alt.binaries.boneless

alt.binaries.boneless is the largest group, with a total size of 4.9 petabytes (4,900 terabytes) [1]

alt.binaries.boneless is a Usenet discussion forum primarily used to transfer binary data content, rather than being used for textual communications.

It has the distinction of currently being one of the largest and most active binary newsgroups on all of Usenet, typically receiving tens of gigabytes of new data and over a million new postings each day, yet almost nothing is known of its origins or why it is so popular.

Typically, newsgroup names are functional in that the name is meant to serve as a guideline as to what type of content can be found in the newsgroup. However, boneless is completely irrelevant, and this appears to hold true as a description of the content, which can include fully ripped DVDs, entirely ripped CDs or individual music files, images and image sets, as well as software and documents of every content type imaginable.[2]

The group's content is likely to be accessed predominantly using NZB files obtained from forums or Usenet indexing services, as downloading group headers would be a highly inefficient process due to the sheer volume of posts made to the group.

On March 31, 2009, NewsBin sent out an alert to its users that the alt.binaries.boneless post count is the first to break the 32-bit threshold, having over 4,294,967,296 posts. Until then, all newsgroups' post totals could be stored as a 32-bit number. This occurrence might cause compatibility issues with binary news readers that cannot address post counts stored as a 64-bit number.[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Usenet storage is more than 33 petabytes (33000 terabytes)". binsearch.info. Retrieved 2016-10-07.
  2. ↑ "The newsgroup alt.binaries.boneless can contain various content". binzb,com. Retrieved 2014-05-30.
  3. ↑ http://www.newsbin.com/motd_archive_2009.php
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