Use a free, nagware free news reader like pan or binary news reaper if you want to use usenet.

I also recommend donating to nzbmatrix for the extra features that you get. Its a great site, much like a torrent site, with ratings, proper pruning of fakes, comments, and a large vault of nzbs.

The BT newsgroup service is outsourced and provided by giganews. I believe it has a speed cap and a monthly data cap too.

I use usenet all the time for downloading because for 7.50EUR a month i can have unlimited downloads at my maximum line speed with 256-bit SSL encryption.

Besides there are litterally hundreds of usenet indexers now and most of them are increasing capacity to 365days to follow giganews added retention.

If you want an easy usenet client just use Alt.binz 1 click download and extract to whatever folder you choose, without downloading tons of headers.

Feel free to correct my description of the process Newzbin uses to make NZBs if you feel you know more about the subject.

Also, I fail to see what relevance your tenure of usenet has on an article about Newzbin, especially as to how far it extends prior to the creation of NZBs. Surely your wonderous knowledge of NZBs can only have come about *since* Caesium invented them in 2003?

You use your own ISP’s usenet server to download copyrighted material? The same ISP who knows your address? Are you mad? Its child’s play for them to see what you’re downloading, and they know exactly where to direct the police should the notion take them.

On top of it all, its BT who don’t exactly have a good track record for not shafting its customers.

There’s a reason why I pay for newsgroup access from a provider who offers SSL connections and does not keep any logs. The price they ask monthly is a small amount to pay for peace of mind coupled with speeds that max out my connection.

“Usenet is so old and archaic, can’t we just forget about a worthless bulletin board? No one uses it anymore.”

Millions of people use it. Toward the end of last year, the full DVDs of The X-Files (entire series) were posted, as well as Star Trek Enterprise DVDs and other shows. One user ripped and posted his entire SciFi DVD collection, which was well over 1,000 movies from the 1950s to the present.

Virtually every scene release is posted to the newsgroups, usually within hours of its release.

“It’s a big swarming mess of posts, spam, and more spam. You can’t find squat compared to bittorrent or rapidshare sites.”

It’s true there’s a lot of spam, which is why Usenet search sites are so handy.

“Who ever puts stuff in rars and pars should be dragged out and shot. They’re always corrupt and a waste of time.”

I’ve been downloading movies and TV shows for over two years now and in all that time, the only Rar/Par posts I couldn’t fix were ones that were so old, many of the parts had expired from the server. I knew it was a risk when I downloaded them, but wanted to take the chance. Anything less than 200 days old is no problem.

#39, Anonymous;

“I’ve yet to see a post or comment here that CORRECTLY explains just how NZB’s are created. Yes #5 and #30… I’m talking to you.”

You mean the technical details, or from the user’s perspective?

Technical – The indexing site either runs its own news server, or they have access to a premium news provider like Giganews. The site pulls the headers or “overviews”, which include the subject line of each post, the name of the poster, the newsgroup(s) they were posted to, the date, the size, and the message ID. The headers are then filtered to eliminate any posts which don’t contain a file. The information for the remaining headers is put into a database where it can be searched or browsed. When a user requests an NZB file for certain posts, the site pulls the relevant information for the posts from the database and places it into an NZB file. For each file the user has requested an NZB file for, this includes the information listed above. The NZB file also contains various other bits of XML code to make sure that the information is presented properly and can be correctly processed by the user’s client software.

User’s perspective – The usual procedure is to use a Usenet search/indexing site. Although they differ somewhat, most work pretty much the same. You enter what you’re looking for into the search box and it will display any matches it finds. Alternately, most sites will let you manually browse the contents of newsgroups. Regardless of which method you use, once you see something you want, you put a check in the box to the left of it, then click the button to generate/download/create an NZB file. The site creates it and sends it to you, where it is saved on your system.

#45, Anonymous;

“Did you even attempt to optimize the settings on utorrrent?”

Yes, but there’s not much you can do if there are 900 seeds and 5000+ peers. Or if you’re trying to download something over 6 months old with 2 seeds and 3 peers.

“I got good speeds with Usenet once-upon atime too. Now I like torrents better, I get near the same speed and more material for twenty dollars less then Usenet.”

I always get good speeds with Usenet and I almost always get lousy speeds with torrents on public trackers.

4) Easynews web interface (and probably others) allow the creation of NZB files in a similar fashion to Newzbin… a user can select individual or ranges of files based on searches and create a NZB file for download.

1) A poster can create them at the time of uploading. Newzbin does not directly allow access to these type of NZB files for download (or any other file uploaded to usenet for that matter). Some indexing sites do however rely on these, and they are of course available for download directly from usenet.

2) An indexing site can create them automatically by regex matching subject-line patterns, poster and timeframe to determine what constitutes a unique item.

3) Newzbin offers multiple interfaces to allow the user to create a NZB based on selections made from data which came from sanitized usenet headers. Every NZB file provided by this site is created as a direct result of a user clicking a button to CREATE the NZB file(s), just for him/her.

Does that answer your question?

“people don’t get infringement notices when downloading” Never knew that, thank you.

What is next me wonders?? IRC?? :(

Right, you have NFI really do you… ATM Usenet binaries have 5,451,932 individual (no dupes) “releases” (according to Newzbin.com) and over 5TB is added daily. Speeds have increased not decreased and their always constant up to 25Mb/s, no uploads required and providers are now moving towards 365 days retention of files.

@36: “Usenet is so old and archaic, can’t we just forget about a worthless bulletin board? No one uses it anymore.”

Your an idiot, user numbers have been constantly increasing since the inception of Usenet and has growth has been increasing rapidly in the last 3-4 years. Mostly because it works – better than any p2p actually if you know how to use it.

“It’s a big swarming mess of posts, spam, and more spam. You can’t find squat compared to bittorrent or rapidshare sites.”

So in other word you have no idea of how to use Usenet to download files and appear to be looking through binary groups to download files in a text reader… whats th ebet you so newb your using Outlook to do this :D (hint: you see nothing but files if you know anything at all… retard). You apparently have no idea of where content is or how much is out there… 5.5 million files in one place, try finding that at any tracker, seriously…

“Who ever puts stuff in rars and pars should be dragged out and shot. They’re always corrupt and a waste of time.”

And apparently your also to clueless to realise that any decent binary downloader automatically repairs (if needed) and unpacks files. “Always corrupt” is a wild exaggeration although perhaps you’re doing something wrong, who knows?

@8: “forget nzb files. download altbinz , it has its own search engine and its just as easy as torrents but way quicker”

Dude, get a damn clue, rofl. One, altbinz is a reader/binary downloader like any other, two, so like any other reader it uses .NZB files to queue and collate post parts and three altbinz just has interfaces for various web based search engines.

People who are whinging that Usenet is “pay to leech” are also idiotic and clueless – using the same logic your ISP is “pay to leech” you morons.

Seriously, all P2P seems amateurish and pales into insignificance once you start using Usenet. It’s always as fast as you can download, pre-times are up there with the best private trackers, massivley more content is available and community is great as well if you wish – I doubt any other community has such a dedicated group of people that fulfil requests either.

People, generally, once they know how to use Usenet (not at all hard these days either) never look back or get rid of it because it’s just so much better than any p2p. Sure, I still use BT, 1-click hosters and occasionally IRC and emule particuarly for “speciality” areas like mags – you can’t find EVERYTHING on Usenet – but for most content people wish to get it’s a small amount of money that provides the best way of getting files apart from scene axx.

I encourage all curious people who are not close-minded because they feel threatened that they may not be using the “best” way to get into Usenet, you won’t regret it.

p2p File Sharers are different from the original pirates who were around at the beginning of The Scene. Back in those days, people were stealing for their own personal gain or for a challenge. I remember those days. It was fun, but it wasn’t really about anything. We went out and bought the products that we liked anyway (my group did anyway). Of course, when I got older and went to university, I realized that what I had done was unethical and not sustainable.

The p2p community is comprised of idealists who use illegal p2p as an act of civil disobedience in retaliation to the injustices committed against them by the entertainment and IP industries. They will bring their beliefs to government, as they are mostly not just stealing. I suggest that you read up on the international anti-copyright movement and network neutrality. Today’s young people are idealists as opposed to the thieves in the 80s (those were good times lol).