The Bincancel Mini-FAQ Last Modified: 1:40pm, September 27, 1997 Maintained By: Shaun Davis-Gluyas URL: http://www.geniac.net/bincancel/index.html This FAQ answers questions about bincancels that have been frequently asked and frequently answered on news.admin.net-abuse.misc and .usenet Many of the answers here are from various posts made to those two newsgroups during 1996, not from some coffee meeting somewhere. Contributions, suggestions and corrections are always welcome. Discussions on bincancels, cancels and net-abuse should be directed to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, not to the maintainer of this FAQ. Note On Organisation: The Bincancel FAQ is arranged in two parts. The Mini-FAQ contains some background information and some frequently-asked-questions, answered very briefly, with clarity in mind. The full version contains the same questions (and many extras), along with a compilation of some of the answers that were posted to news.admin.net-abuse.misc. Both the questions and the answers in the full version therefore tend to be somewhat more belligerent in tone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ======== Basics What are cancel messages? What are bincancels? Who does bincancels? Why are bincancels needed? Frequently Asked Questions How can I ignore bincancels? Who gave you the authority to do bincancels? Isn't this censorship and violation of free speech? I refuse to change. No law says I have to do what you say. Why did you cancel my binary out of a binary newsgroup? On-topic binaries should not be cancelled. What if there is no appropriate binaries newsgroup? I can't make my binary available by FTP or WWW. Why not cancel spam/money scams/sex ads/smut instead? If bincancels are based on size, what about those huge FAQs? It's already got to my ISP's server, why cancel it now? Aren't the bincancel notices a waste of bandwidth too? Why not allow members of a newsgroup to police themselves? Basics ====== Subject: What are cancel messages? This is from Tim Skirvin's Cancel FAQ, available at : "Cancel messages are a specialised form of message to Usenet that, when they arrive at a server, request that the post bearing the Message-ID contained within be deleted. In essence, a cancel message, if heeded, cancels another post. Hence the name." ------------------------- Subject: What are bincancels? Cancels for binary messages posted to a non-binary newsgroup. ------------------------- Subject: Who does bincancels? Richard Depew, a system administrator, introduced and runs the major bincancel bot. Other people run bincancelling in the newsgroups they hang out on. Bincancelling is also done by moderators of particular newsgroups. ------------------------- Subject: Why are bincancels needed? Binaries take up disproportionate amounts of bandwidth. Although many sites have fast feeds and plenty of memory, many sites have neither. For those smaller sites, binaries present serious load problems. Administrators for such sites may be forced to drop the group altogether rather than damage the rest of their feed. Frequently Asked Questions ========================== Subject: How can I ignore bincancels? By aliasing out the bincancel pseudosite. If you are not a system administrator, your admin might do this at your request. Note that your admin may not wish to block bincancels, for the reasons given above. ------------------------- Subject: Who gave you the authority to do bincancels? Since there is no central Usenet authority, nobody *can* give such authority. However, administrators around the world are aware of the bincancels, and many - though not all - accept them as a useful service. ------------------------- Subject: Isn't this censorship and violation of free speech? No, because binaries can be posted to binary newsgroups or made available in other ways with no interference. There are also other arguments as to why this is not censorship. The question is one of "appropriate use of resources" rather than "free speech". ------------------------- Subject: I refuse to change. No law says I have to do what you say. True. However, there is also no law that forces others to do what *you* say - that is, there is no way that you can force other sites to accept your binaries rather than bincancels. ------------------------- Subject: Why did you cancel my binary out of a binary newsgroup? Probably because it was cross-posted to a non-binary newsgroup. There is no way, technically, to cancel a cross-posted article in one group but not another. ------------------------- Subject: On-topic binaries should not be cancelled. The administrators concerned about bandwidth and memory use can't make exceptions for topicality: the binaries in question jeopardise other newsgroups' on-topic non-binary posts. Moreover, cancelling only 'off-topic' binaries would be getting closer to censorship. ------------------------- Subject: What if there is no appropriate binaries newsgroup? There are several choices. One simple approach is to post it to alt.binaries.misc and add a brief pointer to it in the non-binary newsgroup. Another is to make the binary available by FTP or WWW, and post a pointer to it. ------------------------- Subject: I can't make my binary available by FTP or WWW. If you wish to provide binaries on a regular basis, you should get access to an ISP that allows FTP. By posting your binary to a non-binary newsgroup, you are asking other users to subsidise you. ------------------------- Subject: Why not cancel spam/money scams/sex ads/smut instead? All these things are already being cancelled to various extents. See the cancel FAQ at http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/tskirvin/faqs/cancel.html ------------------------- Subject: If bincancels are based on size, what about those huge FAQs? Very large FAQs are rare and (hopefully) save bandwidth in the long run due to their educational nature. Neither is true for large binaries. ------------------------- Subject: It's already got to my ISP's server, why cancel it now? The cancels might well catch up with the articles before the articles are transmitted to some far-off leafs in the distribution tree; since the bandwidth to those leafs tends to be the most expensive, this is a good thing. And the disk space is recovered even when the cancel doesn't catch up with the article. ------------------------- Subject: Aren't the bincancel notices a waste of bandwidth too? No; the notices are much smaller than the binaries they report cancelled. ------------------------- Subject: Why not allow members of a newsgroup to police themselves? First, such "policing" is rarely effective: even those who dislike binaries rarely do anything concrete about them (i.e. cancel them). Second, the 'rights' of the readers of the affected newsgroup clash with the rights of readers of other newsgroups and administrators, which would be affected by the excess bandwidth used by binaries in the one newsgroup. [end of file]