It’s the tree of life, and for no particular reason, either.
As a corollary to Biggs’ “cable companies are doomed” article from earlier today, I thought I’d demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish what he was threatening. That is, live a happy and successful life without having to pay $100+ a month to Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, or whomever. (Note: I’m neither happy nor successful, so this advice is spurious at best.) Here, I’ll teach you a pretty basic method of automatically downloading things like TV shows, and movies, and whatnot from Usenet. Yes, this breaks the first rule of Usenet; sorry.
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Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.
Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and Newsdemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.
This doesn’t look like it’s advertised yet – it’s not linked on the NewsDemon front page – but for a limited time you can get their unlimited plan with 20 connections for $10.95 a month.
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Jealous of the likes of CNET and Scobilizer getting to play with Microsoft Office 2010? Well don’t be! You, too, can edit spreadsheets and send e-mail if you’re willing to fire up your newsreader or BitTorrent client.
Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.
It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.
Panic, the maker of shockingly good Mac software, is having itself a nice little sale that you may want to take advantage of. From now until 11:59 PM PDT on May 29 (so, a little over a day) you can buy Transmist, Coda, Candy Bar and Unison for 50 percent off.
Heads up, Usenet users. We just got word that Giganews is in the process of upgrading its server retention capacity to 365 days. An entire year of binary group goodness, right in your newsreader! (That’s a screen shot of Panic’s Unison, one of the better Mac newsreaders.) Starting next week there will be a little counter on their Web site showing the race to 365. Keep in mind that it’ll take a few months for the Giganews crew to get all that data in order, though. To that end, starting next week, there will be a countdown timer on their Web site, counting down to the day the 365-day retention servers go live. Look for the fun to start by July. And if you can’t wait till summer to troll all that Usenet has to offer, Giganews is running a limited time special offer!
The nice guys at NewsDemon just offered you guys a coupon for 50% off monthly service between now an next Wednesday. Why? Because they want to pull Usenet out of the file sharing ghetto and expand their audience to cool people like you (us).
Wow, Gears of War 2 has now leaked and can be found all over the place. I just checked Usenet, and it’s there waiting for you. It’s also on private and public torrent sites if you feel like risking a hefty fine (maybe).
The game is scheduled to come out three weeks from now on November 7.
It can’t be too long before Epic and/or Microsoft make a comment about its leak.
Gotta have an ominous-looking photo to accompany stories like this
Do you remember how, earlier in the year, New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, set his sights on ISPs that provided Usenet access to their users? Cuomo argued that Usenet is a safe haven for child pornography and that it’s up to ISPs to shut off the spicket. We’ve discussed this at length, but now there’s another development you should be aware of: the use of deep packet inspection to monitor every single packet of data you send, making sure that you’re not accessing any sort of illicit material, here, child pornography.
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Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 has leaked onto the Internet, and it’s available on all the big BitTorrent sites, Usenet, etc. You’ll needed a modded console to play it, obviously.
The 6.52GB file leaked sometime yesterday, only a few days after the game went gold.
I would say this is the second biggest leak of the year—Grand Theft Auto IV’s leak, I think, was a “bigger” event.
Bethesda, the game’s developer, has yet to release an official comment.
The game is scheduled for release on October 31 for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
Sascha at PCMag writes a charming little piece on the death of Usenet as a method of discourse and its eventual rebirth as a repository for porn, spam, and pirated warez. He recalls the days of “serious conversations” on 8-bit Atari architecture and net.manners.
In a way inconceivable in today’s Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of the Internet, it was—well, it is, but it mostly was—a series of bulletin boards called “newsgroups” shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day.
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Two more Internet Service Providers have agreed to cut off access to Usenet as a result of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s crusade to eliminate child pornography once and for all. AT&T and AOL now no longer carry the alt.* hierarchy, something that the New York politician is trumpeting as nothing short of peace in our time. To the right is Mr. Cuomo for you non-New Yorkers who may know know what he looks like.
Additionally, Cuomo has launched a Web site promoting his success; that the title of the site is “Press Releases“ should be a clear indicator that the man is just as concerned with getting “good press” as he is making any real difference in the fight against child porn.
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Is this the beginning of the end for Usenet as we know it? Wouldn’t surprise me.
It broke last week that New York’s attorney general had targeted Usenet because of the existence of child pornography. Fair enough, no one wants that. But the reaction by several ISPs could set a dangerous precedent, and could threaten the way Usenet works.
Time Warner, my ISP (for the time being), will no longer carry Usenet at all once the end of the month rolls around. Not just binary groups, the only place where the offending content could be posted (other than plain text links, I suppose), but all of Usenet. That’s a shame, as I learned a good deal from the comp.sys* groups back in the day. No more free movies and so on, either. You’ll still be able to access Usenet through a third-party server like Giganews, but Time Warner will no longer provide access. I wonder if it’ll lower my bill, then?
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Usenet is in the news today, but not for something as trivial as downloading music or movies or anything, but for efforts against child pornography. New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, said today that ISPs Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner have agreed to help block newsgroups known to carry child pornography. Some 88 groups have been identified in the plan, which contained as many as 11,390 pornographic images. Additionally, the ISPs said they’ll kick in some $1.1 million to help stop the spread of the offending content.
That’s the problem with something as unregulated as Usenet. While most of us will use it fairly innocently, maybe grab a missed TV episode or album or whatever, there are others who use it for that type of thing. And it’s people like that that will draw unwanted attention to the service.
How quickly would you reach Time Warner’s 40GB data cap? I’d be finished in like a week. No lie.
By now you’re probably well aware of Time Warner’s scheme to charge you by the gigabyte. Arrington wrote a piece yesterday on TechCrunch saying how it would destroy innovation—how can YouTube et al. make money if no one has the bandwidth to watch videos, or whatever?—and all that. But I’m not really interested in whether or not YouTube or some band new social network for left-handed people succeeds or fails; I just download a lot of stuff.
For example, yesterday I grabbed the 1080p rip of Cloverfield—horrendous, by the way—in a few hours off Usenet. That’s 9GB right there, or one-fourth of my would-be limit gone in a matter of a few hours. I’m grabbing Semi-Pro right now—that’s another 9GB. And There Will Be Blood should see an internal release in a few days (there’s already a terrible 720p scene rip).
Throw in your occasional album and you can see where this is going.
In well under one week, I would have shot past my monthly bandwidth limit.
I say this just to illustrate how quickly that 40GB cap can be shattered. So to all those who would like to say, “Well, 40GB should be plenty.” Yeah, well, sometimes it isn’t.
And $1 per gigabyte? Here, just take my bank account while you’re at it.
Photo from Flickr
Before I write this gem of a post, let me attempt to absolve myself of all legal responsibility: I’m merely doing what I was told to do. That should hold up in court, no?
My second charge this fine Productivity Week is to teach y’all how to pirate movies, music, video games, etc. more efficiently. On what planet is this type of advice is both approved of and encouraged I don’t know, but here we are.
I’ll divide this into two parts: helping make the most of your BitTorrent experience, and doing that Usenet thing as painlessly as possible… while you still can! Oh, man. The fun, it never stops here.
BitTorrent is for poor people or jerks who either cannot afford to pay for Hollywood works of art like that hilarious Zohan movie, or who think they’re being righteous and thumbing their nose at The Man by downloading. I fall into the first category. I’m not about to pay $30 for the Blu-ray version of Rambo, but I’ll sure as hell download it, watch it and then delete it, then forget I ever watched it.
But how to use it smarter? That’s what everybody (nobody?) wants to know.
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Usenet appears to be the MPAA’s next target. Not good.
The MPAA has told Newzbin, a popular Usenet indexing service and creator of the NZB file format, that it’s hosting copyright-infringing material, material that needs to be removed post-haste. Never mind that NZB files themselves aren’t copyright-infringing (though I doubt the courts would make that distinction), but such is the world we live in.
By the looks of it, Newzbin seems to be complying with the MPAA’s demands. It made a statement saying it doesn’t “condone” the posting of copyright-infringing material, and has hinted that it will remove such material and ban offending accounts.
A few months ago, the RIAA targeted a prominent Usenet provider, so going after enablers like Newzbin was the next logical step.
My advice? Leech off Usenet while you stile can.
via TorrentFreak
