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Comment by benzinschleuder | Hacker News Reader

Usenet is also usable for backups. Normally you would upload a huge encrypted RAR.

Some time ago i built a tool where you can store files/folders incrementally on Usenet with encryption, parity etc. I put much effort into this. It was possible to restore a directory tree by a unique ID (which you could write on some piece of paper) that securely resolves to a chain which links to meta/raw blocks via Message-IDs and you could mount the whole thing with OSXFuse. The ID was reusable after updates to the tree, so incremental backups worked without a new ID.

I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet instead of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it would lead to pollution of the Usenet network.

Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use this without polluting the network? Would love to hear some thoughts about this!

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I wonder if you could convince cperciva (Tarsnap) to exploit Usenet as an encrypted block store (as a cheaper alternative to S3).

> I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet instead of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it would lead to pollution of the Usenet network.

> Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use this without polluting the network?

No way around it, it's absolutely an abuse of the network. That being said, so is the piracy on the binary subgroups. I think the end use would be small enough to not materially affect the binary NNTP hosts anyway.

I wonder if you could convince cperciva (Tarsnap) to exploit Usenet as an encrypted block store (as a cheaper alternative to S3).

I suspect that if Tarsnap was over half of Usenet's traffic volume, it would start getting filtered.

Not sure about being the middleman yet. What if the big Usenet providers decide to delete data or we violate their non-business-usage policies? But on the other hand it's really cheap indeed! We can cancel our Usenet subscription and renew it when the data is needed. So I thought it's maybe better to cut out the middleman by giving the software away.

About the abuse: I imagined that the method could be used like some unlimited-disk-space-providers which had to get rid of that plan because the users used it as advertised.

Of course, apart from that, anyone can write such software. So it's maybe just a matter of time? Though I couldn't find any other solutions besides RAR archives.

The Usenet can be used as a key-value store with handicaps. And stuff can be built on top of that.

I don't understand how you could use newsgroups for storage, except in a "I don't care about data loss" kind of way. I haven't used USENET in decades, but NNTP is a messaging protocol it says nothing about storage AFAIK. I do recall that back in the day, messages in busy newsgroups would expire rather quickly (probably due to limited storage on my news server at the time). So if I post a message containing my backup to a binary newsgroup, what assurance do I have that I will be able to get it back?

Commercial binary NNTP providers have basically infinite retention at this point, if your content doesn't generate DMCA takedown requests. E.g. http://www.news.astraweb.com/ $10/mo gets you 2660 days (>7 years) of retention, growing at roughly one day per day. (Four years ago, 3 years of retention was common.) There are also pay-by-download-in-GB a la carte plans that would be good for backup-only use (because upload is free).

Even if it isn't infinite, you can download and repost every 7 years if you care about having backups for longer than that.

Well, one could run their own NNTP server.

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