NZB
2012-03-29 17:59:34.868786+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments
The things we learn: I gave up NNTP and Usenet news for dead sometime circa 2000. Sure, I had a brief fling with an NNTP interface for Flutterby, and tossed it around as a better solution than RSS for blog syndication, but overall the spammer and "Eternal September" quotient got so high that newsgroups lost their value over a decade ago.
Thus it was rather surprising to me to find that ISPs not only go out of their way to host local Usenet servers, rather than simply buying subscriptions for their subscribers to EasyNews or another Usenet provider, and that this effort to transfer around and store amazing amounts of data, is that having these machines in an ISP's data center actually reduces external bandwidth use.
Huh?
Turns out there's a file format called "NZB", which is an XML based format for associating search terms and titles with a set of NNTP Message-ID records. There are people out there who have automated systems up to record off of broadcast or cable sources, post those video feeds encoded to Usenet newsgroups, and post the NZB files to various places (I haven't gone looking for them).
People looking for topical data could possibly BitTorrent this information, but a Torrent involves less anonymity and more external network traffic. So there are tools which grab those NZBs, download the (presumably MIME or UUencoded) NNTP messages, reconstruct the original files and present users with their TV shows.
Grist for the Dan & Todd bandwidth bet, and for thinking about broadcast vs on-demand network effects, and all sorts of ethics and legal issues discussions.