UDP

Usenet Death Penalty. An acronym that describes the action of one or many Usenet servers refusing the articles of another server. This is undertaken as a measure against providers that are sources for spam or disruptive users, and for other extreme circumstances. This refusal may be either passive, meaning that all posts under the UDP are ignored and propagation is prohibited; or a UDP may be active, which results in the actual deletion or cancellation of all posts coming from the offending server or provider. A partial UDP only inhibits the propagation of particular groups, individuals, or hierarchies while a total UDP inhibits the propagation of all data from a server..

Usenet Client / News reader / News Client

The software used to participate in Usenet newsgroups. Such programs make Usenet accessible and browse-able through an interface that is much like a traditional web browser, allowing users to search newsgroups, download binaries, and read text articles. There are many news clients available, including those associated with the various web browsers such as Mozilla's Thunderbird which lets you read email and Usenet. There are also free and paid commercial clients with a variety of different features available.

yEnc

yEnc is an 8-bit extended ASCII encoding method used to convert binary files for use on Usenet. yEnc was developed as an alternative to uuencode, BASE64, and BinHex. yEnc works by converting bytes in a binary file to a special set of 8-bit extended ASCII characters (encoding). These characters are then posted into a newsgroup article and downloaded by other readers. The characters are then converted back to the original binary bytes (decoding) so the reader can view or use the original file. Example of yEnc Encoded characters: ????V??Qh????@ K???b??_=@? =}A+5?c ? ?+?U?]????Tp?F ?????V??? yEnc was an improvement over tradtional encoding technologies such as uuencode or BASE64 because it utilizes the current 8-bit method of data storage vs. the 6-bit or 7-bit based encoding used in previous generations of encoding algorithms. yEnc's 8-bit based encoding algorithm means a smoother conversion from the original binary file and less character mapping. Tradtional Usenet based encoding algorithms add 33-40% of additional data to your source file. This additional data is referred to as overhead. Overhead includes header data and additional character mapping for Usenet specific bytes (examples: nulls, \n\b.\r). yEnc only adds 1-2% overhead through it's encoding algorithm. The value in reduced overhead is felt all along the Usenet chain. By utilizing yEnc the poster spends less time encoding and transferring their encoded file to Usenet. The Usenet provider spends less bandwidth and storage hosting the article and making it available for download to other Usenet users. Downloaders also spend less time downloading the articles and decoding them back into the original file format. Most news readers today support integrated yEnc support so chances are you probably would never know that a post was made using the yEnc encoding algorithm.