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.

What? Today we’ll be setting up our Usenet software to look at an RSS feed. (You can also accomplish pretty much the same thing using BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is so plebeian.) This RSS feed will carry NZB files that, magically, point your Usenet software to the actual files you’ll be viewing in VLC or MPlayer or whatever. In English, that means when you come home from work or class you’ll have the latest episode of The Ultimate Fighter all ready to be watched.

You’ll need:

• A Usenet provider. The big ones, off the top of my head, are Giganews, Newsdemon, Astraweb, and Supernews. You’ll be spending around $10-$20 a month for access, but that gives you access to all the riches that Usenet provides. In my experience all these services are more or less the same, so feel free to shop around. I have no favorites.

• Usenet software. The easiest to use for our purposes here today, once you’ve set it up, is SABnzbd+. It’s free as in freedom and free as in beer.

• An NZB site that provides an RSS feed. I’ll be using Newzleech.com as my example, but pretty much every NZB site out there should do this. Maybe, I don’t know.

• No qualms with any of this. Yeah, Americans can go to Hulu to watch some shows, but my overseas friends aren’t so lucky. Maybe if Hollywood got its act together we wouldn’t have to resort to this. (Incidentally, I’m right now removing the copy protection of a bunch of DVDs I bought in the UK this past week. All I want to do is see Top Gear! Is that a crime?)

OK!

1. With your Usenet account in hand, go ahead and download and set up SABnzbd+. It’s not hard, but I’m not about to hold your hand here. It basically involves launching the application, putting in your Usenet account info, then pointing the application to a few folders. If you can’t figure this out then the rest is probably too much for you to handle anyway.

2. Set up the RSS feed! I’ll be using the TV show The Ultimate Fighter as an example. For newzleech.com, the RSS feed you make looks like this:

http://www.newzleech.com/rss/php?n=50&g=alt.binaries.multimedia&s=the+ultimate+fighter+s10

That’s your RSS feed. What that does is comb the Usenet group alt.binaries.multimedia (that’s the “g” in the URL) for the last 50 posts (that’s the “n”) containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” (for season 10 episodes; that’s the “s”). The RSS feed is updated every 20 minutes.

3. Go to SABnzbd+’s settings (Config:RSS) and input that URL. Then set the RSS checking interval (Config:RSS checking interval) to something reasonable, like once every 60 minutes. Under no circumstances should you set it for anything more frequent than every 20 minutes, since that’s considered uncouth, and your IP address is likely to be banned by Newzleech. You don’t want that.

That’s pretty much it.

Now what you’d do, I guess, is launch SABnzbd+ Wednesday morning before you leave your house. If it’s set up like we set it up here, SABnzbd+ will check alt.binaries.multimedia for news posts containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” via the Newzleech RSS feed. When SABnzbd+ finds the new posts, it’ll download the appropriate NZB file, then start doing its magic.

In other words, as soon as the latest episode hits Usenet, it’ll automatically be downloaded to your computer, Internet connection speed notwithstanding.

Of course, you can add as many RSS feeds as you want, with whatever parameters you want. Maybe you like 30 Rock, or want to see Louis CK on Parks and Recreation? Or maybe you like Curb Your Enthusiasm? To quote that Nas song, the world is yours.

The purpose of this here article was strictly educational blah blah.

Now I’m off to rip the copy protection off a DVD I BOUGHT FROM HMV WITH MY OWN MONEY! What a pain.

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.

And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.

Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can “find things” on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!

So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current 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.

First up, Giganews. Verizon users get 50 percent off the Diamond Plan for three months. (The regular price is $29.95 per month.) The Diamond Plan includes 50 simultaneous connections, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and SSL encryption. Or, if you don’t want Diamond, you can have any other Plan for three months at 20 percent off. There’s also a 14-day free trial for you to test the waters. All Plans come with 391 days of retention, which is plenty. Giganews is working toward 400 days of retention.

Next we have NewsDemon, which I use. It’s giving Verizon customers 20 percent off its service, which includes unlimited bandwidth and 20 connections. The top price for NewsDemon is $22.99 per month.

Then there’s always Astraweb, which is $15 per month for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections, and no download rate limit. (The popular $10 per month service limits you to 1 Mbit/s.) I’ve never used Astraweb, so I can’t speak to it reliability. That said, I hear good things on various message boards.

So, plenty of options for Verizon folks. Happy trails.

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.

Right, so the file you’re looking for is “MICROSOFT.OFFICE.2010.v14.0.4302.1000.BETA.1.VOLUME.X86-64.ENGLISH-WZT.” I see that it’s on at least one popular, private BitTorrent site that I’ve mentioned in the past.

Or, if you use Usenet, you can find the file on your favorite NZB download site.

Direct links, of course, are out of the question. It’s already probably in bad taste to note the exact file name, but such things really don’t concern me.

The file’s about 1.58GB. It’s a beta, so I wouldn’t switch over to it full-time just yet.

Never has typing business letters been so fun.

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.

The Diamond Plan, which includes 20 connections (plus SSL, which is sorta unnecessary, but whatever) and unlimited monthly bandwidth. That’s usually $30 per month.

Giganews is sorta the Ric Flair of Usenet access, which is sorta weird since it’s only 11 years old. (Usenet itself predates the Bronze Age.)

For the record, I use Newdemon. I pretty much live in alt.binaries.hdtv.x264. True story!

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.

The court case, in the Southern District of New York, found usenet.com guilty of “direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement.” And perhaps more worrying is that usenet.com cannot defend itself using the ol’ Sony Betamax decision. In a nutshell that says that so long as there is a significant, non-infringing use of a device/service you can’t sue it into oblivion.

For those not in the know, Usenet, which is as old as the dinosaurs, can be described, in a very dumbed-down way, as a big, decentralized message board, but one where you can attach files. I’ll leave it at that.

Of course, this is “only” a district court’s opinion, so make of it what you will. And it’s worth stressing, of course, that usenet.com != Usenet. (For the record, I use newsdemon.com, and my brother uses giganews.com. They’re pretty comparable based on our unscientific “let’s see how long it takes to download SomeFile” tests.)

The second rule of Usenet…

via Slashdot

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.

So, you’d be paying $14.50 for Transmit, $49.50 for Coda, $14.50 for Candy Bar, and $12 for Unison.

I used Transmist a lot in the days of Xbox1, when I would transfer files between my iMac and Xbox1—it was good.

And Unison, as I’ve said in the past, is a fine Usenet newsreader. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth—it doesn’t show the total download speed in the dock icon, for example—but it’s still pretty great. Hopefully Panic will invest some of this new money into updating its slew of applications, because, really, the ones I’ve used are pretty terrific.

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. 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!

Yup, for a limited time now you can grab the top tier of Giganews access, Diamond, for $15 per month for the first three months of your subscription. So, a cool 50 percent off for a little while. Not too bad. This gets you the current max of 240 days of retention, unlimited bandwidth and 20 simultaneous connections. (It also has SSL, but that may slow down your download speed, and, eh, is bordering on the superfluous, but it’s there if you want it.)

I think one of these days I’ll do a big GUIDE TO USENET chart, listing all the big providers, retention times, max connections, price, etc.

How do you get the goods? Roll over to NewsDemon and sign up for a monthly service with the coupon “CRUNCHGEARRULES.” As long as you keep re-upping, you’ll get the discount for a year.

What can you do with Usenet? Well, besides the obvious hax0ring, Usenet is one of the largest worldwide forums in existence. There are plenty of groups for every prediliction and folks like Newsdemon are working on bringing the service into the 21st century to compete – and work with – with social networks and smaller forums. We’ll have a primer up soon but until then, give it a whirl.

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.

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.

MSNBC, of all outlets, has a truly remarkable report on how Cuomo, ISPs (including AOL), law enforcement and an Australian company are all involved in trying to eliminate the offending material from being traded online. There’s a lot of talk on whether or not deep packet inspection is appropriate here: true, no one wants to see child porn online, but who’s to say, some time from now, the authorities don’t decide to use the underlying technology for something else? Something along the lines of, “In order to keep you all safe from terrorists we’ll be deep pack inspecting everything from now on.” Then what if the likes of the RIAA/MPAA get involved—“Hey, we need to use this technology to protect our intellectual property.” Slippery slope, sure, but something to think about.

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.

Sascha brings us back to 1993, the year when most of the current blogger kings were just entering college. Their discussions were precursors to the open, sad eyed moping of JenniCam and her ilk, the snark of the Gawker empire, and the basis for just about every social network on Earth. After all, if emo nerds could create a complex network of interconnected forums, think of what Ning can do with VC funding!

I personally never got into newsgroups as a communications medium although I now use the network for another form of data transmission. Is Usenet dead, as Sascha posits? I don’t think so. As long as there are folks who thing a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on. Sure, ISPs will shut down access out of mislaid kiddie porn fears but the real pros know where to go to get their agnst-filled, nit-picking, obsessive fix.

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.

The site even has form letter that it encourages New Yorkers to send to their ISP asking them to help stop child porn. You know, as if carrying the nearly 30-year-old Usenet service is tantamount to running some sort of illegal sex slave ring.

What’s most troubling is that child porn is pretty much the only crime that’s universally condemned—it’s not like “big deal, I download a movie off The Pirate Bay.” It wouldn’t be too hard for someone to accuse you of being “soft” on child porn because you’re trying to argue that blocking Usenet access, as provided by ISPs, makes no sense, since anyone hell bent on downloading it can get Usenet access from any number of different places at the drop of a hat. That, and never mind that we’d have to ban the Web as a whole because Lord knows there’s nastiness on there, too.

At the same time, ISPs probably know that such a small percentage of their subscribers can even pronounce Usenet, let alone how to configure a news reader to download binaries, so that blocking access isn’t too big a deal. It certainly beats having Cuomo & Co. call you “soft” on child porn, right?

All that being said, these ISPs sometimes do own the servers where all these alleged files are stored, so there would, theoretically, be some sort of liability there.

Now let’s ban access to HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent and every other protocol since untold amounts of undesirable content flows through them every day!

Is there a politician in this country who understands how technology works, and isn’t looking to further his or her own ends by exploiting the public’s lack of knowledge? Thought not.

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?

Verizon will no longer carry the alt.* groups; you’ll only find the Big 8.

Sprint has similarly agreed to curb Usenet access.

Obviously it’s the ISPs’ right to choose what groups it carries and what groups it doesn’t, but this does reek of overreaction.

And to play devil’s advocate, the argument, “Well, then why doesn’t Verizon just block access to the Web, there’s gotta be gross content on that?” Difference is, those files aren’t on Verizon servers, whereas they were on its Usenet servers (allegedly).

Given my advocacy for Usenet this past year, you’d think I’d be more upset than I am. I mean, all I’m losing is access to a few binary groups, groups that can easily be replaced with BitTorrent sites. And I’ll be in another country in about a month’s time, so I have bigger things to worry about.

And as far as the larger speech issue goes, it’s not like these ISPs are preventing you from accessing the service, but rather they’re just no longer providing it. I don’t quite know if that counts as censorship, especially given Google Groups’ existence (anyone remember Deja?).

It sucks, yes, but I think we, as a society, have more important issues to concern ourselves with than whether or not Verizon, as a company, offers access to alt.tv.simpsons.

A nice discussion about this can be found on the comp.sys.mac.system group. I’m sure they’re others, but it’s one that caught my eye as far as groups I regularly visit go.

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.

You guys want the quickest, least responsible way to BitTorrent like your life depends on it? If you’re using a router, put your computer in the DMZ and make sure any and all firewalls are turned off. Or, if you’re directly plugged into your modem (like me!), just turn off the firewall(s). This 100 percent irresponsible action, for both you and the greater Internet community, will prevent you from having to search esoteric networking forums because you keep getting “ports are closed” errors. What this does is expose your computer to the Internet with nothing getting in between your computer and the computer you’re downloading from. (Oh man, ended a sentence with a preposition!) It’s a sure-fire way to get a virus or trojan or all sorts of malware, but if you want the absolute easiest way to get your torrents up and running, that’s the way to go.

But let’s say that you’re a little more responsible than that, that you can deal with a little port forwarding nonsense. If that’s the case, then check out this site, Port Forward. It’s got tutorials for all makes and models of popular routers on how to open which ports and when. That way, you only open the ports that are necessary for BitTorrent to run smoothly and don’t leave your entire system vulnerable to Internet nasties.

You can also maximize your BitTorrent download speeds by using private trackers like What.cd. I grabbed the new Disturbed album last night in, say, three minutes, and was getting speeds of around 800 kbps. Theoretically, you’re also safe from the likes of the **AA, but with OiNK’s closure (and the subsequent arrests) and the recent threats against What.cd, I wouldn’t feel too confident that The Man isn’t watching your every move on private trackers. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Moving on, let’s talk Usenet, whose days could also be numbered. It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but I explained most of it, including exactly what it is and how to gain access to it, a few months ago. It’s actually a pretty decent post, very thorough, so check it out before you head out of the office today. That said, he’s a brief little recap for how to use Usenet as painlessly as possible. That way, you spend less time trolling strange binary groups and more time downloading The Fifth Element in 1080p. (I’ll be watching that tonight, methinks.)

The way to download Usenet files using zero brain power is to obtain NZB files. Think of them, if you will, as .torrent files. That is, they don’t contain any data per se, but rather “point” to where this data can be found. NZBs tell your news reader—I’ve used Unison for several years now, and it’s one of my favorite Mac apps—where to go to grab the files you’re looking for.

Now, where to get these NZBs? The best location is Newzbin, but as I mentioned a minute ago, its days may be numbered. Right now, you have to be invited to even join the site, which then charges a couple dollars a month to access its NZB index. Seeing as though we’re already in the pirating mindset, I doubt you’re in the mood to pay for anything.

There’s a few free alternatives to Newzbin, that, while not as easy to use, work the same way. I occasionally use NZBIndex.nl. Try it out now. Search for “Weeds,” for example, and up will pop a list of recent posts made to a binary group dedicated to HD. All you have to do is tick the little button and click “create NZB” and the site will make an NZB file. Now, you double click that and, if everything is configured correctly, it’ll start to download all the parts of the rar archive. That’s it. So, literally, in like 10 seconds, you can go to NZBIndex.nl, search for your content, and create the NZB and away you go. It’ll pretty cool, and quite literally shocked Biggs when I showed it to him. He was able to download 27 Dresses—for his wife, he claims—it no time.

Using the Usenet server that’s part of my broadband subscription, I can usually download up to four files simultaneously at around 250kbps each; you’ll max out your connection if you go with a commercial provider. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I’ve never had any issues with ports being closed or anything when trying to download from Usenet, either with or without a router, or when hooked up to NYU’s campus network, which I miss dearly.

So there, how to pirate stuff as easily and quickly as possible. Enjoy your weekend. I won’t.

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