My findings on Usenet

Right now in the digital world the go to protocol for file distribution and sharing is the bittorent protocol. And with good reason too, being one of the most supported file transferring protocols available and with relatively little effort one can get started rocking away with it. However, avoiding the glory that bittorent basks itself in is an ancient system which the more shady users of the internet prefer to lurk in. It’s name is Usenet.

Now then, I don’t intend to write up a walk through on what you need and how to get yourself started on using Usenet. That’s been pretty well documented over at http://mantup.com/ and that is where I got my start from. They’ve explained it so well that anything I might want to add would only confuse you, which is no fun (well, maybe for me).

There is a vast amount of data to browse through in Usenet. These days a lot of it seems to be pirated material. Usenet’s popularity also comes from the fact that it is 100% anonymous. You don’t need to wait for seeders and can basically leech all you want, at speeds any user familiar with bittorent would envy. On the flip side ISPs have caught onto the popularity of Usenet and so you will need to subscribe to a paid service to access it. Not only that, but these service can have bandwidth usage limits, speed throttles, and various durations of retention, all of which are affected by how much cash you are willing to part with. Then you need to find a decent NZB (that’s the Usenet equivelent of torrent files) index site, and often these will also cost you either a monthly subscription or a once off ‘donation’ of some sort.

I happened to get my hands on an unmetered bandwidth Usenet plan which had 380 days of retention. Which I thought was fantastic, for a moment. You see, with the plan I had you can’t download anything that’s been posted to Usenet after the 380 day mark. And often, the data that I’m looking for, the good old stuff is beyond the scope of what was accessible. Bittorent still wins in the respect of variety and availability of files. In fact, with Usenet you’ll struggle to find anything that hasn’t just been released by The Scene (the people who put out the stuff we want and risk their jobs, lives, etc) within a year. Which means that the main reason you would want to subscribe to Usenet is for the high speeds and anonymity correct?

Wrong! Why do that when you could for the same prices subscribe to a VPN or SSH service and tunnel your bittorent traffic through that? There’s a guide for that over at http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-over-ssh-071014/ with easy to follow explanations. And that is what I intend to do. Following that method ensures your traffic is encrypted satisfying the need for anonymity, and seeing as encrypted data is given priority bandwidth it results in faster transfer speeds. Sure, play around with Usenet, but since the Scene releases in more formats to the bittorent indexes than the usenet indexes, usenet now seems to be just a major waste of time dabbling in antiquated technology.