Just saw on Titus Tech Talk that torrents are last decade, and newsgroups is where it’s at for this stuff. Of course he didn’t elaborate, so I need some help here.
What is he talking about, and what are these groups that can I enter er, avoid?
Interesting. Newsgroups are literally what i used last century for my piracy. But back then you got newsgroups (and other services) included with your internet.
They do sometimes; but they also comply with takedown notices. Thing is, they all mirror each other’s data and are located globally. Take one down, 2 more pop up outside your jurisdiction; and files that get taken down are only taken from one provider at a time, while others pick up the slack. It’s an endless game of wack-a-mole that’s essentially a waste of time.
This is why it’s somewhat important to have more than one provider in seprate jurisdictions but not absolutely critical. You can move from one to another pretty seamlessly.
I’ve used usenet for maybe 6 months lightly, so admittedly I’m not the mostly experienced. That being said, I know how to sort search results by popularity and size, and I’ve still had at least 5 video links download executables in that time, from various indexers. Maybe those .exes were completely innocent and not malware… But for some reason I have my doubts.
Personally I’d argue RD is actually cheap for video, and unless you NEED max download speeds, torrents are just as good as Usenet for anything else.
(Note torrents will probably need a VPN too, but that’s still substantially cheaper than Usenet if you buy years at a time. And personally I use a VPN for usenet too, although I’m sure I’ll be downvoted and called paranoid.)
You need a provider (giving you access to it), some indexers (communities that catalog and link to releases) and a download client, and you’re good to go. What you actually don’t need is a VPN, because you’re only loading from the provider and not seeding anything.
torrents are last decade, and newsgroups is where it’s at for this stuff
100% accurate. There are a ton of guides online to getting your indexer and providers picked and set up. It’s a much better space than torrents. I’m never going back into the muck with those things.
Back in the day, people shared files on usenet news, which was similar to the forums you’re seeing on Lemmy or Reddit.
You’d take a file, image, video, whatever, and turn it into text via a program called uuencode.
Text size posting limits often meant having to split the image into multiple text pieces all marked (1/34, 2/34, etc.)
The person downloading the file would then need to stitch all the pieces together, in order, making one large text file, then use uudecode to turn it back into a usable file.
Here’s a sample of what a uuencoded file looked like:
From a user aspect: nowadays all that is burried in/handed by the usenet client you use.
Downloading from usenet is very similar to torrenting in that you receive an index file (.nzb) that is effectively equivalent to a torrent file. You pass that to your usenet client, and it’ll handle downloading each of the parts, called articles, then stitching them together into the actual file shares. (while even recovering missing/corrupted data via added parity data)
The big difference is you’re downloading each of these articles from whichever usenet providers you’ve configured; instead of from random individual peers discovered through public/private trackers.
Usenet providers usually offer more consistent and faster speeds, typically saturating my disk write speed; where as torrent peers are often slow or unreliable in comparison. Also as it’s a standard tls connection between you and a private service, and you don’t have to re-upload the data you download; you’re not exposed to copyright claimants and don’t need a vpn.
Been like a decade since I touched usenet but I do recall that requests were pretty common. Especially since the content expires. With a 5 year old torrent there’s a decent chance you’ll find a couple of seeders even on a public tracker and get it eventually, but with usenet that stuff does eventually rot away and you’ll have to request a reup.
I mean usenet servers are running with insane retention… omicron hosts have 5648 day retention, other backbones are over 4500
Unless it gets taken down, it doesn’t go away anymore… providers just keep retaining. I suppose that will end eventually… maybe some day the cost of storage will prohibit archiving 15 year old binary usenet posts.
That’s down the the indexer you decide to use. The one I use (NZBGeek) does have a requests section where you can enter an IMDB id, TVDB id, or just a general description and any other necessary/desired details like quality and they’ll be filled by volunteers.
TBH not something I’d actually looked into until now. I’m gonna go drop a request or two in there right now. There’s not much I’m missing, but the things I am I haven’t been able to find regardless of source.
Yeah, the notion that no one uses torrents anymore is hilarious. I use both frequently. Usenet is great and has a lot of benefits, but it doesn’t hold a candle to torrents as far as breadth of available content.
You’ll want to do some research on nzb files and their transfer mechanism. I’d say both nzb and torrents together is the best option because you have redundancy rather than one is better than the other
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