On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:27:22 -0400, Paul wrote:

Perhaps Google does archive the 1TB per day of illegal
movie uploads in various binary groups, but that would add
up after a while. (There is one dude, who does 1TB of uploads
per day all by himself!) To archive all of USENET, you need
a farm the size of the one that Giganews runs. Google
could do it. But, is it worth it ?

I don't think anyone
has any idea just how large a "full feed" of USENET would
amount to.

I used Easynews for about 15 years and every year they'd announce the
size of the average daily feed in their support newsgroup, so yes, there
are people who know what that size is, but no, I don't remember and it's
been quite a few years since I changed NSPs. It's undoubtedly even
higher now.

The abuse is large. The pipe has to be large.
To have retention (as a Giganews selling feature), you need disks.

All of the premium providers have that problem and all of them have
addressed it, growing their data storage capabilities to keep pace with
the constant growth. No one expires anything anymore so the only things
that routinely get lost are the DMCA takedowns.

One other thing about Easynews - they have a web interface where you can
participate with just a web browser. One of its features is a search
capability so I used to sometimes search by entering only a lower size
constraint, leaving the upper constraint blank. It always amazed me to
see people uploading 350-400 gigabytes in a single multipart archive,
with each part being a gig or so. That's beyond huge for an archive. I
checked a few pieces of those monsters here and there, only to find them
encrypted every time. I can't even guess what they might have contained.

We used to joke that people were using Usenet as their unofficial cloud
storage provider. There are no upload limits and you can retrieve your
data from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. No other
storage provider can beat that since it comes free with your Usenet
service.

--

Char Jackson