Or, hear me out for a sec: Usenet?
Can someone ELI5 the difference between Usenet and torrents? From a pirating standpoint anyway.
From a protocol standpoint, my understanding is that downloading from Usenet is no different than downloading from a website, eg you download the file from one server vs the data being sharded across multiple peers.
My understanding is very basic, but from what I understand (please anyone feel free to correct me if you know more), it uses newsgroups, which is, historically speaking, an extremely old computer network communication system (conceived in '79) that was used for sharing news and files (it used to have forums and stuff on it too), and it works by transferring files in parts, then unpacking/assembling them at their end point.
Because they are in pieces during transfer, it’s very difficult for ISPs to know what you are downloading, therefore no VPN is necessary.
There is also no seeding because it’s a server-client model, not P2P.
You are wrong. Usenet uses Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) and newsgroups are Basically just forums with different topics.
Usenet is basically the first ever worldwide forum or discussion system and it only accepts text, it doesn’t accept binary. Files are posted by encoding files as text and posting them, but since there is a size limit for each post similar to twitter, the files have to be split.
Your ISP can see that you are connecting to a Usenet provider and if you don’t use SSL they will see what you are downloading, but it doesn’t matter since in most countries only sharing is illegal, downloading is not illegal.
Imagine a federated Reddit with extremely lax (or no) moderation, and files. Access to a Usenet server gives you access to an almost unlimited number of communities discussing almost any topic you can think of, some topics you’ve never heard of, some topics you don’t want to be involved with, and (depending on which server you subscribe to) downloadable files.
I haven’t used one in years, so I have no idea how accurate the previous paragraph still is.
Yes yes yes. Ever since I set up my arr stack on my home server, I’ve been blown away by just how easy getting everything I want in minutes is. It’s all automated. It’s actually insane.
If it’s better to DM please do, but what service do you use? At the moment I’ve been using arr with torrents for… ISO… And would like to take the step to usenet
I use frugal usenet and usenet express for my providers. (for redundancy and speed, you only need one really.)
I use nzbgeek for search.
Both providers mostly saturate my 2.5gbps download speed, and when they don’t, my download automatically uses both of them at once anyway so I always saturate. (I limit speeds during the day so I don’t notice any network lag if an automatic download starts while I’m doing stuff.) I can’t recommend one over the other, they both perform great.
I use sabnzbd to actually download stuff, then the arr stack to trigger and control it.
Sabnzbd did require some extra configuration to saturate my bandwidth, so if you do run into any issues DM me and I can help.
All of this lets me download my publicly available and free Linux ISOs very quickly. Even the biggest ones download in a couple minutes. I still use torrents as a backup, as some stuff makes it to torrents before usenet, but I have usenet set as a higher priority. Both are searched automatically so I don’t miss anything.
Nzbgeek and nzbplanet are good. From my experience these 2 have very similar quality.
Drunkenslug is a lot harder to get into but it does find items the other two don’t have on occasion. On the downside, drunkenslug lacks a one time subscription and the other two have a one time subscription. It does however have a free tier so you can probably be fine still using it as a last resort to try finding harder to get content.
I use nzbfinder.ws and NzbGeek.info. I’m quite happy with that combo.
Is there like a combo package that let’s me subscribe to all of these?
@Imgonnatrythis @nsrxn so orionoid and torbox or supposed to… never got it to work. but maybe torrents are prioritized?
torrent
Usenet is always paid because you pay for retention how long a server keeps a file. its like seeding in BitTorrent and if you don’t pay it will probably be shit.
