Daily Usenet Feed Size Hits 300TB

> Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

No need to seed which reduces legal liability and bufferbloat issues on lines with anemic upload speeds. Most torrent clients penalize peers that don't contribute to the swarm. It's also really convenient to plug in automated downloads with a decent index and sabnzbd.

> why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

With the exception of the rare, well seeded torrent, a Usenet download will proceed at full speed while the torrent will trickle along at 34kb/sec.

> It seems so fundamentally ill-suited to the task.

It is. But it is there, so....

Download speeds, no ratios, very low risk of any action by right holders. Would be things I would consider. Also setting VPN right is not entirely untrivial, you could get appearance it being in use, but traffic actual passing through other ways.

There are many things I've found on soulseek that are simply not on the public (and few private) trackers I check. I can only imagine the same applies to usenet.

similarly, soulseek is limited to 1 peer at a time, which some might consider "ill-suited to the task"

anyways I love slsk

clients exist:

- https://github.com/nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus

- https://github.com/slskd/slskd

Serious question: why does anybody use torrents for pirating rather than Usenet?

100% (down) bandwidth saturation, no VPN, no letters from lawyers, and no using my (asymetrical) upload - what is not to like?

Because it will max out your connection speed, got a 5Gb connection? no problem, it will instantly start downloading at full tilt.

You can still misconfigure or leak your real IP using a VPN if you are not completely right in how you set it up. This leaves you open for large-ish claims in countries like Germany because technically you are uploading and that's illegal. Usenet doesn't have the uploading component so that risk doesn't exist.

> Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

In addition to the other answers, Usenet binary newsgroups are much older than torrents. So another reason is that it simply never died. Torrents didn't replace Usenet, they just complemented it.

Afaik, there is no benefit to a VPN for downloading content from Usenet.

Usenet, in my experience, is reachable through a variety of easy-to-use web-based providers. Easynews, etc... I agree that it's ill-suited in the sense that often the files are split into parts and often need re-assembing or other such work. But it's fairly trivial stuff that a user may already be familiar with. Other than that it's super easy. Torrents, at least in my experience are not so straightforward due to the required installation of a client. I think users are hesitant to install it on their machines. Just my take based on limited experience.

Honestly there's way more there, and you get consistent solid speeds. Find a provider with a lot of retention and you can find almost all mainstream media regardless of it's age. (Public) torrents tend to track what's popular and quickly fade. The masses seem to favour low size encodes too, so if you're looking for more quality (and again, public trackers) you're usually much more out of luck.

VPNs leak and can be tricky to manage. I believe most serious torrent pirates use seedboxes at this point.

It is a growing user base. Streaming services were convenient, now they are not (ads, increased cost, reduced content availability, fragmentation).

> It just seems highly unlikely this is driven by a growing user base;

If you are old enough, there was a time when everyone pirated stuff due to the alternative being rather expensive or unavailable (physical media). Then a golden age of streaming services that were cheap and had high availability basically killed torrenting for the general public. Now people are returning to piracy as the streaming services got worse for reasons I stated above.

One of the most popular types of content is now remuxed (not reencoded or recompressed) 4k blu-ray rips that can be anywhere from 50-150Gb per disc. In the DVD/Blu-ray era movies were often reencoded to lower bitrates the way streaming services now do and had tiny original sources. Those files were orders of magnitude smaller (600Mb-1.5Gb typically).

The people who still care enough to pirate in the era of ubiquitous streaming are often doing it explicitly to get the best possible quality, because no streaming service now offers anything of comparable fidelity for any price.

Yeah, it actually requires a lot of work on the posters' end because they choose to do all their discussions in the form of videos apparently.

> Or are these Usenet mirrors all massive businesses that can support running hundreds of PBs

ding ding ding. The market consolidated toward only a few large backbone operators. Here's a picture of what the network looks like: https://svgshare.com/s/14tF.svg

I'm also curious -- how come you hear big stories about governments going after torrent sites, which don't even host the pirated content.

But I've never heard big stories about the government going after big Usenet providers. Do they? If not, why not? Or does it just not make the news? Or am I just not paying attention?

AFAIK, files uploaded to Usenet still need to be ASCII encoded using something like uuencode or base64, which increases file sizes to something like a third larger than their original sizes. So you can decrease the amount of data you need to store quite significantly by only storing the unencoded versions.

After that, deduplication can probably bring you down at least another 50% - how many of these files are just the same things being posted over and over? Probably quite many of them. Store a file once with a database tracking its SHA1 hash, and whenever you see a file with the same hash come in, throw it away and instead store a reference to the first file.

I always encrypt my “hi mom” messages as multigigabyte .rar files to blend in.

You can post binaries on Usenet. And a lot of the stuff is dupes (the same content being re-ripped in different formats and posted by different groups).

Any particular piece of content might be uploaded 50 times or more with different resolutions, codecs, sound formats, languages, etc.

To a first approximation none of it is, because it’s drowned out by the absurdly massive amounts of piracy.

When it comes to text-only groups there’s still some spam but a lot of it is cranks howling into the void about their insane world views rather than unsolicited and off-topic commercial offers, though those do still exist too.