🇨🇦
You won’t find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It’s all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots
That’s not been my experience at all. Pretty much everything I’ve looked for has been available and I rarely come across encrypted files. I do regularly have to try 2 or 3 nzbs before I find a complete one, but I almost always find one.
2 main advantages:
no hosting liability. Unlike torrents; you’re not seeding ie hosting the files yourself. You’re purely downloading. This moves you out of the crosshairs of copyright holders as they are only interested in the hosts (providers). This also means a VPN is not necessary for usenet downloading. (providers don’t log who downloads what either)
speed. As long as the content is available (hasn’t been removed due to dmca/ntd), you are always downloading at the maximum connection speed between you and your provider. No waiting/hoping for seeds and whatever their connections can provide. I’m usually at around 70mb/s. Where as torrents very very rarely broke 10mb/s for me, usually struggling to reach 1mb/s.
As far as availability goes, stats from my usenet client: of 17m articles requested this month, 78% were available. I’m only using a single usenet provider. That availability percentage can be improved by using more than one in different jurisdictions (content is difficult to remove from multiple servers across different regions).
You’ll need 3 things:
A usenet client such as SABnzbd. This is equivalent to a torrent client like qbittorrent.
An NZB indexer such as NZBGeek, again equivalent to torrent indexers, but for nzb files.
And finally a usenet provider such as FrugalUsenet. This is where you’re actually downloading articles from. (there are other providers listed in the photo in my other comment here)
Articles are individual posts on usenet servers. NZB files contain lists of articles that together result in the desired files. There are also additional articles included so if some are lost (taken down due to dmca/ntd) they can be rebuilt from the remaining data. Your nzb client handles the process of reading nzb files, trying to download the articles from each of your configured usenet providers, then decompressing, rebuilding lost data, and finally stitching it all together into the files you wanted.
Yeah, pretty much.
They do receive takedown notices, however files uploaded to usenet are mirrored across many providers across many jurisdictions while also split into many parts as you noted. Usenets implementation of file sharing is quite robust; being able to rebuild a file that’s missing a significant portion of it’s data. To successfully take down a file, you need to remove many of these parts across almost all of the usenet backbones which requires cooperation across many nations/jurisdictions that are governed by varying laws. It’s not an easy task.
Here’s a somewhat limited map of usenet providers:
No, but that’s just the nature of NZB file sharing. The individual articles aren’t typically tagged/named with the actual file names, that info is pulled from the NZB and the de-compressed + stitched together articles.
I’m not using any special indexers, just open public registration ones. The NZBs aren’t hard to find, for me or for IP claimants.