
The End: NZBMatrix closes - Savid
http://nzbmatrix.com/the_end.html
======
tptacek
This is a Usenet binary sharing site whose front page, in a Usenet "video
review", was a table of movies, TV shows, and video games. In other words, it
wasn't even possible for the owners to look at their own site and not know
that it was being used almost exclusively as a tool for piracy.

Extremely common DMCA misconception: it's not enough to be "takedown
compliant". That's not how the law works. You also can't ever operate with
specific knowledge of infringing content; you are, in effect, required to
"take down" any pirated content _you_ find.

~~~
cdh
Has it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is
illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious.

My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that
there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively
coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix
hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.

~~~
tptacek
The NET act criminalizes any willful "copyright infringement" (the term used
in the act) so long as it's done for financial gain. Contributory or vicarious
liability for copyright infringement for linking is well established.

At any rate, services like these rely on the DMCA Safe Harbor provision.
Regardless of whether the potential liability is civil or criminal, you can't
have actual knowledge of infringing activity on your site _and_ the ability to
remove that activity from your site and claim safe harbor.

~~~
cookiecaper
What about Google? They make a copy of almost every image on the internet with
the full knowledge that they are nearly all covered under an absolute
copyright license of "All Rights Reserved", including the right to store and
rehost a copy of that content. How would Google's financial outlook change if
they decide to follow the letter of the law and never use pieces of
copyrighted works "for financial gain" without explicit permission from each
rightsholder first?

It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is
that the media companies like one more than the other.

~~~
Terretta
> _It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al
> is that the media companies_ NEED _one more than the other._

------
edwardh
Gotta say that I find it very questionable how many people dump on nzbmatrix
or say that it was not necessary anyway.

Sure, if you only watch high quality stuff like Skyfall and listen to Lady
Gaga, a site like nzbmatrix is probably useless to you. But for those who
appreciate things that aren't that easy to come by, it is essential to have
some sort of an index to even HEAR about them. My estimate is that at least
half of the movies and games I got through nzbmatrix, I had not heard about
anywhere else. And as every usenet user knows, it's basically just not
possible to "browse" the usenet itself.

Then there are software releases where 95% are fake or bug-ridden. Where it
saves a LOT of trial & error if people help each other out by posting only
those that are for real.

And I found no other nzb site as useful when it comes to finding all new
releases. And I have looked at them all because I did not appreciate
nzbmatrix's own censorship.

~~~
res0nat0r
You don't need a usenet indexing site to learn about good indie movies or
music. There are dozens of websites that review and discuss these things
without releasing them for free against the authors wishes....

------
spdy
_Coupled with this is problems with payment providers, we have been through
pretty much everyone out there, in the end they all pull out._

Here lies the real problem

~~~
StavrosK
These guys could benefit from BitCoin, if it were ubiquitous. Too bad...

~~~
cookiecaper
They did utilize bitcoin. I purchased my VIP account with them via bitcoin.

~~~
StavrosK
My point was more that Bitcoin isn't widespread enough to compete with
traditional payment processors yet, which would have saved these guys.

~~~
aw3c2
I would guess that also Bitcoin is nowhere stable enough to be taken
seriously. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bitcoin_exchange.png>

------
cookiecaper
Would be nice if they would a) publish their code and b) upload their nzb
database on Pirate Bay. Would make it much easier for someone to pick up the
torch.

~~~
dsl
NZBs die pretty quickly, so a back catalog wouldn't be that useful. They even
mention on the website that content is getting taken down faster than NZBs can
be updated.

~~~
cookiecaper
I've used NZBs that were 3+ years old and they've mostly worked fine.
Occasionally blocks are missing, which of course is more likely the older an
NZB gets, but _most_ of the catalog is still together.

They're right that many providers are getting hit with notices, which causes
them to remove a few chunks of each rar from their server making it impossible
to complete the download and too pervasive for repair by typically-sized
parity file, but this can be circumvented by using a lesser-known news server
as a backup; you still use Astraweb or Giganews for 99% of the transfer, but
your fallback picks up the pieces that have been DMCA'd out of AW/GN/another
major carrier.

I would be happy to see a more intelligent splitting system than rars, as one
missing block in a couple of rars will often make it really difficult to
extract the content you DO have and use a more robust delivery system, like a
torrent, to download the blocks you're missing. This is going to become
increasingly important.

News servers are interesting because they really are a non-optimal method for
this kind of transfer that has incidentally become a hot bed for filesharers,
probably just because of the plausible deniability ("yes officer, of course we
only intend our server to be used by those discussing photography..."). I too
wonder if it's not time for a new protocol, something more direct than
torrents (webseeds kinda works here, but not quite what I'm looking for) but
less hacked-up than NZBs and ASCII-encoded binaries in split files.

It's time to stop skirting around the issue and try to put together a serious
underground analog to direct-downloaded binaries, something hearty and immune,
or as immune as possible, to interference and foul play like this.

------
thechut
This is a major blow to usenet. But more importantly this could be the start
fo something very very bad for usenet. It, and it's users of who I am sure
there are plenty on HN, have so far been able to fly under the anti-piracy
radar of the big media companies. This clearly demonstrates that they know
exactly what is going on, and may be on the war path to shut down more indexes
and search engines.

~~~
tptacek
Nauseating. Piracy killed the real Usenet, and now pirates are upset that
enforcement is killing the goofy little playground they built inside its
corpse.

When I was 18, I ran a competitive (on the Freenix leaderboard) full-feed
Usenet server for the ISP I worked at. Every ISP in the world could have
provided full-feed Usenet access, but for the assholes who loaded the system
down with ASCII-encoded binaries. Even while it was possible for an
independent provider to offer Usenet to customers, it was still a total
nightmare because of the ludicrous storage requirements for binaries, which
ensured that only an ever-dwindling number of providers would take the time to
offer it at all.

It's startling to me that there's a Usenet at all anymore, since it's
essentially been reduced to a collaborative system for sharing pirated
binaries.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I like the imagery.

So I am chuckling at the idea that some young guns who want to be "free" to do
what ever they want in their network of computers to come up with a scheme
where they are will use telephones to call up one computer to the next, and
addressing will be free form a series of "hops" where you tell the computer
what sequence of machines will have to be called in order to get your message
from you to your destination. You could use a character like ! to separate the
hops making an address 'bobs-machine!piratebay!alices-machine!alice'
delivering through three hops to Alice.

~~~
NateLawson
Honeydanber + Node.js. Ugh, can't wait.

------
StavrosK
Can anyone explain what this was, for us who didn't know it?

~~~
tallanvor
Think of it like Pirate Bay, but for newsgroups. Newsgroups are massive with
some providers archiving binary groups for up to 4 years (and growing). Sites
like NZBMatrix index the content and provide nzb files which tell your client
what to download so that you don't have to constantly download the headers for
a bunch of sites and search through them. Sites like NZBMatrix were also
somewhat curated to help keep passworded files out of the results.

~~~
tibbon
And combined with a private usenet server, it was non-P2P and relatively
secure file downloading at exceedingly high speeds.

~~~
aes256
The usenet servers live on, and all the files (minus a small percentage that
are the subject of takedown requests) are still there.

NZBMatrix was just one of dozens of indexing sites.

------
tvdw
This is awkward... When newzbin shut down, I was without a NZB provider for a
week. Then 2 days ago I paid for my membership at NZBMatrix. And now it's
gone?

~~~
kinnison
Similar position.. but I was waiting a week or two before committing to actual
money :) Glad I did. Going a bit old school at the mo, downloading headers
from a.b.mm for example. Get some retention up myself, might take a while!

------
ComputerGuru
The second Newzbin also closed this week: <http://www.newzbin2.es/>

Apparently their last payment gateway wouldn't deal with them any more.

------
shelf
Despite being 99% illicit content, could somebody explain why this is not a
case for Safe Harbour? Is this principle enshrined in any law at all, or is it
just some neutrality idyll that we assume others share?

*Thought it was part of the DMCA

~~~
ubernostrum
The "safe harbor" includes more requirements than responding to take-down
requests. In particular, the service provider must "not have actual knowledge
that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network
is infringing", and "in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of
facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent".

In other words, though you don't have an active duty to police your site, if
you do become aware, and don't take action, you're not protected. Similarly,
if you set up something with the sole purpose of distributing copyrighted
material, and try to hide behind a "gosh, we never knew _that_ kind of thing
was going on until you told us", you're probably not going to get a court to
believe you.

~~~
shelf
I was commenting on this sentence, in particular:

>Once this notice is completed we are left with an impossible task of policing
our indexing bots. Even then it won't stop there, there will be follow-up
notices etc.

This seems to me like they're being told to actively police automatically-
indexed content after this notice is processed?

I'm not sure how provable that 'knowledge of infringement' clause is.

~~~
ubernostrum
"knowledge of infringement" basically boils down to "you know damn well what
you're running here". It's not that every site operator has to actively police
every single submission for possible infringement; it's that if even a ten-
second glance at your service reveals obvious massive presence of infringing
content, you don't get to pull the "well, gosh, we never knew" and claim safe
harbor (this is the "is not aware of facts or circumstances from which
infringing activity is apparent" clause).

------
jrockway
I guess in this era of Bitcoins and Tor hidden services, it's inevitable that
a site using credit card funding and a public IP address for piracy is being
shut down. Low-hanging fruit.

------
prezjordan
Binsearch [0] usually does the trick for me. Admittedly I'm not a hardcore
user.

[0]: <http://binsearch.info>

------
aes256
Never understood the appeal of NZBMatrix. Just use a search engine like
Binsearch, NZBIndex.nl, etc.

In any case, with more and more takedown requests being directed at usenet
providers, I think usenet's days as a safe haven for piracy are numbered.

~~~
cookiecaper
Binsearch is much harder to navigate.

~~~
hackerboos
Coupled with <http://abteevee.allfilled.com> and
<http://abmoovee.allfilled.com> it's easy.

~~~
aes256
If you're looking for scene releases, just use a pre database like preDB.com.
Find a release on preDB, copypasta the release name to binsearch, create the
NZB, done.

Generally speaking it's very easy to find material just using binsearch. If
you want a 1080p copy of a particular film, just search for the film name
along with '1080p' and you're almost guaranteed to get relevant results on the
first try.

------
thehodge
I had noticed almost everything had been failing over the past few weeks with
NZBMatrix...

Back to torrents / DC++

~~~
shelf
I haven't experienced any missing binaries or bad NZBs recently, neither from
NZBMatrix nor Astraweb. Can anyone corroborate this?

~~~
cookiecaper
I was getting a good amount of missing blocks on Astraweb only; I bought a
backup news account from blocknews and haven't had any missing block issues
since.

It helps if people put big pars out.

~~~
shelf
I'll not jump ship until my downloads are frequently disrupted at the block
level, across multiple providers. Pretty difficult to achieve, given the
architecture.

Indices come and go... Much of the Usenet crowd know how to set up an indexer
if need be. Perhaps a hidden service is warranted?

------
nicksterling
Question for those with Usenet know how. When downloading raw headers, I have
observed a convention where the title is a random string of letters and
numbers, and within the post are for example 50 rars and 10 pars. How are
consumers 'decoding' the title so they know what they are getting? Does the
uploader provide a translation? Or can the 'real title' be recovered
programmatically? Many thanks.

~~~
voltagex_
Can you give an example?

~~~
nicksterling
Here's one from a.b.boneless...

"2TU4K75C6Z" (45 rars, 9 pars)

And here's one from a.b.multimedia...

"DTTBiAp23.101.by.NYCrules" (14 rars, 11 pars)

no .nfo included and no way to know what's inside. Does anybody know how
people are decoding these titles into meaningful information?

~~~
nicksterling
Here's one from a.b.cheerleaders...

"291112_08_29" (60 rars)

There are lots of these and they are interesting because the first part
suggests a date, 29/11/12, and the second part suggests a sequential number.
The size is almost 6 gig.

~~~
voltagex_
Aaaaand I'm glad I didn't look that one up on the work PC. I'm assuming you
can get the filename info by looking at either the RAR headers or the first
archive.

------
alternize
running your own custom tailored usenet indexer seems pretty easy nowadays
thanks to <http://www.newznab.com/> \- if you have a need for one in the first
place, that is.

------
upper2bits
I've never used torrents and I've always used newsgroups. Does that make me
old? Anyway, I feel naked now, with newzbin down and now this I feel I'm going
to have to end my fun or try torrents which I'm worried about the legal
issues. Are torrents "safe" now a days, what's the best approach (Seedbox?)

~~~
cookiecaper
Torrents aren't really safe or unsafe, it's mostly about the quality of the
trackers you use. There are some OK cultivated communities out there, but the
worry over ratio and constant leech on one's upload stream is a real bummer
when you can just purchasing blocks from a news server and not have to worry
about it. A seedbox is way more expensive than a news account and usually
comes with quotas which one must mind.

All in all, nzbs are a much more pleasant experience if you can afford the
account (and pretty much any employed person can) and have a good indexing
site (harder to come by, and now I don't have one either :( ).

~~~
jonny_eh
Wouldn't connecting via a VPN sufficiently hide your tracks from the secret
squirrels?

~~~
dsl
No. You should watch this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU>

------
emehrkay
Open source the code. Id gladly run my own private nzbmatrix

~~~
spudlyo
Feel free.

<http://newznab.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>

~~~
emehrkay
You've derailed my Sunday. Thanks. Is this the nzbmatrix core?

~~~
spudlyo
No, it's a GPLv3 clone of an nzbmatrix-esque site. Somewhat popular sites like
nzb.su use it. It has a Sickbeard compatible API too.

------
jondiggsit
This is a sad day.

~~~
emehrkay
I really feel some type of way about this. This site (and netflix and hulu)
allowed me to live without tv for almost four years

------
whiteymj
Move the site to TOR and let digital copyright enforcement cops try to figure
that one out. All they can do it push it completely underground and once the
site is on TOR they have zero recourse or means to track down the operator.

~~~
foobarqux
Do not do this. The Tor network cannot handle that kind of traffic.

~~~
cookiecaper
The site is just text transmission, like torrents. Your connection to the news
server would not have to be piped over Tor, just your access to the web
interface where you download text files telling your news client what to
download.

~~~
foobarqux
Right, sorry. I misinterpreted the parent.

------
xer0x
Such disappointing news compounds last weeks troubles. When nzbs'r'us shutdown
over similar payment problems. Payment is a huge achilles heel for these
services. Blocking payments was used to hurt WikiLeaks, and Dutch usenet
providers have recently lost the ability to use paypal for payments too. A
popular bitcoin-esque service can't happen soon enough.

[http://usenetreviewz.com/dutch-usenet-providers-banned-by-
pa...](http://usenetreviewz.com/dutch-usenet-providers-banned-by-paypal/)

~~~
xer0x
I like that Europe scolded visa for stopping payments to wikileaks, but that
is unlikely to ever happen for anything piracy related.

[http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/europarliament-scolds-
visa-m...](http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/europarliament-scolds-visa-
mastercard-paypal-for-killing-wikileaks-donations-initiates-regulation/)

------
zenocon
alternative: <http://www.nzbsearch.net/>

~~~
mimog
That's not really an alternative..

~~~
zenocon
why not? admittedly, i didn't use nzbmatrix, but i do use nzbsearch and the ui
is simple, easy to use - search is _ok_ , but it seems to get the job done.

~~~
pyre
Sounds like NZBMatrix had an API for auto-download clients to consume. If
NZBSearch doesn't have that it's not really a replacement.

------
skippy
The masses need to pick a new site to invest their energies in, rather than
scatter at random to lots of different sites! Any particular one out there
that's better than the rest?

~~~
troels
As someone who hasn't used usenet for downloading content, why is it that it
seems that a few central indexing services are the way people access this
medium? Wouldn't it be possible - and preferable - to distribute the index
through p2p? That way, there would be no single point of failure.

~~~
nwh
The index would be insanely huge. A lot of these indexing sites are used for
their API. Dedicated applications like SickBeard automatically compile lists
of wanted files (movies, TV rips and music) and use them to search against the
provider. The provider returns a file (NZB) that contains references to
hundreds of encoded files hosted on newsgroups.

Here's a breakdown of one NZB, for a single 3.88GB file.

Inside are 74 RAR files, and 15 additional PAR files containing parity for
recovering corrupted data.

Each of these 89 files is split into 37 parts of 1.4MB for ~3200 pieces total.

These pieces are then encoded with yENC (similar to base64) and then uploaded
to the newsgroup.

Every single one of these yENC pieces is referenced in the NZB file, making
for a total of 400KB. Just because of this, the NZB indexs are enormous;
hundreds of gigabytes, probably terabytes in some cases.

~~~
morsch
There's no need for everybody to serve the entire index. Set up a DHT and let
interested parties exchange the NZBs. All problems in computer science can be
solved by another level of indirection.

~~~
trotsky
it's a reputational and data quality issue as well. completely decentralized
content distribution doesn't usually work unless there is some kind of
curation, there are just too many motivations for disruption. it's not an
impossible problem, but long ago ceased being mostly about the technical
occupation of shipping bits between nodes.

~~~
pyre
You could always have sites that only serve up indexes of NZB files (e.g. "NZB
file => SHA-256"). Then you could use these to determine which NZB files to
trust. I would assume that distributing a "NZB => Checksum" hash would be a
lot smaller/easier than running an entire site on top of a terabyte of NZB
files.

------
rdl
Is USENET anything other than file sharing (mostly piracy) now?

~~~
jockc
I know that comp.lang.lisp is still active.. I assume there are plenty of
other groups still active as well.

------
tonystamp
I'm currently using www.nzbzombie.com and its been great , has an API that
works with CouchPotato & Sickbeard and phpBB forums.

------
daniel777
you can bet your bottom this fact''Federation Against Copyright Theft
Limited''will be into all nzb providers now by attacking the index list making
sites like nzb matrix take down massive amounts of copyrighted movies and
other copyrighted items, changes in the usenet indexing this looks bad all
round for us downloading they cant get the server providers so they will go
after the next best thing the index system that list content.

~~~
omarchowdhury
And why aren't they able to get the server providers?

~~~
Rhythmic
It was probably cheaper to force or induce the closure of index sites that are
done more as a love of community than of profits, not make nearly as much as
the usenet providers themselves. These index sites, I'm sure, understand the
legal costs and risks of continued operation if those options were presented
to them. With the majority of them down and out of the way the providers
themselves will see a reduction in revenues and may not put up a fight when
they fall into legal pressure to close up shop.

------
TomHere
A bunch of fucking assholes. They took my money the day before. Wish I could
get my hands on them....

------
portsmouth657
a lot of chat about "we never use them and get by" ,,how about some feedback
for alternatives!!!!! i have only ever used newzbin ,,then yesterday paid
matix ,and today not sure where to go?

------
cmccabe
Welcome to the NZBMatrix.

I don't care who you are, if you see an agent, you do what the rest of us do.
You run. You run your ass off.

------
MozMorris
MacGuffin!! Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!1

~~~
harrod
Yup. Mr. "a:10 v:10"

~~~
emehrkay
Those were the most helpful comments. You'd see a four on either metric and
know not to waste time.

------
greencopper
There is NO such thing as priracy, there is only sharing of property between
people. When I buy something I own it, no matter what those fools say, and
when I own it, I copy it if I like!

~~~
Rhythmic
And thus we explore a brief glimpse of the tragedy of the commons.

