A GThing Science Project

The first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet. I'm telling you about it now, though, because I care. After you read this, please forget all about it and never think of it again.

Usenet is the seedy underbelly of the Internet. It was conceived in 1979 and made up the Internet in it's entirety for a long time, before the WWW layer and other things were added. Most people don't know anything about it, or don't care to know anything about it.

So what is usenet? Basically, it's a world-wide distributed bulletin board system. Publicly accessible chat conversations, essentially. It's here that you can find things like Linus Torvalds announcement of the first Linux kernel and other such momentous occasions (google keeps usenet records all the way back to 1981).

But it's not the conversations we're interested in here. It's the binaries. Binaries = files. Everything in usenet is divided into directories, like on your computer, and the alt.binaries directory is especially for transferring files. It is here that new movies, music, and software are posted (then on torrent trackers and IRC, then on all the P2P networks). The best part of it is not really monitored. You can't tell who is downloading like you can with torrent files and on P2P networks. It's actually the closest thing to anonymous in filesharing.

If you have an internet connection, you probably have access to usenet newsgroups. For example - if you're on comcast your news server is news.comcast.net and your login info is the same as you use to log into comcast's website. But you're better off going with a dedicated news service because they will retain the files for a longer period of time. Comcast retains for maybe a week or two, and often drops parts of files for no apparent reason. Giganews, on the other hand retains files for 90 days, giving you a better chance to find what you're looking for. They charge $12/mo (first month is $5 off) which I think is pretty fair considering what you're getting.

Another major advantage of newsgroups over P2P networks is speed. Since you are downloading from dedicated servers and paying for a premium service, you can pretty much saturate your downstream and go as fast as humanely possible. Where it might take a few days to download a 2GB file using a torrent, it will take something on the order of a few hours from usenet.

It's really important to have a good client. Since most files come as multiple messages, a good client will group messages together and list only files, pushing all the nonsense to the background. The best news reader I've found for OS X is called Unison. It costs money, but again - it's worth the price and one of the very few pieces of software I'm willing to pay for. It not only groups binaries into single chunks of files for easy downloading, but it has a system that gets rid of all the trash newsgroups (there are A LOT) and only shows you what you want (Movies, TV Shows, Rock Albums, etc). The only decent one I ever found for Windows is called Agent - but I really recommend buying a Mac if you plan on doing this.

You will also need a way of finding the files you are looking for. Usenet doesn't have any type of search functionality built into it, so you have to use a third party search engine like binaries.nl or binsearch.info. I prefer binsearch.info because it is better at grouping files together like Unison. You search for the files you want then create an ".NZB" file which you open with your reader. Your reader then knows to download all those files.

So in short, usenet is a superior way of getting files you want. It has both legitimate and illegitimate uses, and there is a lot of crap you won't want on there. If you do decide to give it a try, Giganews has a free 3 day trial (well, it's free so long as you cancel with in the first 3 days) and $5 off the first month. They also have various plans depending on how much you plan on downloading. Follow this link to check it out (I get a kickback if you do).

As a side note, I don't encourage downloading copyrighted materials. I have used usenet for downloading freeware game mods, open source programs, and media licensed under creative commons. It's a good distribution system for people who don't have a lot of bandwidth to spare (like small linux projects).