FAQ 7 Part Z: Unsorted Questions

The following question was asked to me by Viper, who maintains a website dedicated to Japanese hentai anime. This is the relevant part of his question:

Q: "...when i download i just dont know if im getting the complete collection or not and the name of the collection. Yeah there is the name of the pics like tarky85.jpg but really that dont tell me anything if you know what i mean..."

Here is my response:

Viper,
A good poster will post indices which will say exactly how may pictures are in the series (with thumbnails of each one) as well as the name of the series.

This is assuming it's not a scan of a manga, in which case it probably won't, since those are always posted completely by any competant poster, and the name of the series should be obvious from the title page. ;)

Person X: I said downloading. I'm to tired! ;-) 100 times :downloading, downloading, downloading, downloading

Ramses: ...you could probably download much easier if you used a program like Getright or Gozilla to do the downloading for you. Have you used something like them before? You click on the links you want to download (a single click will capture the link), and they will add the link to their download list. Then when you're ready you tell Getright or Gozilla to start downloading, and it will download its list one by one while you're sleeping / eating / decorating your pyramid. ;)

Note: Getright and Gozilla are listed in FAQ 6B

Someone asked why he got a "Packet Reflection" error. The following was my response.

If you are interested in the technical explanation, data by your modem is grouped together and sent off in packets. "Packet reflection" means that the packets your modem is sending are getting reflected back. The most common cause of this is Call Waiting. If someone wants to call you up for a date and you're busy online, a "packet reflection" error will eventually occur if the call waiting is not disabled. Another cause is lifting another end of an extension telephone. A third possible cause is line noise (static). Yet another possible cause is an incompatability with comm.drv Once again, by far the most common cause is simply Call Waiting. ;)

Q: Ramses40: i am searching for two things...where can i find a CABview program and QM player that will work with win3.1, i have looked everywhere and nothing......please help, send reply to: subzero-sg1@mailcity.com thanks and take care

CabView is free and is included with Powertoys, a package you can get from Micro$oft's webpage and many other sites:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/download/powertoy.exe

You can find other links using a search engine or http://www.download.com (that's how I found it). Other links are included in FAQ 6B of my webpage.

As for a QM player for win 3.1, I don't know of one, but if one exists, it would probably be too slow for a computer using win 3.1 because QM is similar to RM files (high compression usually requires a faster computer).

The link I provide in FAQ 6B to the QM player is the official webpage for QM, so if they don't have one for win 3.1, it probably doesn't exist.

Q: How do you do reposts? How do you remove those extra returns?

FAQ 10 has a few suggestions on this. In addition, there is software to help with reposting (such as Editpad).

Q: How safe is getting zips from a site?

You download them at your own risk. Apparently some people will put viruses in them, so I suggest you do not run programs put in them. I also doubt they would contain anything that you can't find in the appropriate newsgroup.

Viper was asking me several questions about hentai anime newsgroups. Here was my response:

viper,
Original series that are posted to news are usually scanned by the original poster. In other words, the original poster tyipcally has a hardcopy of the series in print and scanned it for posting.

The vast majority of series you see on news did not originate either directly or indirectly from a website. In fact, you will find that the exact opposite is true in the vast majority of websites you see.

As evidence of this, notice that the vast majority of series in newsgroups are of far greater quality than the series you see in the vast majority of websites. If posters to news simply posted things from websites, this would not be the case.

While some websites do scan their own material, the vast majority do not. Many get their material directly from newsgroups, and usually they degrade the image (by making it smaller in dimensions and filesize) and often mask them. Most of the remaining websites take them from other websites that actually do scan material themselves. Of course, this does mean that there are hard working webmasters out there that always get copied by others. ;)

As for requests, most reposts in newsgroups are in response to someone else's request.

Q: There are as many as 20 pieces of a movie in the newsgroup, but i dunno how to piece them together, i use WinCode 2.7, but no luck, anyone have any ideas?

It's probably easiest to use a newsreader that will automatically join the parts of the movie together (SBNews or Newsbin will do this). With Free Agent you can select the parts, right click, and choose decode. With Outlook it also has a manual decode option.

Otherwise, you'll have to cut and paste the 20 pieces together and then decode them using a program like Wincode, which isn't very convenient and is prone to mistakes.

Some people get problems when they try to run .rm movies. One person described an "invalid url error".

Here is my reply:
This means that the movie you are trying to play is of a newer version than the Realplayer you are using. Realplayer then tries to look up a website to get a newer version of Realplayer on the web, which it can't find (causing the "invalid url error"). In actuality you have to download Realplayer G2, which should be able to play all current .rm files. You can get Realplayer G2 for free at their website http://www.real.com The disadvantage of G2 is that it doesn't run well on slow computers.

Q: can someone tell an idiot what causes a computer/program to freeze up?

Usually an overlooked bug in a program causes your computer to freeze up. Often the bug is a problem with conflicting memory, which will cause your computer to freeze up seemingly at random.

The chances of this type of freeze up happening is significantly increased by unusual conditions. Which programs do you think caused the freeze up?

Q: i want to learn how to break passes and basically hack...
all of the hack sight that i have found haven't really helped... i was wondering if any of you have a url that my teach me how to do all of this stuff... thanx

johnny,
If you want to practice cracking zips, you can try cracking this zip at my site: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/hartford/190/happo.zip

You can find a zip cracker in FAQ 6B called FZC:
file://c:/web/faqs/ramfaq06.htm

The DOS command line to crack this example is:
fzc b happo 0 a

You'll know it works when the cracker returns the password "pass"
There are other crackers out there as well, but I haven't tried many out.

As for hacking, that's something you'll have to ask someone else about.
Good luck. ;)

Blue17
Ramses (or anybody),
After lurking here for a while, I tried using the newsgroups to get pics. It kinda worked but I have a question: I keep seeing posts that are "indexes" of picture series. You know, single pages with all the pictures in small size with their names or numbers. Why would anyone do this? Is there something special you have to do to get the series all split up?

Ramses
Blue17,
There are several possible reasons for posting indices. Here are just a few of the more common:
1) You can save people the download time by giving them a preview of what you are posting. If they don't like, they can easily tell their newsreader/newsbot to skip them assuming they have a decent one.
2) A collector can tell if they have missed any by cross-checking with the index. On indices that contain filesize information, the collector can determine if they have the full picture.
3) A casual news surfer can pick and choose which ones they want from the index and only download the corresponding posts, skipping the rest.
4) You can post several indices and wait for people to request the ones they want posted. This way the poster won't annoy everyone by posting something few people want (such as something that's recently just been posted).
5) The poster can tease the rest of the group for fun. ;)

In any case, if you're just recommending a site every now and then, I don't think most people would consider it spam. Generally spammers that I hear complaints about are those that try to literally force people to visit their site. Next comes the sites that try to trick people into visiting their site. Generally I figure if you want to inflate hits instead of getting real visitors to your site you might as well set up the reload button. ;) Most people who repeatedly advertise sites don't go that far, so I don't think most people are referring to them when they complain of spam.

From what I've seen, the only time spam at boards get more hits than spam on newsgroups is when one of the first two tactics are used. Unfortunately, hits generated these ways don't tend to mean any more than hitting the reload button, since visitor retention tends to be understandibly poor. Also, due to some actions that a few naughty people took against the theeunderground site they've lost more visitors than they gained (several of their sponsors stopped linking to them and provided an estimation of the number of hits that they were generating)

Lord High Executioner, Po Po is right concerning entrapment as far as most countries are concerned. If authorities mail you a brochure soliciting you to purchase something from them, that is entrapment in many countries (but definitely not all). Authorities in most countries are allowed to present an opportunity for a crime, but in most countries they would be overstepping their authority if they actually encouraged or promoted it through solicitation to otherwise law-abiding individuals.
In trading, it is assumed that you were in possession of whatever you were sending before you were ever asked to trade. So, assuming you are in a country where posession is illegal, your crime would have been committed before they ever made a solicitation; your trading with someone is merely proof of a crime already committed. As I said before, you can't generalize for every country, because some countries have very different definitions of entrapment (in some countries there is no such thing as entrapment at all and in some police are allowed to arrest without any proof, but those are generally exceptions).

Po Po, While you are also right that in most countries it is not illegal to fantasize, but believe it or not, in some countries they still have laws against specific thought (generally politically, but sometimes also religeous and sexual). Also, in most countries I don't think the clerk in your example would not be able to argue entrapemnt, unless he can demonstrate that the minor had some powerful persuasive powers. ;) As for laws, they vary quite widely (in practice anywhere from anything being legal to everything being illegal). After all, in some countries they have the death penalty for producing any form of pornography (which has been enforced). ;) For that reason, while exploitation has an issue in determining laws, it usually does not in individual trials.