November 18, 2007 by sharky
Websites for Usenet searching
There’s a few sites that offer search capabilities (some in ‘real time’) for finding content on Usenet. This can be a helpful service to find older posts, especially if you subscribe to a premium online news server like Giganews that will be able to retrieve them. These websites can also be used as a tool for discovering popular newsgroups that belong to your interests.
Thee services are quite elementary - they simply list all the updated headers for any newsgroup that they offer data for, plus throw in some extra stats like verification, size, number of files, and date/time posted.
Nfonews offers a much older search of files, up to 120 days, along with updated headers in the popular binary newsgroups. Excellent service when combined with a good online news server (with long retention).
BinSearch features a search that can be toggled between recent (real time) and up to 200 days+ in the results - for really deep Usenet searching. While they excel at searching, they don’t offer any browsing of recent headers, files or newsgroups.
Deleting the Usenet History:
Deleting your newsgroups and your newsgroup file history is not the same as erasing your cache in your browser. In fact, it has nothing to do with your browser (unless of course you use an online pay news server).
When you set up a proper news server with Outlook Express (or any other newsreader), the database of newsgroups that you downloaded are stored on your hard drive. And when you enter a particular newsgroup, a file is created for each one. The name of this file is the complete name of the newsgroup (so if you opened a newsgroup called alt.binaries.corvette, you will have a file called “alt.binaries.corvette.DBX”), plus inside it contains lists of all the “headers” (or titles of the posts) that are in it. And it doesn’t matter if you subscribed to the newsgroup or not. The purpose of this file is that when you exit and re-enter a particular newsgroup, the newsreader compares all the new posts with the old ones, and only downloads posts for ones you don’t already have. This was important when Internet bandwidth used to be a problem, as it could take quite a long time on a 28.8 modem to download just the headers of a popular newsgroup, let alone actually view the inside binaries of the posts. With Outlook Express, these newsgroup files have a *.DBX extension, but they can actually be opened with a text editor (like Notepad) and the headers can be read. When viewing binaries (i.e. pictures), the picture is not actually saved as a picture per se, unless you chose to ‘decode’ and save them to a certain directory (the default is ‘My Documents’ but be absolutely sure where they’re going). But the image data IS saved in that *.DBX file, and it is possible to recover some of that image data using a HEX/bin editor or whatnot. Certainly this is not new information to specialized forensic computer cops; I didn’t just enlighten them of some dark secret.
How to clean it up:
Open Outlook Express, click TOOLS > ACCOUNTS… and then select the NEWS tab. Highlight the news account there, and click the REMOVE button to the right. This will delete the entire list of newsgroups AND all the ones that you visited, including those pesky *.DBX files. Now, nothing remains. But this means you’ll have to set up the whole news server process over again, and download the entire list of newsgroups again, too. Yes, slyness comes at a cost. And don’t forget to delete those decoded image/binary/multimedia files that you downloaded as well, preferably using a file shredder program on them. The rule of thumb is: the smaller the file, the easier it is to recover from an emptied recycle bin using specialized tools.
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