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Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

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Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#3
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.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#4
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.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#5
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!

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#6

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 y…

Well, one could run their own NNTP server.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#7
post #3

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.

Just as with torrents, the public trackers will always have this issue. Private ones tend to have less of a problem.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#8
> 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-...

Still an availability problem though.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#10
post #3

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.

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?
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