brave little meme

Quote Post

It didn’t have to be this way. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never been a good listener. You seem more interested in your friends the Advertisers than me. And you’re terrified that I’ll steal your content, without realizing that (a) I already am and (b) you could offer me so much more.

– A Valentine’s Day Card to the Media Companies

Text Post

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 newzbin.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]