Robin Laing posted on Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:14:41 -0600 as excerpted:
> On 2025-08-30 06.39, Dave wrote:
>> On Saturday, 23 August 2025 10:11:52 British Summer Time Duncan wrote:
>>> I haven't done regular binary downloads in years so I'm honestly not
>>> sure what modern "obfuscation" looks like (as compared to say, all the
>>> spam garbage
>>
>> I suspect he's referring to the often 1000's at a time posts, with
>> random strings of characters in the subject line and a random senders
>> email address for every single post. [...] I suspect they can only be
>> filtered after the fact, once the headers have been downloaded. The
>> normally visible headers are almost all random strings.
>>
> That is pretty much what is happening. The issue is the posts are
> showing up in different groups from time to time and flood them with
> 10,000's of posts. Some are groups under the same users. Others are
> nothing but garbage by looking at the author or subject.
So these are all garbage posts that need deleted unread, preferably pre-
download-to-cache if possible?
If so I was thrown off by the "obfuscation" description, thinking it might
actually involve a new method of "obfuscating" the subject and possibly
author header lines of actually on-topic, desired, posts, in ordered to
combat automated censorship and copyright-enforcement bots.
If it is indeed just another form of unwanted spam to have to process...
One strategy I found very helpful was making active use of the sort column
(with or without threading enabled as appropriate).
Sort by author, find whole ranges of hundreds of spam/chaos-agent posts,
aided by sight-recognition of repeated author that could indicate an on-
topic series to avoid mass-deleting. Avoid the latter on first mass-
delete pass at least. Click first of a spam range, shift-click last,
delete. Next range...
Then sort by subject, same general thing, again aided by sight-recognition
of repeat-patterns to avoid on first mass-delete pass at least.
Then if the group's one that often has README, *.txt or *.nfo type text-
file posts that go with series, try finding them and for subjects that
interest you, check to see if there's matching series to download.
Once the desired small-text-file posts you want are processed, if it's not
a group with text-based discussion posts, most of the rest of the too-
small-for-binaries posts can be weeded out with a size sort and delete.
This sort of strategy was surprisingly effective at weeding out huge
numbers of spam and chaos-agent/anti-piracy posts -- effective enough I
used to wonder why more of them didn't deliberately mass-post several
fake-series using the same fake author, before switching to another, as
that would seem to me a more effective chaos-agent strategy if that was
the intent. Some did, but it was still a surprisingly effective strategy
for the many simply random posts.
Obviously if the mentioned "obfuscation" was of actually wanted on-topic
posts, this sort of strategy would likely delete many actually wanted
posts. Which is what threw me off at first, as that's exactly what I took
"obfuscation" to mean.
Meanwhile, I really like DD's up-thread idea of scoring on unnaturally
long strings of no-space text in subjects (and authors?) too, as I suppose
that should be quite effective on this sort of obfuscation, and even
better, unlike my stuff above, that can be fully automated as a pre-cache
action to avoid the download! 15 or more alphanumeric (plus -)
characters...
[alt.binaries.*]
Score:: -9999
Subject: [0-9a-f-]{15,}
> One group I used regularly got hit by this. It had many old and strange
> movies that are hard to find.
>
> I have read that many of these Android TV boxes that you can use to
> pirate TV are the reason for these posts as feed sources for the boxes.
If I'm reading that correctly, these obfuscated posts may then be actually
on topic after all, but I take it still more a nuisance than useful if
you're not on one of these AndroidTV boxes with the ability to properly
deal with them? Or are they, while useful to the AndroidTV folks,
effectively posted to random groups so an unwanted off-topic invasion of
the group, from the perspective of the users actually using it for on-
topic posts, anyway? Or maybe they're actually anti-piracy efforts aimed
at screwing up the AndroidTV boxes?
> If I can get pan working enough to monitor, then I will know more.
Please do follow up if/when you do know more, as it's certainly topical
and interesting/likely-useful, both for me personally if I ever get back
into binaries, and surely for others as well. Additionally, as an active
regular on this list/group, I can easily envision reposting some part of
the info in some future discussion, too, which would make it personally
useful in that way even if I never get back into binaries myself...
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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