I'm surprised people aren't mentioning this more. Usenet may be dead for discussion, but it certainly isn't a dead technology.

edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the comments.

From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.

This is true. Pretty much all alt.binaries though and there is an interesting ecosystem of tools, forums and providers that you need to be aware of in order to access content.