, MSN, and Comcast.

- Sites with more sophisticated filtering than that provided by standard
news server software may choose to filter out all posts that have
binary content, anyway. Already, Google Groups strips out any binary
contents from their newsgroups archive, mostly to avoid becoming a
de-facto free porno/pirated-warez server. Even a site like Google,
with nearly unlimited communications bandwidth and storage space, is
concerned about becoming a transmission vector for copyright
violations, viruses, and obscene material.

- It may even be a violation of your ISP's Terms of Service (TOS) or
Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) to post binaries to a discussion
newsgroup.

--
73, Paul W. Schleck, K3FU

http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/
Finger for PGP Public Key