shhhhh

Didn't a lot of servers just stop carrying the binaries newsgroups, or never bothered carrying them in the first place? Even without considering piracy, binaries tended to place a burden on the server provider since the messages tended to be much larger. (Even a small image/program in the 10's of kB would be larger than a heavily quoted message.

Yes, and so these days there are paid-subscription NNTP providers that sync the alt.binaries groups. Presumably all the pirates (both the uploaders, and the pure leechers) are using such providers.