
Usenet – what have you become? - harrybr
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/08/28/usenet-what-have-you-become/
======
shocks
Movies and TV need a Steam alternative.

I used to steal every single game I played. Even games that had online play, I
would play on cracked servers.

These days I buy every single game on Steam, and if it's not on Steam I still
buy it on Play.com. Steam is easy, fast, convenient, and simple. Games are one
click away. My Steam account contains over £2,000 worth of games.

It's easier than stealing.

~~~
danieldk
Actually, iTunes and the Apple TV did this for me for movies. At some point I
started downloading movies from Usenet, for various reasons:

\- Annoying unskippable 'don't copy this disc' messages.

\- Movies are sometimes not available at the local rental or retailer.

\- High prices of Blu-Rays.

\- Downloading is legal in my home country.

\- Downloading from Usenet was less effort.

iTunes solved most of these issues, and made it easy to 'impulse rent' movies.
Nowadays, we just rent movies via iTunes, since it is less effort than
verifying/extracting/converting movies and finding subtitles. Also, it feeds
the makers.

~~~
TobbenTM
This may work for people with Apple products and/or people in the US. For us
in (Northern) Europe this is not good enough. (Yet)

~~~
danieldk
Why not? Renting movies via the iTunes store works fine here in The
Netherlands... Haven't they added most European countries by now?

~~~
motdiem
in France, the iTunes selection is pretty poor if you're looking for English
content with subtitles. Most of the catalog is available dubbed in French -
which is a pity, especially for TV Shows where dubbing is really poor.

------
atourgates
First, thanks for violating the first rule of Usenet.

Second - I have to take issue with one sentence, "you’re at risk of being sued
for a lot of money and maybe even loosing your home internet connection. "

Sure, you're at risk, but far less risk than other methods of violating
copyright. Nearly every Usenet provider offers encrypted traffic. Most by
default, and many as the only option. Which means that your ISP has no
freaking idea what you're downloading.

Many providers also allow payment in bitcoins, or go out of their way to
accept other anonymous methods of payment.

And finally, unless you're uploading to Usenet (wich most people aren't)
you're participating in a much less volatile and essentially never prosecuted
form of copyright violation.

Usenet can be a pain to setup, but once you're up and running with the tools
the author listed, you'll be using far-and-away the easiest most user-friendly
method of obtaining movies and TV available.

~~~
tangothedog
The ISP might not have any idea, but your usenet provider does. I'm curious if
it's common practice for them to log user activity.

~~~
aes256
> The ISP might not have any idea, but your usenet provider does. I'm curious
> if it's common practice for them to log user activity.

Most providers do not log downloads. To cite the policies of two of the
biggest providers, Giganews and Astraweb:

> Giganews does not track the specific articles you download; however, we will
> track the volume of your downloads for account maintenance and download
> limit enforcement purposes (if applicable).

— <http://www.giganews.com/support/#q4.1>

> We do not store any specific information about your downloads. We only store
> the amount downloaded, date and access IP address for accounting purposes.

— <http://www.news.astraweb.com/privacy.html>

------
nicholassmith
I know a few people who use Usenet (I did as well for a while), mostly as they
weren't cheapskates who were out for free alone, but as it was the fastest way
to get something they wanted in a format they wanted. Most of them dipped off
a bit when NetFlix came in (UK based) but as the catalogue quality isn't
amazing it's still there as a good choice.

Makes you wonder why someone in the studios hasn't sat down and gone "There's
nearly 10 million people paying $15 a month to get hold of movies, we could
charge $20 and it's legal and get even more people and we'd be filthy rich",
but entrenched behaviour is tricky to shift.

I don't bother with it now, it gets to a point where you're trying to manage
data in the terabytes and it's just more of a pain than it's worth.

~~~
mikerosoftx
Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I
spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of
it...

Access to [American] Netflix has made it so much easier to view the content my
family and I want with out the need to queue terabytes of data.

~~~
robryan
I know people like this to. I think it is kind of a waste of time given you
will often watch something once and if you really want to see it again can
redownload it and be good to go in about 20 minutes.

I download things, chuck them on a hard drive that is only 1TB, if it starts
to get full I just delete a chunk of stuff.

------
wazoox
I still use Usenet daily. To post messages on programming and linux groups.
And mind you, I'm not alone (else it wouldn't make much sense, would it?). In
fact we're back in the good ol' pre-AOL time, when only a few roamed there.

Maybe the solution to the HN problem is moving it to Usenet :)

~~~
ojiikun
I would love to see someone set up an all-new Usenet network that is
proactively disconnected from the old one and disallows any binaries.
Especially if it were well-run and seeded by users from, say, HN, I imagine it
could be a fabulous place for discussions on all things geeky.

Hell, if you have to change the port numbers and the name of the system to get
around ISPs that fear it, that'd even be fine.

------
manualz
Since the major binary providers stopped deleting articles about 4 years ago,
Usenet has effectively become a public digital archive. Granted, archive.org
takes uploads but they're limited to public domain works or creative commons.
There's a lot of copyrighted works that are of value to our society but the
content networks just throw them on a tape in a vault somewhere. The few items
that make it to Youtube (without the copyright's holders complaints) are able
to live on and help serve as items in a 21st century library. If you have a
digital item you'd like to see preserved indefinitely, a Usenet post (along
with other avenues) is a a good start. I personally think archive.org should
upload their media collection to Usenet just to serve as an extra backup.
Youtube would be even more valuable there as there are tons of YT videos in
which the original source file probably doesn't even exist anymore. If
anything ever happens to YT or Google (they're corporate entities, things tend
to go down hill eventually), what will happen to these works? Many may very
well disappear from society's grasp.

~~~
andreasvc
It bugs me that it has to be in this stupid base64 encoded format, which is
wasteful. Also, the binaries have to be cut up chunks of a certain size; it's
all rather hacky. Instead of providing Usenet servers it would be better to
offer something like bittorrent caches.

~~~
manualz
While lack of 8 bit support is unfortunate, most posts utilize yEnc now which
is much more efficient than base64 or uuencode.

With bittorrent caches, wouldn't you still be limited to people providing
seeds for each item? The sustainability of Usenet is now driven by commercial
demand. Wouldn't BT be limited to people donating bandwidth/resources at
personal will?

~~~
andreasvc
I meant replacing commercial usenet servers with commercial/ISP bittorrent
caches. Perhaps paying for it would be harder to justify, but it could offer
the guarantee of fast download speeds, plus never having to worry that there
are 0 seeders. It's also interesting for ISPs because BT traffic costs them
money if it has to go through other ISPs (peering agreements), whereas traffic
through their cache would be essentially free.

------
rb2k_
> It costs about $20-35 US Dollars a month for Giganews usenet subscription

That's the only thing that keeps on confusing me when it comes to usenet. I
don't get why people don't just use cheaper providers but flock to the ones
with massive ads and referal links. There are a lot of 10 USD / month
providers without caps and the same retention. I get that it might be easier
just to pick the one that you're pointed at, but for a recurring 10-20
USD/month, it might be worth the 15 minutes or research.

~~~
wccrawford
Perhaps it's because they've used the cheaper services and found them lacking?
In particular, there seem to be a lot of issues with retention time (years,
for Giganews!) and missing posts. Speed is also a factor.

It's not that they haven't tried the cheaper services. It's that those
services just don't have the same quality.

~~~
rb2k_
As far as I recall there are basically just 3 large providers and tons of
resellers.

There are e.g. Eweka (<http://eweka.nl/en/usenet_toegang/specificaties/>) Or
The Cubenet (<http://thecubenet.com>) which don't fall short compared to the
expensive counterparts with the large advertisement budget.

EDIT: Here's a small overview about who resells what: <http://www.usenet-
providers.net/newsgroup-resellers.php>

~~~
ChiperSoft
There's still dozens of small, basic service providers. Many universities run
NNTP servers, as do ISPs.

Cox used to offer a base NNTP service, for example, which was part of my cable
subscription. I stopped using it because they had awful data caps and horrible
retention.

------
protomyth
I remember when USENET was the internet for me. I went to college before the
web and we had terminals connected to a IBM 370 for my first year (got a VAX
account the second year). USENET was an amazing discussion vehicle at the
time.

~~~
ixnu
The best-ever Usenet discussion vehicle was DejaNews - and Google killed it.

~~~
mattchew
Mmmm. As I recall, DejaNews decided to reskin and become "Deja", along with
making their service much stupider and more user hostile.

Then, they died.

I think there was a SaveDeja campaign for a while before Google finally bought
the archive.

I was not thrilled with what Google did with the archive after that--hugely
disappointing, actually--but first the stupid and then the dying happened
before Google touched anything.

------
purephase
I think the best thing about Usenet is that no one talks about Usenet.

~~~
deltaqueue
I'm starting to think this is no longer the case. I can't even count the
number of blog posts, websites, and forum threads recommending it in the past
few years. And with more people writing software to simplify the process it's
only going to lower the barrier to entry.

I just hope the industries adapt by the time usenet starts deteriorating.

------
xpose2000
It made me cringe to think that a usenet article made the frontpage. Nothing
to see here folks...

~~~
emehrkay
1st rule or you despise it?

~~~
peterwwillis
Usenet has for years been the most reliable, easiest source for high-quality
same-day releases that the Copyright Czars have always ignored (probably due
to lack of popularity). The more popular it gets, the quicker it gets killed.

I mean, few people realize how ridiculously, amazingly simple it is to
download a movie or even an entire series using Usenet and NZBs. Click a file
and start downloading at full bandwidth. That's it. No torrent seeding
bullshit, no download caps or mirrors to find. It's incredible. And we're
scared it might become popular.

~~~
ChiperSoft
Honest question, how would usenet get killed?

Usenet posts are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. Sure there's some
source header information, but that's extremely easy to spoof and there's
already dozens of SAAS upload services which hide the user's identity.

Downloaders are as anonymous as their NNTP provider makes them, thanks to SSL
encrypted connections.

The only attack vector for copyright holders is to go after the service
providers, which _should_ fall under safe-haven rules. The worst they can do
is issue DMCA takedowns for individual posts, which can number in the hundred
of thousands for just a single video.

If safe haven didn't apply, usenet itself is distributed, take down one host
and people will simply move to another.

~~~
evandena
Each provider still has take down rules in place, which propagate to the other
providers. I guess if the copyright holders monitor every file like a hawk,
they can send tons of take downs and pretty much cripple the library.

~~~
ChiperSoft
Ah, I wasn't aware that takedowns propagate. That does change things.

------
Tichy
Netflix is not available in my country. There are some online video providers
(including iTunes), but they insist on offering most movies and videos in
German (talking about Germany) rather than the original English.

Not that I have taken to Usenet, just saying that there is more to it. It is
also tiring to look for movies and find they are not available (mostly for
political reasons, no doubt).

------
lowglow
I was just thinking about this. Reddit is usenet without the files. That blew
my mind a bit.

~~~
omgsean
Reddit is a former link aggregator that people have repurposed into really,
really crappy forums software. It's nearly impossible to have a long, coherent
discussion with multiple participants because of how much effort is involved
in keeping up with new comments (unless they're direct replies to you).

Reddit really sucks for discussion and it's one of the (many) reasons I don't
go there anymore.

~~~
SageRaven
I disagree. With most discussion sites (the likes of slashcode, phpBB3,
vBulletin, etc.), daily re-visiting of the site and trying to pick up where
you left off the previous visit is a maddening experience.

With reddit, it's easy to see at a glance (particularly with the enhancement
suite) just what comments/posts you have made have been responded to.

Granted, there simply is no web-based discussion format that rivals firing up
"trn" and using 2 keys to flip through several hundred threads in just a few
minutes. That, and you can sync the posts offline, read and respond to them
offline, and post your replies in a single batch once you regain connectivity.
Pure ASCII was such a great medium for discussion.

------
engtech
The reason why piracy can continue to exist is licensing agreements.

Content providers need to offer a flat rate for resellers, and sure, they'll
have the occasional exclusive and better deal to specific online stores.

But compare this to a real world store: they can sell anything they can buy.
Yes, they have to negotiate with a distributor but it isn't nearly as
ridiculous as the digital marketplace is.

I should be able to set up my own ebook / movie / tv-show / game online store
and be able to sell anything that isn't locked into an exclusive agreement.

~~~
engtech
and don't even get me started on that we need to be able to resell "used"
content as individuals.

The current fiasco of "losing" all your electronic purchases on death because
they're non-transferable is criminal abuse.

There's a big difference between paying a monthly subscription to stream
versus buying digital files that are hosted on your hardware and you can't
transfer them after death.

------
Bjoern
Interesting question, is anyone here using the Usenet for something besides
binaries?

~~~
dsr_
Yes. In fact, I pay ten Euros a year for access to news.individual.net, which
does not carry any binary newsgroups. As I run my own little server, I also
get news from eternal-september.org and a few other free, non-binary services.

It's quite reliable, and if your upstreams are good about filtering spam, then
many communities are quite useful, too.

A good threading Usenet client like slrn is pretty much the peak of discussion
interfaces. Web forum stuff rarely comes close in terms of usability for
someone who takes ten minutes to learn it.

~~~
hollerith
>A good threading Usenet client like slrn is pretty much the peak of
discussion interfaces.

You might be interested to hear that not everyone feels that way.

In fact, the lack of what I considered an acceptable client is what made me
stop reading Usenet. I was running Linux at the time, and I thought all of nn,
tin, rn, trn and slrn had very bad user interfaces. (I forget if Pine had a
Usenet reader in it. If it did, I tried it, too. I also tried the Usenet
reader in Lynx, and in fact that is what I was using when I gave up on Usenet.
Lynx's user interface bothered me a lot less than the others, but Lynx had
severe performance problems when I "pointed it at" a busy newsgroup.)

The user interfaces of all the clients I just mentioned are text-mode, but
that is not the main reason I stopped using them: I continued to use Lynx as
my web browser and text-mode Emacs as my editor for many years after giving up
on Usenet.

trn is the client I spent the most time with. Probably the biggest problem I
had with it is that is discouraged contemplative reading. Specifically, every
other device or contrivance for reading I have used allowed me to go back and
re-read what I was reading a few minutes ago. In trn, I could usually succeed
in going back (using the = key or using the arrow keys combined with the "tree
view") but some small but significant fraction of the time going back was
impossible (or prohibitively difficult and tedious) because in the mean time I
had reached the end of the unread articles in one group and had been
automatically taken to the next group with unread articles or (if I remember
correctly) I had finished up reading a huge subtree and been taken
automatically to some other subtree.

My second big problem with trn was that it tempted you to get a "stupid high"
by using it to overload your brain with a constant stream of information or
novelty in much the same way that watching TV does.

Although some probably considered that a feature, I concluded that it was
unhealthy.

The main contributor to this "dynamic" was the decision by the designer of trn
that all a user would have to do was keep on hitting the space bar (or more
realistically the space bar and the n key, which skips to the start of the
next article) and he would continue to be fed new text. In contrast, browsing
the web requires a person to make a steady stream of decisions about what to
see next, and although these decisions seems very easy to make, this constant
stream of decision points seems to prevent the use of the web to get the
"stupid" high that certain people like myself were tempted to get whenever we
used trn to read Usenet.

If I remember correctly, slrn shares the two problems I just described with
trn.

I do realize that many people feel as you do about these text-mode Usenet
clients that came out of the Unix tradition. I also realize that Usenet had
certain "pro-social" and "pro-free-speech" properties that the web does not
have. Also, note that I spent many thousands of hours reading Usenet, back
when it was still a more important medium for online discussions than the web
was.

~~~
aerique
The Usenet clients might not be the peak of usability but they're far, far
ahead of all the different kind of forums software we also have to put up with
these days.

~~~
gcr
How so? I've never used a news reader or USENET for that matter; what am I
missing? How is it different than an ordinary email client's threading?

~~~
aerique
It isn't very different from an email client. I was comparing against web
based discussion forums.

------
Tomdarkness
It is not just the day one availability that is the problem. Where can you
legally get high bitrate 1080p video with DTS-HD Master Audio/Dolby TrueHD via
the internet?

~~~
ixnu
This is perplexing. A consumer will purchase a $3000 60" screen (eg, Samsung
ES 8000) that is capable of stunning 1080p and run Netflix and Hulu on it.
That's like taxying an F-22 down the freeway.

This more than anything proves that cheap and easy media is king.

------
tzs
My oldest documented Usenet post: [https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix-
wizards/msg/bdd2d3b...](https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix-
wizards/msg/bdd2d3b2889d6c5c?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect)

Anyone here on Usenet earlier than that?

For some reason, I seemed to pick on csh a lot back then:
[https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix-
wizards/msg/ab37210...](https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix-
wizards/msg/ab37210a27c393d9?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect)

[https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix/msg/21cc4b34f67c736...](https://groups.google.com/group/net.unix/msg/21cc4b34f67c736f?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect)

That's kind of puzzling, because I've never been a csh user as far as I can
remember.

------
underlines
I use the Usenet since 1999 for downloading. In my country it's still fully
legal to download anything, but not distributing (uploading) it.

We don't have hulu, netflix, bbc iplayer, spotify, whatever since the world
wide system of copyright is too complicated. Media providers have a huge
hassle to simplify the process.

As long as it's easier for millions of people to set up a giganews acc,
couchpotato and download every single blockbuster in HD quality months before
it's available on BluRay, VoD et cetera, people will do this.

The day when one eco-system provides me with state of the art resolution
movies which I can buy _and_ collect (not VoD) , no matter where I live, that
day will be the end of my filesharing career.

------
kurige
> Does this tell us people will do anything to save a bit of cash? No. It’s
> telling us that people will do almost anything to get same-day releases –
> and that they’re willing to both pay wads of cash and break the law at the
> same time to get them.

I'm not sure that that's the correct lesson to learn here. If anything same-
day delivery only applies to the most popular shows. And even then it's not a
guarantee. And even if it does show up you still have to wait for it to finish
downloading, which may take more than a day if you have a slower internet
connection.

So, what's the real takeaway?

I think it's that users will do almost anything to have physical control over
content. Having your favorite movies and TV shows and music on a hard-drive
that you own is well worth the cost and the time-investment for a huge number
of people.

------
wildmXranat
Region locking, launch day delay, cross border licensing , etc all amount to a
pile of dung that limits their profits.

Global distribution that steps over the above is a first step to a solution.
Country ISP level firewalls and DRM are not.

------
vhf
Another proof that people illegally downloading art (movies, music, books,
...) is the category that spends the most money for art (spending it here for
Usenet access, but also moviegoers, paying for gigs, buying the vinyl of this
great album they found in FLAC on rapidshare, etc).

It is now well know, and it's about time for the major companies to understand
it, piracy is not their biggest problem, their biggest problem being their
uninventive, old, broken business model. Until they finally figure this out,
more money will be spent on Usenet access, rapidshare accounts, etc.

------
mhd
I wonder how many years since its inception you'd have to add together to get
to the bandwidth of one pirated BlueRay.

Or in other words: How many Naggums is one "Twilight-Eclipse-1337-0-day-aXXo-
xvid-sucks-720-SWESUB.mkv"?

------
Feoh
I think the author has jumped to a foregone conclusion. He thinks it's all
about getting releases before they're made public, and doesn't see any reasons
other than that people might have for going with pirated entertainment.

The reasons are many and varied. Some folks simply don't want to pay, others
are frustrated by the content providers insistence on their way or the
highway.

IMO the recent Oatmeal says it best:
<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones>

------
robryan
The big question is: Is there a price point which will both see widespread
adoption and make enough money to cover licensing.

I pay $70/month for cable, I would probably pay up to around the same amount
for a free varient of usenet that could match the availability of new shows.
Sports is a tough point, the main reason I got cable is for sports that
weren't possible to get live on any other service. So if someone could nail on
demand new shows and live sports there is a massive market opportunity there.

~~~
brudgers
Live sports over NNTP is akin to live sports via email.

~~~
quesera
Worse than that actually. NNTP is a pull model, SMTP is push, at least.

------
SG-
The article's numbers are a bit off, Astraweb has unlimited accounts for
$11/month, also there's 1-2 providers who are offering free access to their
IPv6 Usenet server (XSNews and I forget the other). There's also no real
mention of NZBs and tracking sites that host them and offer
indexing/filtering/searching (NZB is basically like a .torrent).

So you don't actually need to load up a full client and start searching all
these different groups for files anymore.

------
Stwerner
I know a few people that do this and their argument is that downloading isn't
the illegal part, the uploading is. Is that not correct?

~~~
prof_hobart
IANAL, but my understanding is that, at least in the UK, it's still illegal to
download. It's just that it's almost entirely pointless going after an
individual purely for downloading. You could claim the cost of the individualy
pirated item plus probably a few £ in damages - for a single movie, I doubt
you'd get into triple figures.

But with uploading, you can claim a cut of every single download that other
people could have done from your file. This can be run into many thousands of
pounds per file.

~~~
__alexs
The BPI's own FAQ seems to suggest that their case against _downloaders_ is
rather thin if existant at all. <http://www.bpi.co.uk/digital-
music/article/online-faqs.aspx>

~~~
prof_hobart
> Downloading is when an internet user obtains a digital music file from the
> internet in filesharing this source is another internet user known as an
> uploader. Unless this act of downloading is done with the permission of the
> record label (for example, from a licensed service like iTunes), it is
> unauthorised copying and is illegal.

Looks like their position is pretty clear to me - even if it's not worth
actually prosecuting.

------
astrojams
We need an app to stream movies from Usenet. There is so much freaking
bandwidth on Giganews and they have like EVERY movie ever made. Instead of ->
download -> par check -> combine -> unrar -> watch, it should just stream
right from the rar files.

------
stalecoffee
Money is still the primary reason.

As others have mentioned, the risk is low and it's a lot more user friendly
than people realise.

<http://www.stalecoffee.com/2012/08/28/usenet-brignull>

------
bulibuta
I beg you, let this be the last post about Usenet.

Don't turn it into... well... what the rest of the Internet has become.

------
nitinthewiz
And then Fox sued Dish for ad-skipping.

------
sabat
_It’s telling us that people will do almost anything to get same-day releases
– and that they’re willing to both pay wads of cash and break the law at the
same time to get them._

That's the entire point, right there. It is stunning to me that media
companies are oblivious to this, and it's possibly even more stunning that
they're still trying to control their shows as if it's 1985. You may as well
try to hug water.

Like shocks says, when the studios build a Steam for media (e.g. Hulu but
without the bullshit), they will come.

~~~
vetler
Well, here's why HBO doesn't do it:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/05/11/why-hbo-
cant...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/05/11/why-hbo-cant-afford-
to-offer-a-stand-alone-streaming-service/)

~~~
tomjen3
Well they will have to, because the entire system is going to colapse when the
old subscribers die of.

~~~
calinet6
They won't understand this, but any business model trying to treat infinitely-
copyable digital goods as salable material possessions is going to either
change or fail. It will happen in the next 10 years, and no amount of law,
security, or resistance is going to stop it. It's already happening with
music; Spotify, MOG, Rdio are all viable and spreading.

The network is here. It has made their product into a service whether they
like it or not. They need to provide it as a service.

~~~
nobleach
While I mostly agree with you, there is a third option none of us really want
to consider. And that's that HBO/MPAA/etc get so efficient at catching and
prosecuting piracy, that piracy itself dies off.

Now we at first think, "this is impossible, where there are bits, there are
ways to copy said bits". But don't forget What happened with DirecTV at the
turn of the century. They implemented an "unhackable" card that stopped all
satellite piracy on their network. No biggie, pirates just moved over to the
hackable DishNetwork and began purchasing FTA boxes and hacking them to
emulate cards. Dish spent a ton of money implementing their new "unhackable"
Nagra3 encryption and mostly eradicated the problem. Sure you have a few
people doing some sort of private card sharing... but effectively, satellite
piracy is dead. I don't want to sound like chicken little... but let's at
least consider that these draconian ways could persist and push us back to the
dark ages.

~~~
moheeb
Satellite piracy is not dead. I'm pretty sure anybody on Usenet could be
downloading those very same shows right now.

It seems the pirates just tow your ship to land and rape and pillage from
there.

