Usenet is an extremely fast, powerful way to pirate media online. It is relatively unknown compared to the popular BitTorrent, but kicks it to the curb in terms of speed, instant gratification, and user experience. In this tutorial I will teach you all you need to know to get started.
Warning: Don't bother with this if you aren't willing to pay $15-ish a month for this service. Considering the unbelievable breadth and accessibility of content, everyone I know that is "in" on this is quite happy paying, but it may not be your cup of tea.
If you want to jump straight to a walkthrough, click here.
I may have misled with the title of this article. I think I made it sound like Usenet is the next-generation BitTorrent or something. Not true! Usenet is an archaic discussion system that has been with the Internet since, well, forever. It was originally created for people to discuss with each other and flame one another about whatever topics they pleased.
One day, some enterprising dudes realized they could encode binary content into text and post it to groups to be downloaded rapidly by their friends around the world, since most ISP's provided their own local copies of Usenet and thus provided a very fast cache to the end-user.
Usenet is a big place, filled with both discussion and binaries. Some of this distribution is legal, and some of this is not.
Legal: Old people flaming each other, your creepy neighbor posting horrible Alvin and the Chipmunks slashfic, Linux ISOs, some book collections, porn sites flooding XXX groups with watermarked pictures that they own
Illegal: Full ROM sets for every system imaginable, DVD's of every movie and TV show imaginable, HD resolution captures of TV shows, full high-bitrate MP3 albums, DVD's of all the latest console games, cracked versions of operating systems and software, eBooks, and A LOT of porn (which, by the way, is still copyrighted). Basically all forms of media that are or can be digitized have been pirated on Usenet.
If you're wondering why Usenet hosting providers don't get in trouble for distributing this content, it's obviously due to the decentralization and legislation difficulty of the Internet, and also the DMCA. As long as the providers respond to "takedown requests" by the copyright holders within a reasonable amount of time, their operation is legal since they remain unaware of whether data transferred in and out of their service is being redistributed unlawfully. These takedown requests take resources to file, and lawyers tend to target the more public, obvious places to scare people into never downloading anything ever again. Usenet so far is relatively unscathed (and by so far, I mean since the 80's), but one day that could change.
BitTorrent is a very popular way of pirating media online. You've probably heard of it. Its popularity is driven by large public tracker sites like The Pirate Bay. However, there are many key differences in pirating content with BitTorrent vs. Usenet.
BitTorrent is great for the following two general categories:
The Usenet Difference:
I suppose the biggest problem for most people wanting to get involved with Usenet is that it is going to cost money. ISP's have caught on in recent years, and now it is very rare to find an ISP that actually keeps binary groups listed on their Usenet servers. Even if you do find such an ISP, their servers may only store 2 or 3 days of data, far less than what you'd get from a paid Usenet hosting account.
An unlimited bandwidth package could run you, say, $15 a month, and a good indexing site will run about $3 a month. If you do a lot of downloading, especially of things that are time-critical (i.e., you enjoy instant gratification), then it is very much worth this cost.
Concerned about spending money on this? Worried someone will take down your hosting provider and map your downloads to your personally identifiable information from your credit card? That's valid. However, most Usenet hosting companies are very strict about keeping your privacy. When looking for a Usenet host, you are probably going to want a provider that does not keep any logs of what their users are downloading.
My current hosting provider is Astraweb. They have a remarkably cheap $11/month plan (if you use any of my links on this page) that includes SSL, 20 connections, and 380 days of retention. I've been using these guys for several months now and they are my new favorite. Such a good deal at $11/month.
When you hear people talking about "binaries" on Usenet, they're talking about files. It doesn't necessarily mean a program; it just means files. It could be images, ZIP archives, RAR archives, whatever. All of the stuff you're looking for is most likely stored in binaries groups, which are conveniently indexed by several sites on the web (but not Google). These sites are a lot like The Pirate Bay or TorrentSpy, since they will be the place where you search for your downloads, but not where you actually pull the data.
These indexing sites make things a LOT easier for you, because you don't have to wade through a single group's millions of postings and group them together yourself. The indexing sites create special instruction files called NZB's (sort of like a .torrent file) that you can then pop into a client of your choice so all the work is done for you.
My current favorite, and pretty much the Internet's best, is Newzbin.com. Newzbin has a community of editors that put together groups of posts, so you can be sure a post is complete and will work properly when you download it. They also have a commenting system for the posts, so you can pick up some feedback from other people that downloaded the post. Newzbin has kind of a funky payment plan where you pay once every 8 weeks, and it's only 2 Euros (a little under $3 USD). Trust me, it's definitely worth it compared to any of the free NZB sites out there.
Unfortunately right now Newzbin requires an invitation from an existing member to join. While it is by far the best Usenet indexing service on the web, there are a couple of others that you can sort-of make do with:
So, you got yourself an account at a Usenet host and an indexing site; now how will you pull all that sweet nectarine data? I used to recommend various programs for each OS, but SABnzbd+ is at the point where it is so user-friendly and well-done that nearly everyone should be using it.
SABnzbd runs a resident program (in Windows it sits in your taskbar, in OS X it's an app in the dock, and on Linux it's just... there) that runs a web server on your local machine. All interactions are done in your web browser in a web dashboard. Configuration is done with user-friendly menus in the web interface, and there are lots of little bells and whistles. Perhaps the most useful thing in SABnzbd is the ability to simply drop a Post ID from a Newzbin report in a box on the dashboard to begin a download. If you're savvy enough, you can achieve this with a Firefox bookmarklet in one click.
In case you'd prefer a command-line solution, I'd recommend hellanzb. It's a free, open-source command-line NZB client written in Python that is hella cool (I'm so clever). Check out their site for a huge list of features.
For configuration and to learn about all the awesome features of SABnzbd+, check out their excellent Quick Setup guide on their Wiki. And be sure to set the number of concurrent connections in the server configuration to the maximum your provider allows. Newshosting allows 8. If you don't set this right, you may get slower-than-optimal speeds. Also, if you have any issues with your connection to the provider, your hosting will often provide specific port numbers (like 80 and 23) to use so you can make the traffic a bit more firewall-friendly (see the members section of Astraweb once you've signed up).
If you're using SABnzbd, it typically will do all the work needed to repair and unarchive any archived files you may have downloaded. I've told you all you need from me. Peace. If you're using something else, read on...
At this point, you either have the files you were looking for, or you might have a bunch of files like "r00, r01, r02" or ".001, .002, .003". These are pieces of a broken-up RAR archive, which you can open up using any number of decompression utilities (for Windows, use 7-Zip, OS X, use UnrarX, Linux, use unrar).
Although usually when you pull data from Usenet with a verified NZB (like from Newzbin) the data integrity will be pretty solid, there will sometimes be cases where you might be missing a piece or some pieces are incomplete. Luckily we have PAR to help us out.
PAR Files
Most posts, especially large ones, will bundle some special parity files that are downloaded first. Depending on the size of the post you're downloading, there may only be the initial PAR file (*.PAR), or you may have several (*.PAR, *.P01, *.P02, etc). These files give you an opportunity to rebuild any lost data, so long as you have most of the other pieces. It's a lot like magic, and if you don't believe in magic, you should read the Wikipedia article on the subject.
There are several programs out there to help you fix broken posts using PAR files. Here are my favorites:
Windows: QuickPar is free, fully-featured, and has plenty of helpful information on its website.
OS X/Linux: par2cmdline is a free command-line tool to fix that broken data (and, if you want, create PAR files of your own). However, hellanzb, mentioned above, already handles PAR files all by itself. Protip: just use that.
Now I know what you want to say next. "With the $18 bucks you just spent, you could have gone out and bought brand new copies of that awful album!" True, but now I have an entire month of unlimited access to download whatever I please at very high speeds (by repeating the last few steps in that list). My quest for shitty music was just to get started.
This place used to be a bunch of seldom-updated blog posts and dumb stuff like that. I think blogs are boring and useless, so I'm going to start writing informational articles about the things I know the most about. See you there.
The end.