this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Can someone ELI5 the difference between Usenet and torrents? From a pirating standpoint anyway.
From a protocol standpoint, my understanding is that downloading from Usenet is no different than downloading from a website, eg you download the file from one server vs the data being sharded across multiple peers.
My understanding is very basic, but from what I understand (please anyone feel free to correct me if you know more), it uses newsgroups, which is, historically speaking, an extremely old computer network communication system (conceived in '79) that was used for sharing news and files (it used to have forums and stuff on it too), and it works by transferring files in parts, then unpacking/assembling them at their end point.
Because they are in pieces during transfer, it's very difficult for ISPs to know what you are downloading, therefore no VPN is necessary.
There is also no seeding because it's a server-client model, not P2P.
You are wrong. Usenet uses Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) and newsgroups are Basically just forums with different topics.
Usenet is basically the first ever worldwide forum or discussion system and it only accepts text, it doesn't accept binary. Files are posted by encoding files as text and posting them, but since there is a size limit for each post similar to twitter, the files have to be split.
Your ISP can see that you are connecting to a Usenet provider and if you don't use SSL they will see what you are downloading, but it doesn't matter since in most countries only sharing is illegal, downloading is not illegal.
Thanks for clarifying!
Anytime,
If you want to know more about newsgroups you can find the structure here: https://www.itpro.com/infrastructure/network-internet/368089/the-big-8-usenet-newsgroup-hierarchies-and-what-they-cover
And you can find information about the file encoding here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YEnc#%3A%7E%3Atext=yEnc+is+a+binary-to%2Can+8-bit+encoding+method.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate you going above and beyond to provide me with some literature! :)
Imagine a federated Reddit with extremely lax (or no) moderation, and files. Access to a Usenet server gives you access to an almost unlimited number of communities discussing almost any topic you can think of, some topics you've never heard of, some topics you don't want to be involved with, and (depending on which server you subscribe to) downloadable files.
I haven't used one in years, so I have no idea how accurate the previous paragraph still is.