this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Does the Usenet still exist? I haven't used it since around 2006.
It does and it’s alive and well for piracy (alt.binaries.*). As for text discussion well. It’s mostly spam and Nazis. But it’s great for sucking down content!
There has to be something similar to Rule 34 that deals with this. Rule 35: Given a long enough span of time, every form of online interaction will be infiltrated by Nazis. Like a corollary to Godwin's law.
Haha, well said
Is it worth paying a newsgroup subscription for, or is the torrent network adequate? I haven't sailed the seas in years, but I've been thinking about hoisting my jib since Netflix stopped account sharing, Paramount pulled all the Trek shows, and things are generally getting more fragmented and expensive.
I think it is worth it. Usenet has a lot of advantages, like not needing seeders. If the content’s there, you suck it down at the full speed of your connection. That said, sometimes things get DMCA’d so you have to try to download several of them, until you find one that works. Generally smaller servers are less likely to get DMCA’d. I personally use XSNews.nl having switched from NewsHosting and notice a better availability of files (eg less DMCAs). But that minor hiccup aside, it’s much faster and easier than torrenting once you get set up.
My setup is Usenapp for macOS plus XSNews as a host and a paid NZBPlanet membership for search - which you can plug right into a lot of clients, Usenapp included. So basically it’s a magical search engine and download manager that can one-click pirate just about anything at the full speed of my fiber connection. Glorious!
For the serious pirates there’s a thing called Radarr too, I haven’t dabbed in it but I understand there’s a way to set up your Synology NAS or whatever to auto-pirate new episodes of shows and stuff.
Outstanding! Thanks for all the information.
I have a newsgroup subscription, but a lot of the posts are obfuscated (confused titles that don't make sense) so you can't read the post headers like you can in (say) lemmy or reddit (spit! ) . So I also subscribe to a nzb provider (makes sense of the obfuscated) .
In terms of money it's not too much - like £20/year.
The nzb provider searches the usenet then your newsgroup host downloads what you want.
I'm probably not very clear, and this has been a learning curve for me, but if I can help I will, just ask. It's good fun - especially when it works!
Edit: too many 'buts'
Don't services like Easy News and Giga News provide one simple solution in the form of server access, searchable content, and a news client that organizes and downloads everything? That's how I used it in the past, but those services are $10-$20 per month. Do you mind sharing what you use?
There're better provider deals on r/usenet. They usually overcharge if you don't use discounts.
One subscription provider is good and then few non-expiring block accounts on a different backbone helps donwloading content that migjt've been DMCA'd on your main provider. A block with many GB's lasts a long tims since (almost) all parts of a movie are on the main subscription provider.
And then you need an indexer that usually costs around 15$ per year. Those are like torrent tracker. E.g. DrunkenSlug has currently open registrations.
But to get started a subscription provider and an indexer should be enough.
With sabnzbd (download client), Radarr, Sonarr and Prowlarr and Thrash Guides everything can be automated if you want.
Thanks for the information!
I'm using nzbgeek to find stuff. Then put the links it returns into eweka - a usenet provider. I'm new to this, so I'm just dipping my toe in to make sure it works. Currently it does but I'm sure there are better deals if you look around.
I wanted to rely on torrents but I need german and english audio for my family/friends, which usually aren't available as torrents - at least on the trackers I can access.
Usenet and direct download sites (via real-debrid) have most content in my native language and the former is the only one that can be automated with *arr.
You can get subtitles for just about any movie in a bunch of different languages at OpenSubs. It's not audio, but it could help if there's something that you can't find in the right language.
unfortunately germany is heavily "dub centric" and a lot of people here never engaged in english more than needed in school
convincing family/friends to watch a movie/series with subtitles is sometimes challenging
Yeah, there are still some decent indexers around like Drunkenslug.