I used to spend a lot of time on news:// protocol back in the 90s, but haven’t touched it for good 20 years or so.

Could anyone point me to a good primer on how to use USENET for piracy? Looking for advice on client software, or webapps, good services worth paying the subscription that will give me access to all the right newsgroups and archives.

Last time I used news, all this stuff was free, so I’m at a bit of a loss on what’s worth paying for.

Btw, I did try looking for answers before turning to Lemmy, but ended up with just a ton of SEO garbage articles designed to serve ads, waste time and provide no real answers :(

  • rhabarba@feddit.deEnglish
    12·
    11 months ago

    Primer:

    1. Usenet is for text, not for piracy. Just because you can share giant files over NNTP, that does not mean that you should. I mean, the IRC supports “file sharing” too, but there are much better protocols for that.
    2. The main hurdle trying to abuse NNTP for piracy is to find a Usenet provider that actually mirrors binaries. I am not aware of any free one, as it takes very much traffic and disk space.
    • Alt+F4@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Is it the same uuencode as ages ago?

      Anywho, I know nntp was not designed for file sharing, but USENET supposedly hosts some more obscure content, often impossible to find on torrents.