What is this Usenet thing? Why would anyone use it? Is it useful for me? How do I get started?
I aim to answer these burning questions and shed some light on why Usenet is so awesome and under-appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don’t advocate internet piracy. This article is intended for educational purposes and though you can probably download virtually every movie, show, or album ever in mere minutes – I assume you will use this information strictly for the better of mankind.
What is Usenet?
Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a
set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by
subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by
people on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are
then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide
variety of networks.
Learn more about the technical details of Usenet.
For your purposes, Usenet is a vast grouping of computers that you can access to download large files from (like movies, software, etc.) at speeds that are only limited by your ISP (internet service provider).
More simply, you can do what you’d usually do with torrents in about 1/10th of the time without wading through all the garbage on the internet to get what you want.
Why would I want to use it?
You will be able to find basically every movie, TV series, and album you ever wanted – FAST. You will also be able to use much more of your bandwidth, allowing you to download, for example, a 5 GB HD movie in about as fast as 2 mins (depending of course on your internet connection speed). I currently get download speeds of ~25MBps.
Another important difference between Usenet and torrents is that Usenet is very clean. You don’t have to worry as much about spyware, malware, bogus password-protected downloads and all the other wonderful stuff that comes along with dirty, dirty torrenting.
What’s the catch? Why isn’t everyone doing this?
Well, there is a slight catch. It isn’t completely free – though it almost is. This is one of Usenet’s strengths actually, since the result is substantially less clutter.
If you’re not sure about spending money on Usenet yet, you can get a free trial from Easynews.
I’m personally happy to pay a few bucks for the convenience Usenet provides, especially as torrenting becomes less and less viable.
So if you don’t mind paying a couple bucks for unlimited HD movies, TV shows, and audio downloads at lightning fast speeds, then get started now with my quick and easy guide on How to Use Usenet.