Author: Jason Fitzpatrick / Source: howtogeek.com
What would BitTorrent look like if it was lightning fast, always available, completely private, and secure? It’d look a lot like Usenet. Read on to learn how to ditch Torrenting and enjoy super speeds and selection on Usenet.
We’re not here to argue that you’ll never use a torrent again, of course.
It’s just that almost nobody knows that Usenet even exists—mostly because there isn’t a good completely free option. But these days, you have to pay for a VPN to torrent safely anyway, right? Why not use a cheap unlimited service that doesn’t require a VPN and has blazing fast, consistent speeds. Every download will max out your bandwidth.What Is Usenet and Why Should I Care?
First, let’s talk about a system nearly everyone is familiar with, BitTorrent. Torrents are a form of distributed file sharing. You get a torrent file, and that torrent file connects you to a tracker, which in turn helps your BitTorrent client find all the other computers around the world sharing that file. Your ability to find and download files is dependent on other people sharing them, as well as the quality and speed of their connections to the internet. Torrents are not inherently private or secure because there is no way, even on the nicer private trackers, to engage in the entire process of torrenting without sharing your identity (or the identity of your proxy or seedbox at least). Torrenting is, even on a private tracker, a public activity, requiring a VPN to hide your location and identity.
By contrast, Usenet is private, secure, and as fast as your broadband connection can handle. What exactly is Usenet and how does it provide these things? A bit of history is in order.
Usenet is, by modern standards, an ancient internet system. Harking back to the early 1980s, Usenet was created to serve as a global distributed discussion system. Sub groups existed for everything from hardware hacking discussion to movie critiques to alternative lifestyles. The heyday of Usenet as a global discussion forum has long since passed (although some groups are still active). Usenet, however, lives on thanks to binary groups and the introduction of the NZB file.
Binary groups are sub groups that specialize in the distribution of non-text files. These files are broken up into pieces and shared as text blocks in thousands of sequential Usenet messages. You can find virtually any type of file that you can imagine downloading in those groups—from tiny files to multi-gigabyte Blu-ray image files. Accessing the binary groups was an arcane art and required multiple steps as well as a lot of frustration when those multipart files didn’t download or unpack correctly. Eventually, people decided they’d had enough and the NZB file was born.
Although the origin of the NZB format is murky (some accounts claim it was created by Newzbin, others that it was first created by Dutch computer enthusiasts and lifted by Newzbin), the practical application of NZB files is perfectly clear. NZB files are XML indexes that make sharing and accessing files on Usenet extremely easy. Back in the olden days of binary sharing on Usenet you had to, by hand, find all the pieces of a shared file and reassemble them yourself using a variety of programs. In the early 90s, for example, doing something as simple as downloading a wallpaper pack was a multi-step and failure-prone procedure.
NZB files did away with all that tedious hands-on activity and made it simple to retrieve the entire file set with nothing more than a single NZB file. To bring it back to the BitTorrent comparison, NZB files are much like Torrent files, except instead of pointing you to thousands of file sharers around the world, NZB files point you to the thousands of pieces of the file on a high-speed Usenet server.
When you load an NZB file in a Usenet client, you are establishing a direct one-to-one link with your Usenet provider—no extra peers, outside access to your machine, or sharing of files from your collection back to the internet. It’s all the benefits of BitTorrent and none of the downsides.
All you need to get started with Usenet is a Usenet service provider, an NZB index, and a Usenet client. Let’s take a look these three things and get you up and running with Usenet.
One final note on Usenet before we continue: Usenet can be used to download all sorts of stuff, and we’re simply telling you how it works. The legality of certain material on Usenet is going to vary by country, but the biggest thing you need to know is that you should never upload any copyrighted material to Usenet. That’s generally illegal everywhere, so don’t do it.
Selecting a Service Provider
Unlike BitTorrent, Usenet is going to cost you some money. It’s a small price to pay for blazing fast downloads and privacy, however. Your ISP likely has Usenet servers available but there’s a 99% chance they’re unsuitable our purposes. If your ISP is one of the remaining ISPs that offer Usenet access, they most likely don’t provide access to the binary groups, which makes them useless as a file sharing service. Not only that, but the speed is likely restricted, as well. This is not true of non-ISP providers.
Before we start suggesting potential providers, let’s highlight some critical terms and what you should be looking for in a Usenet provider:
- Retention: Retention is the length of time the Usenet server retains the binary files. The longer retention the better. If you’re paying for a premium server, you should expect retention on the order of years. Top providers usually have a retention rate in excess of 1,000 days. A server with a low retention rate will be nothing but frustrating. At minimum, you should accept nothing short of at least 800+ days of retention.
- Quotas/Monthly Caps: Providers offer tiered service that can range anywhere from 10 GB per month to unlimited access. We’d suggest taking the free 30 day trial nearly every Usenet provider offers, and then at the end of the month checking your usage to determine what tier you’d like. These days, however,…
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