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?
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"torrents are so last decade, we need to use the technology of four decades ago!"
USENET was first rolled out in 1979.
- The Supreme Court, probably
Roe vs Wade is so last decade… What we really need is much older legal precedent, ah yes, like from this judge who presided over Witch Trials.
Well played, friend.
We all know the firearms policies of 1627 are what we really need to cure society’s ills in 2024
A creative interpretation of the firearms policies of 1627.
Musket life.
Just as the founding fathers intended.
Honestly he is talking out of his ass, torrents are neither dead nor slow nor used by nobody. They’re very much alive.
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.
Chris does most of his talking out his own ass in my opinion.
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.
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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.
Usenet retention has been pretty much infinite the last 15 years.
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.
That’s cool. I never knew about that!
Newsgroups = usenet.
He’s talking about Usenet.
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.
more specifically you don need a vpn because it’s all obfuscated ssl
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
I know I get all my up to date piracy information from a comedian podcast.
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.
I’ll have to look into it. I remember usenets as a kid but that was 25 30 years ago haha cries in getting old
Yeah, last time I used Usenet the client was the email client, your ISP hosted a server, and the internet occupied the phone line
Flashget was a life saver
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.
Why don’t these usenet servers get taken down? They share stuff much more directly than piratebay ever did.
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.
Faster download speeds, high cost of entry, and a lot more malware
Disagree. I’ve never encountered malware in over a decade. Cost of should be less than the cost of a Netflix subscription.
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.)
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And most decent indexers these days.
Using automation software like the Arrs, dramatically improves the UX/UI, providing another layer of filtering too.
The cost for these things isn’t terribly high. You can get three excellent indexers and a good provider for less than $12USD a month.
People are paying to pirate?
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