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

If and when the **AA have Usenet shut down after the piece appears, feel free to blame Biggs. He’s making me write it.

I occasionally mention Usenet when talking about piracy here, but I’ve never really explained what it is or what it does. I’m still not going to explain what it is, technically, (that’s what Wikipedia’s for), but I will put it in layman’s terms. Think of Usenet as a big, unregulated, uncontrollable message board in the sky. The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy even logged onto Usenet when he needed to know the star of Radioactive Man!

The key difference with Usenet is that users can attach files to their messages. That’s the gist of it, at least. And since you can attach a file to a message you can, conceivably, attach many files to many messages. That’s what people do. You’ll find these file-laden posts on something called binary groups. And that’s where the piracy aspect comes into play. Literally thousands of groups devoted to literally thousands of categories, each one filled with all sorts of pirated content. Entire albums, entire movies, entire video games—getting 0day DreamCast games back in the day was top-notch—et cetera. Basically, Usenet rules and is what all the cool kids use. Hopefully you’ll be able to use it, too, after this.

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The one and only, PVD. Don’t worry, the pic is relevent.

What’s the most exciting part about the holidays? There aren’t any, unless you’re 7-years-old and get oodles of presents under a dangerously dry tree or metal pole or some other object. Like, who wants to go through the stress of talking to your relatives about what they want? The only smart way to do is to hand out cash to each and every one of your special guys and gals and let them buy whatever they want. Yes, it would be smarter to realize that exchanging money or gifts is a zero-sum affair, but the holidays are all about the spirit of giving, the spirit of going into mountains of credit card debt.

So, given that cheery (yet logical!) introduction, what could I possibly recommend you spend your hard-earned dollars on this Christmastime?

A few things, as a matter of fact.

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The RIAA has now set its sights on Usenet, that decentralized network of discussion groups, some of which happen to host copyrighted material. The cartel filed suit against www.usenet.com, a Usenet access provider, for offering—get this—”essentially the same functionality” as the Groksters of the world. (When was the last time anyone used Grokster? Why don’t we mention BearShare while we’re at it…) Usenet, if you’re not familiar, can be thought of as a giant decentralized message board of sorts, only you can attach files to your posts. That’s the Reader’s Digest version, at least. Since Usenet is sorta hard to figure out and not everyone has access to it (some ISPs give you access as part of your regular Internet subscription), it hasn’t been on the RIAA’s radar. But believe me when I tell you, having used it to “get things” for six years now, it’s the best resource for things out there for the average guy. Not everyone has access to topsites and the like.

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