always-deciduous-tree
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2023
I've not used Usenet (I go the private tracker torrenting route), but I understand the following:
Usenet is a decentralized communication protocol composed of "Newsgroups," which are the early Internet predecessors to websites and forums. There was a newsgroup for everything, such as local community news, movies, breeding animals, etc. Many of these newsgroups have now died and are inactive, but piracy remains active due to the decentralized nature of Usenet.
There are two major components of piracy on Usenet: gateways and indexers.
The piracy arm of Usenet is huge, with roughly 175 TB of media uploaded each day, and this hosting isn't free. The first service that one has to pay for to access to Usenet pirated media is a Usenet gateway, which is paying for access to these massive servers where content is hosted. It is my understanding that all of these services are more or less equal to each other, therefore one gateway isn't inherently better than the next. The consideration of the gateway is secondary to the other paid aspect of Usenet, the indexer.
Although the Internet is often the wild west, and Usenet is the wilder west, some efforts are made to obfuscate the content being hosted, msotly to avoid DMCA notices (which people still seem to care about). Content is often split into many smaller .rar files with gibberish titles to hide their true identity, and the indexer is simply an index of which files constitute a given piece of media. From an indexer website, one downloads a NZB (newzbin) file which has the addresses for .rar fragments, loads the file into a program for retreiving Usenet files (using your paid for gateway), and then downloads the content. The content comes through as a HTTPS download from Usenet: your ISP can see you downloaded something from Usenet, but they cannot identify it, so you will never get a DMCA notice (or other copyright violation if you live in a country that cares).
As the gateways are more or less the same, the more important aspect is getting signed up to a nice indexer. Indexers don't inherently share their NZB directories, so some are better than others. I am told that Drunkenslug and NinjaCentral are two of the best. Their registrations are usually closed and invite only, so their current open registrations are worth paying attention to.
It seems to me that someone who is curious about Usenet would do well to sign up for the free tiers of these indexers now, and then spend a day or so figuring out whether or not you actually want the account. If so, use it (you will probably have to upgrade to a paid account if you plan on using the indexers often). Accounts are automatically pruned for inactivity if they go unused. It seems that there is no social stigma against being pruned for inactivity, contra to the private trackers of torrents.
Another web post about Usenet that I did not read, but it looks good, can be found here.
Hopefully some Usenet users can chime in. I am more suited to discussing torrenting via seedboxes, which is most of my experience.
Usenet is a decentralized communication protocol composed of "Newsgroups," which are the early Internet predecessors to websites and forums. There was a newsgroup for everything, such as local community news, movies, breeding animals, etc. Many of these newsgroups have now died and are inactive, but piracy remains active due to the decentralized nature of Usenet.
There are two major components of piracy on Usenet: gateways and indexers.
The piracy arm of Usenet is huge, with roughly 175 TB of media uploaded each day, and this hosting isn't free. The first service that one has to pay for to access to Usenet pirated media is a Usenet gateway, which is paying for access to these massive servers where content is hosted. It is my understanding that all of these services are more or less equal to each other, therefore one gateway isn't inherently better than the next. The consideration of the gateway is secondary to the other paid aspect of Usenet, the indexer.
Although the Internet is often the wild west, and Usenet is the wilder west, some efforts are made to obfuscate the content being hosted, msotly to avoid DMCA notices (which people still seem to care about). Content is often split into many smaller .rar files with gibberish titles to hide their true identity, and the indexer is simply an index of which files constitute a given piece of media. From an indexer website, one downloads a NZB (newzbin) file which has the addresses for .rar fragments, loads the file into a program for retreiving Usenet files (using your paid for gateway), and then downloads the content. The content comes through as a HTTPS download from Usenet: your ISP can see you downloaded something from Usenet, but they cannot identify it, so you will never get a DMCA notice (or other copyright violation if you live in a country that cares).
As the gateways are more or less the same, the more important aspect is getting signed up to a nice indexer. Indexers don't inherently share their NZB directories, so some are better than others. I am told that Drunkenslug and NinjaCentral are two of the best. Their registrations are usually closed and invite only, so their current open registrations are worth paying attention to.
It seems to me that someone who is curious about Usenet would do well to sign up for the free tiers of these indexers now, and then spend a day or so figuring out whether or not you actually want the account. If so, use it (you will probably have to upgrade to a paid account if you plan on using the indexers often). Accounts are automatically pruned for inactivity if they go unused. It seems that there is no social stigma against being pruned for inactivity, contra to the private trackers of torrents.
Another web post about Usenet that I did not read, but it looks good, can be found here.
Hopefully some Usenet users can chime in. I am more suited to discussing torrenting via seedboxes, which is most of my experience.
