Just saw on Titus Tech Talk that torrents are last decade, and newsgroups is where it’s at for this stuff. Of course he didn’t elaborate, so I need some help here.

What is he talking about, and what are these groups that can I enter er, avoid?

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    "torrents are so last decade, we need to use the technology of four decades ago!"

    USENET was first rolled out in 1979.

  • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Honestly he is talking out of his ass, torrents are neither dead nor slow nor used by nobody. They’re very much alive.

    • MostlyGibberish@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, the notion that no one uses torrents anymore is hilarious. I use both frequently. Usenet is great and has a lot of benefits, but it doesn’t hold a candle to torrents as far as breadth of available content.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Back in the day, people shared files on usenet news, which was similar to the forums you’re seeing on Lemmy or Reddit.

    You’d take a file, image, video, whatever, and turn it into text via a program called uuencode.

    Text size posting limits often meant having to split the image into multiple text pieces all marked (1/34, 2/34, etc.)

    The person downloading the file would then need to stitch all the pieces together, in order, making one large text file, then use uudecode to turn it back into a usable file.

    Here’s a sample of what a uuencoded file looked like:

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      From a user aspect: nowadays all that is burried in/handed by the usenet client you use.

      Downloading from usenet is very similar to torrenting in that you receive an index file (.nzb) that is effectively equivalent to a torrent file. You pass that to your usenet client, and it’ll handle downloading each of the parts, called articles, then stitching them together into the actual file shares. (while even recovering missing/corrupted data via added parity data)

      The big difference is you’re downloading each of these articles from whichever usenet providers you’ve configured; instead of from random individual peers discovered through public/private trackers.

      Usenet providers usually offer more consistent and faster speeds, typically saturating my disk write speed; where as torrent peers are often slow or unreliable in comparison. Also as it’s a standard tls connection between you and a private service, and you don’t have to re-upload the data you download; you’re not exposed to copyright claimants and don’t need a vpn.

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    He’s talking about Usenet.

    You need a provider (giving you access to it), some indexers (communities that catalog and link to releases) and a download client, and you’re good to go. What you actually don’t need is a VPN, because you’re only loading from the provider and not seeding anything.

  • toasteecup@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You’ll want to do some research on nzb files and their transfer mechanism. I’d say both nzb and torrents together is the best option because you have redundancy rather than one is better than the other

  • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    torrents are last decade, and newsgroups is where it’s at for this stuff

    100% accurate. There are a ton of guides online to getting your indexer and providers picked and set up. It’s a much better space than torrents. I’m never going back into the muck with those things.

  • Ilikeprivacy@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Interesting. Newsgroups are literally what i used last century for my piracy. But back then you got newsgroups (and other services) included with your internet.

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Why don’t these usenet servers get taken down? They share stuff much more directly than piratebay ever did.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      They do sometimes; but they also comply with takedown notices. Thing is, they all mirror each other’s data and are located globally. Take one down, 2 more pop up outside your jurisdiction; and files that get taken down are only taken from one provider at a time, while others pick up the slack. It’s an endless game of wack-a-mole that’s essentially a waste of time.

      This is why it’s somewhat important to have more than one provider in seprate jurisdictions but not absolutely critical. You can move from one to another pretty seamlessly.