Posts tagged bittorrent

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Posted 2 years ago

Caprica out tomorrow, pilot already in the wild.

With Battlestar Galactica’s recent departure from our screens I’m sure many of you, like myself, have been left with a growing sense of longing in our sci-fi-loving hearts.

Rescue may however be at hand with tomorrow’s DVD release of BSG’s prequel, Caprica.

Also, if the recent judgement against The Pirate Bay has failed to strike fear into your depraved copyright-infringing heart, a little bird also tells me that the pilot is already in the wild - not that I would advocate such blatantly illegal theft of intellectual property.

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Posted 2 years ago

Pirate Bay Defendants Sentenced to Jail

After a few weeks of deliberation, a court in Sweden has found the four defendants in the Pirate Bay case guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available.’ Each of the defendants were sentenced to 1 year in jail, plus combined fines of $3,620.000.  

The verdict marks the fall of Sweden as one of the last safe heavens for the file-sharing community. The wider repercussions of the verdict with regards to Swedish ISP’s as well as the BitTorrent community as a whole are still unclear.

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Posted 3 years ago

Forget BitTorrent: a three step guide to Usenet bliss

BitTorrent: bane of the media industries, press darling extraordinaire, and the single most successful file sharing protocol in existence. But is it really the best way to get what you want?

I stopped using BitTorrent for my downloading needs years ago, frustrated with the persistent throttling, unreliability of content, and the culture surrounding some private trackers. When I started exploring Usenet as an alternative however, I had to wade through a lot of conflicting information before honing down an ideal solution. Now, I’ve decided to post a simple guide to setting it up - so you can be up and running in no time.

What is Usenet?

Usenet is one of the oldest computer communication systems widely in use, pre-dating the World Wide Web. All you need to know is that it’s an excellent and extremely efficient way to access content, but if you want more information, there’s always wikipedia.

What’s so good about it?

- It can be very, very fast. When properly set up, it will take advantage of all your download bandwidth, 100% of the time. 

- It has a staggering amount of content (both sanctioned and otherwise).

Ok, What do I need to get going?

There are three key components to a good Usenet setup:

1) A Usenet Provider - Your ISP may well offer Usenet newsgroup access for free, or you can look here for a list of free news servers, but if you’re willing to pay in the region of $12.99 a month, newshosting.com and giganews.com are the most popular. When choosing a provider, look out for a decent ‘retention rate,’ from 90 days up. The higher the retention rate, the longer a file is kept on the servers before getting rid of it.

2) An Index -  A place to find .nzb files, which are the usenet equivalent of .torrent files in the BitTorrent world. I recommend nzbmatrix.com, although free alternatives like newzleech.com, binsearch.info and tvnzb.com are available.

3) A Client - I use the amazing sabnzbd+, for mac, linux and windows XP. Just install it, configure it with your provider’s details from (1), feed it .nzb files from (2), and it does the rest. With a bit of tweaking you can even set it to automatically download from RSS, rename and sort all your content automatically, and much more.

In no time at all, you’ll be set up with one-click downloads for just about anything you want. Just make sure to keep it legal ;)

UPDATE: Here is a link to a thread over at the sabnzbd forums with a long list of free news servers. [link]

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