this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Technology wise, Usenet abuses decade old Mailbox protocols and software for file downloads it was never designed for. Torrents are modern, decentralized and redundant. Usenet was always a huge PITA. Especially if some parts were missing.
Unless the original seeder disconnects before someone else gets the full file. If they do then hopefully #3 gets it before #2 goes offline and so on. It takes a bit for the "web" to form. I've connected to tons of torrents over the years that were stuck at 99% or less, some as low as 1%. Torrents are only decentralized and fast if the content its sharing is popular.
Usenet, while ancient and centralized, is at least 10x faster in terms of downloads than any well seeded torrent could wish to be. Most Usenet servers have massive pipes and will easily max out your connection. I've had it max out a 10G pipe. Even highly seeded torrents like (actual) Linux ISOs only do a few megs a second, maybe 10 if you're lucky.
I used torrents for years but after discovering (and understanding) the Usenet suite of apps (downloaders, indexers, index aggregators, specific content downloaders, etc...) it's so much easier. I set it up and forget about it. Usenet access costs about $10/month and the indexers usually have a one time "donation", but it's way better for piracy.
Yeah Usenet was crap for binary downloads long before the BitTorrent protocol was invented.
It’s just so under the radar that it continues to plod along.
I remember when I was a teen, I used USENET to d/l pictures with a 26.4kbps modem - this was some time ago (let's call it 20 years and not discuss it further)! I don't think USENET is "plodding" at all. My setup is so automated that I spend less than 5 minutes a week verifying/whatever downloads and the like. No need to u/l anything. It. Just. Works. No risk of being hit by authorities for seeding a torrent (I have received a few ISP letters in the past that I was identified - granted I was not using a VPN or proxy at the time.)