
Usenet, what have you become? (2012) - pmoriarty
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/08/28/usenet-what-have-you-become/
======
Cymen
I am a former usenet user. I used it first for actual discussion threads (like
HN!) but later for binary content. I tried it again a couple years ago and the
commons are being abused. An example of it is password-protected binary
content that requires going to a website to get the password which of course
requires additional actions like viewing an ad or signing up for a large
number of mailing lists (with embedded referral codes). There are indexers
that help find content that does not suffer from this problem but they come
and go.

I still would like to use usenet for that content I can't get on
Netflix/Amazon/HBO/Redbox but the effort required is too much -- I'll settle
for watching something else. I also feel better about actual paying for the
content I consume. I have my fingers crossed that we'll see more and more of
the unstreamable content come to streaming providers.

~~~
Scaevolus
There are Usenet indexers that filter out password-protected archives and
provide well-organized listings of high-quality binaries.

~~~
Cymen
> There are indexers that help find content that does not suffer from this
> problem but they come and go.

------
patrickfl
The fact is, it is now confusing for most end users. I tried explaining usenet
the other day, and people just can't wrap their head around something other
than "a web page" or "an app."

Not only is it a different protocol, but it is a different interface as well.

But I realize this post was meant more towards Usenet's intended audience. I
know for me, I really started migrating away from Usenet around 2005-06 when
the SPAM got so bad I could barely sift through my daily posts.

~~~
ljk
could you explain here?

~~~
na85
A surprising number of people aren't able to separate the concepts of "the
internet" and "the world wide web". When you try to explain that USENET is a
whole separate entity from the web, running along side it on the Internet,
their eyes tend to glaze over.

~~~
Dylan16807
More than anything else, that's because most people don't care about the fussy
details of the term "world wide web".

"It's online but not a web page" won't glaze over many eyes.

------
benzinschleuder
Usenet is also usable for backups. Normally you would upload a huge encrypted
RAR.

Some time ago i built a tool where you can store files/folders incrementally
on Usenet with encryption, parity etc. I put much effort into this. It was
possible to restore a directory tree by a unique ID (which you could write on
some piece of paper) that securely resolves to a chain which links to meta/raw
blocks via Message-IDs and you could mount the whole thing with OSXFuse. The
ID was reusable after updates to the tree, so incremental backups worked
without a new ID.

I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet instead
of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it would lead to
pollution of the Usenet network.

Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use this
without polluting the network? Would love to hear some thoughts about this!

~~~
usenetthrowa
I wonder if you could convince cperciva (Tarsnap) to exploit Usenet as an
encrypted block store (as a cheaper alternative to S3).

> I thought this would be a nice alternative use for binaries on Usenet
> instead of piracy stuff. But I never released it because I think that it
> would lead to pollution of the Usenet network.

> Is anyone interested in this? Or maybe somebody has an idea on how to use
> this without polluting the network?

No way around it, it's absolutely an abuse of the network. That being said, so
is the piracy on the binary subgroups. I think the end use would be small
enough to not materially affect the binary NNTP hosts anyway.

~~~
benzinschleuder
Not sure about being the middleman yet. What if the big Usenet providers
decide to delete data or we violate their non-business-usage policies? But on
the other hand it's really cheap indeed! We can cancel our Usenet subscription
and renew it when the data is needed. So I thought it's maybe better to cut
out the middleman by giving the software away.

About the abuse: I imagined that the method could be used like some unlimited-
disk-space-providers which had to get rid of that plan because the users used
it as advertised.

Of course, apart from that, anyone can write such software. So it's maybe just
a matter of time? Though I couldn't find any other solutions besides RAR
archives.

The Usenet can be used as a key-value store with handicaps. And stuff can be
built on top of that.

~~~
ams6110
I don't understand how you could use newsgroups for storage, except in a "I
don't care about data loss" kind of way. I haven't used USENET in decades, but
NNTP is a messaging protocol it says nothing about storage AFAIK. I do recall
that back in the day, messages in busy newsgroups would expire rather quickly
(probably due to limited storage on my news server at the time). So if I post
a message containing my backup to a binary newsgroup, what assurance do I have
that I will be able to get it back?

~~~
usenetthrowa
Commercial binary NNTP providers have basically infinite retention at this
point, if your content doesn't generate DMCA takedown requests. E.g.
[http://www.news.astraweb.com/](http://www.news.astraweb.com/) $10/mo gets you
2660 days (>7 years) of retention, growing at roughly one day per day. (Four
years ago, 3 years of retention was common.) There are also pay-by-download-
in-GB a la carte plans that would be good for backup-only use (because upload
is free).

Even if it isn't infinite, you can download and repost every 7 years if you
care about having backups for longer than that.

------
brownbat
> You get one thing – [release day availability]

I'd bet it's not zero days, but one stop shopping. So the consumer saves the
overhead of wondering, "wait, is this on Hulu? Netflix? Amazon? iPlayer?" The
entire catalog is in one place.

I think Netflix and Amazon are getting to the point where their catalogs are
deeper than usenet.

Of course, most film junkie's "essential 100" lists will still probably hit
somewhere less than 10% representation on Netflix:
[http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/films-on-spike-
lees-...](http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/films-on-spike-lees-list-of-
essentials-that-are-streaming-on-netflix)

Still an availability problem though.

~~~
ams6110
Netflix (and probably Amazon too -- I have Prime but the UI for the video
service is so bad I normally don't bother with it) is falling into the cable
model of hundreds of channels but nothing to watch. More often than not I will
spend 15-20 minutes browsing Netflix to find something interesting that I
haven't already watched, and end up just switching it off because there's not
much there.

~~~
oxide
It's the same as opening the fridge, finding nothing you want, and going back
a bit later with lower standards.

It's not that there is nothing there, your standards just need adjusted before
you can appreciate what is there.

I guess the same can be applied to cable, but you have to _really_ lower those
standards to appreciate dozens of home shopping networks, reality TV and
infomercials.

------
Animats
There's still "eternal-september.org", which offers the non-binary USENET
groups. The "comp.lang" hierarchy is still widely used, and the main
discussions of changes to the C and C++ standard are still on USENET.

There is almost no spam.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
One of these web-server setup fails again. The site is only accessible with
the www. sub-domain: [http://www.eternal-september.org/](http://www.eternal-
september.org/)

~~~
cpach
[http://eternal-september.org](http://eternal-september.org) works fine in my
browser.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
Not in Chrome. I just get "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED".

------
windlep
In the past 3 years on usenet, something has changed though. Perhaps in
response to this article and/or the others talking about it.

Some studios are getting drastically faster at getting their content pulled
within minutes of nzb's appearing on the index sites. It's not as if its
difficult to scan the groups and topics and issue take-down's on posts to the
NSP's.

~~~
stinos
This. Some shows seem impossible to get via usenet and I end up looking for
torrents anyway. (Also some shows seem not popular enough, so again torrents
to the rescue). Which still is a major PITA as I never looked into something
like SickBeard but for torrents. Any recommendations?

~~~
schwap
Yeah, some networks (HBO) are extremely vigilant. If you don't have some kind
of always-on device scanning for releases you'll be too late.

------
stinos
_$20-35 US Dollars a month for Giganews usenet_

Can be found cheaper though, like 1/4th of that price, if you're happy with
less retention (1600 days instead of 4000 or so) and a download speed limit
(never found this a problem, background downloading during the night or day
still means you can watch shows same day or day after if you're into that).

------
seibelj
I was a loyal giganews user for 10+ years. Then the content creators started
getting content pulled very quickly, sometimes within days of upload, and the
whole thing started becoming a huge hassle.

By this point I was making enough money that $30 a month split between a few
streaming services and a few bucks occasionally for a movie on amazon prime
wasn't a big deal. It feels good to pay for quality. But as a young kid, who
wanted to experience so many types of media and no means to pay, usenet was
the best.

Piracy is the perfect thing for kids interested in computers to use. It's
complex, you need to figure stuff out, takes a lot of time (which kids have),
and the reward for doing so is free content. But once you get old and are
time-poor and have the money, it's not really needed anymore.

~~~
icebraining
Piracy still has the better catalog; until not long ago, you couldn't even
watch Star Wars online.

~~~
yoha

        telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

------
striking
That's very interesting. I wonder if, three years later, there would be a
script to set this all up on a Raspberry Pi to run automatically.

(If not, I wonder if I should? Sounds at least like a fun weekend project.)

In any case I think Popcorn Time still works well, and if not, there's always
regular torrenting.

~~~
anardil
A script like that would be completely feasible, but wouldn't that make it
more popular? Isn't it's difficulty to set up what's keeping it under the
radar?

------
paulddraper
Earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442826)

------
nickysielicki
FWIW, nzbget ([http://nzbget.net](http://nzbget.net)) is considered better
than SABnzbd nowadays.

~~~
feld
SABnzbd is so slow I don't know why anyone would want to use it

------
bane
So, today's desktops and high-speed internet connections are more than enough
to just have personal Usenet servers instead of subscribing to somebody else's
(or having your ISP shut down there's), anybody know what it would take to do
this for real?

(after all I remember having access to full Usenet servers being served off
ancient computers hooked into a T-1)

~~~
res0nat0r
Sure, if you have the bandwidth and hard drive space to mirror 25+ TB of new
content a day...

~~~
naveen99
Text only should be doable. All of Reddit is less than a terabyte.

------
rvern
I don't agree with the claims that Usenet is dead, or that it isn't used for
actual discussion anymore. I am subscribed to many newsgroups and most of them
are very active. They work in all regards like mailing lists: you will find
support lists for programming languages or software, announcement lists, and
discussion groups about humanities, politics and many other subjects you might
be interested in. People who ask questions actually get answers.

There is spam, yes, but almost all of it is in newsgroups that receive no
messages other than spam, and there is no point in subscribing to these
newsgroups in the first place. You can filter the rest away with SpamAssassin
or Bogofilter.

You can get free access from news.solani.org or www.eternal-september.org to
the non-binary newsgroups, where all the interesting discussion happens. Any
client like Gnus or Thunderbird can do.

------
demian00
There are now a lot of encrypted or hashed uploads. And to get the content you
need to pay for an indexer.

------
boggie1688
Cost per month: $10 for usenet access with SSL support $3 for VPN anonymity
$100 for 150mbps internet access $15 for electricity to run a 24/7 box

Total per month - $128 to have things literally on demand.

How much do you pay your cable or satellite company?

EDIT:

I should say that the box does cost money, but usually can be piece together
with old equipment.

