> Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

No need to seed which reduces legal liability and bufferbloat issues on lines with anemic upload speeds. Most torrent clients penalize peers that don't contribute to the swarm. It's also really convenient to plug in automated downloads with a decent index and sabnzbd.

>Most torrent clients penalize peers that don't contribute to the swarm

I agree with you and I also want to add that I've had problems with trackers penalizing me because i can't get my ratios up since hardly anybody is torrenting the same outdated 1980s mecha animes i am. I don't usually have troubles finding or downloading them because there's always at least one guy who has it on a seedbox running 24/7, but my ratio is guaranteed to be stuck at 0.0 forever.

I actually got autobanned from a private tracker once because i downloaded a bunch of comic books which were all miniscule in terms of size and also extremely niche. this series was being distributed as one issue per torrent instead of a big archive torrent, with each torrent being on the order of a few MB. which resulted in me having several dozen torrents with a 0.0 ratio and therefore looking like a leech.

> I agree with you and I also want to add that I've had problems with trackers penalizing me because i can't get my ratios up since hardly anybody is torrenting the same outdated 1980s mecha animes i am.

Small trick. Pick one, popular, item that everyone wants now, pull it down and seed it. That will add to your ratio which can then be used to grab the obscure stuff that is hard to seed.

Download free popular ones and keep them forever to seed.

Automating *arr with torrents isn't too bad depending on which trackers you use.

especially if you use debrid/premiumize

> why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

With the exception of the rare, well seeded torrent, a Usenet download will proceed at full speed while the torrent will trickle along at 34kb/sec.

> It seems so fundamentally ill-suited to the task.

It is. But it is there, so....

Seeders on private trackers often use seedboxes. I can saturate my gigabit connection with just one or two torrents downloading.

But then you need to deal with the complexity and maintenance involved in using a private tracker. Easier to pay for a provider or two and an indexer and be done with it.

Of course, private trackers are superior when it comes to older content and general availability (no DMCA or NTD to worry about).

Download speeds, no ratios, very low risk of any action by right holders. Would be things I would consider. Also setting VPN right is not entirely untrivial, you could get appearance it being in use, but traffic actual passing through other ways.

Why are the risks of action by right holders low?

Because you aren't uploading like you are with torrents. In many (most?) jurisdictions downloading for personal use is ok. It's the uploading that exposes you to legal liability.

It is similar to watching illegal streams of copyrighted content. In most legal systems going after that is either hard or very little reward.

On other hand with torrents you usually automatically upload. And even single uploaded copy can result is some extremely questionable math of potential damages. Which the legal system in essence has blessed.

Easy to see which IP is on a torrent from anywhere (it’s a service you can buy).

Legal differentiations in some places between downloading and distributing.

At least at one point news servers were in a kind of a limbo rights-wise. They were kinda like ISPs providing a service and thus weren't liable.

Just like I can send you a copyrighted image via email and the email server owner isn't liable for the material on their drive.

Also it's hard to track compared to the ease of monitoring public torrent swarms.

With torrents you can just enter the swarm, log all IP addresses and maybe download a bit that it's actually infringing material.

With news the stuff is ascii jumble spread in posts with weird names and you need to download it all to figure out if it's what it says. And just looking for material from the 300TB backlog is a huge pain.

There are many things I've found on soulseek that are simply not on the public (and few private) trackers I check. I can only imagine the same applies to usenet.

similarly, soulseek is limited to 1 peer at a time, which some might consider "ill-suited to the task"

anyways I love slsk

clients exist:

- https://github.com/nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus

- https://github.com/slskd/slskd

You can still misconfigure or leak your real IP using a VPN if you are not completely right in how you set it up. This leaves you open for large-ish claims in countries like Germany because technically you are uploading and that's illegal. Usenet doesn't have the uploading component so that risk doesn't exist.

Usenet, in my experience, is reachable through a variety of easy-to-use web-based providers. Easynews, etc... I agree that it's ill-suited in the sense that often the files are split into parts and often need re-assembing or other such work. But it's fairly trivial stuff that a user may already be familiar with. Other than that it's super easy. Torrents, at least in my experience are not so straightforward due to the required installation of a client. I think users are hesitant to install it on their machines. Just my take based on limited experience.

> Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

In addition to the other answers, Usenet binary newsgroups are much older than torrents. So another reason is that it simply never died. Torrents didn't replace Usenet, they just complemented it.

Because it will max out your connection speed, got a 5Gb connection? no problem, it will instantly start downloading at full tilt.

Afaik, there is no benefit to a VPN for downloading content from Usenet.

If you live in a place where downloading is a gray area legally, it could save you a lot of potential hassle. Even if you win in court, it is far cheaper and better to have never been summoned in the first place.

Yes, but is there demonstrated to really exist any such area when it comes to Usenet? I am not convinced that there is.

Downloading from Usenet is not like downloading from torrents; it is not p2p. One downloads from the Usenet service provider over SSL encrypted connections. There is no way for anyone else to track it.

But doesn't Usenet require an account that's linked to a payment method? If you use something like a credit card, then the server owner has your real info and presumably a list of every illegal download you've done. Seems like you'd be putting a lot of trust in the server owner, and couldn't it get subpoenaed?

It is safer to use a Usenet provider of a different country.

Secondly and independently, Usenet providers often don't keep very many logs, so there may not exist anything for the server owner to provide in response. For example, if the Usenet provider gets ordered to list all users that downloaded a particular movie, the provider could respond that they don't keep such records.

Also, think of all the pirate streaming websites that exist.

The worst that can happen here is that a court orders someone to pay a fine for downloading something, and this would make big news if it were to happen for Usenet, etc. It hasn't happened to anyone afaik.

Honestly there's way more there, and you get consistent solid speeds. Find a provider with a lot of retention and you can find almost all mainstream media regardless of it's age. (Public) torrents tend to track what's popular and quickly fade. The masses seem to favour low size encodes too, so if you're looking for more quality (and again, public trackers) you're usually much more out of luck.

VPNs leak and can be tricky to manage. I believe most serious torrent pirates use seedboxes at this point.

It’s really not that bad unless you really don’t want to be found. Most DMCA/copyright firms just do a basic investigation which stops at the IP AFAIK.

Mullvad and I’m sure other modern VPN clients have “kill switches” built-in that shuts down traffic if the tunnel isn’t on. You can also do a leak check before starting anything up.

Unfortunately Mullvad and the majority of VPN providers don't offer port-forwarding anymore, last year when I checked only a couple, maybe three remained...

Having wrote that, another option, under Linux with network namespaces and Wireguard it's possible to have a pretty fail proof VPN...

Wouldn’t seedboxes be far more dangerous? The provider absolutely can see what you are doing on the box and provide that to the authorities whereas a VPN provider that doesn’t log activity, well there’s no paper trail at least retroactively.

Why do you trust VPN providers more than seedbox providers?

Mullvad and Proton at least have had their privacy claims tested by European courts, they really don't have much info on you. And conceptually it is obvious that a hosting provider could provide more information about a permanent activity than a networking provider could provide about a transient one.

Serious question: why does anybody use torrents for pirating rather than Usenet?

100% (down) bandwidth saturation, no VPN, no letters from lawyers, and no using my (asymetrical) upload - what is not to like?

Usenet is a bit of a weird place to get into.

You need to find an indexer, the best ones you need to pay for or get an exclusive invite.

Then you need to find a news provider, and pay them too.

On top of that you need software that can plug into the indexer and the server and actually download the stuff.