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« Part 6 of a 7-part series on Advanced Searching for Copyrighted Content »

Part 6. Usenet, Newsgroups & NZB Sites.

Like IRC, Usenet and the newsgroups have a direct link to the piracy pyramid. Most true “sceners” and release groups alike still utilize it as a means of file swapping. For anyone who’s seriously into downloading, Usenet is a great addition to their filesharing arsenal. In fact, when Usenet is applied through a paid service provider such as Giganews or Usenext, it is inarguably the best way to download. Our aim of this article is to introduce the easiest and fastest methods for finding and downloading from Usenet.

Most of the hard work has been taken out of the newsgroups nowadays. With the emergence of NZB files, users don’t have to even visit a single newsgroup to get what they want. An NZB file is sort of like a *.torrent - just load it in to your software program and it downloads all the necessary files for you. In the end, the most you’ll have to do is unpack it. Elementary, my dear downloader!

A sample of what’s available on Usenet:

Movies. — CAMs, Telesyncs, DVD rips, full DVDs, DVD ISO ‘images’, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray DVDs, iPOD movies, subtitles, HD movies, trailers.

Music. — Full albums, ‘advance’ & promo albums, discographies, lossless audio (*.APE & *.FLAC), categorized genres of ALL music.

Television. — New episodes, complete seasons & series, older shows, HDTV rips, iPOD TV files, every category imaginable.

PDA files. — Apps, games, TV, movies for PocketPC, Symbian, PalmOS.

Games. — Disk ‘images’, smaller games, full DVDs for all platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux) under every genre available.

Games - other. — Rips and full DVDs of games for XBOX, XBOX 360, N64, Wii, PS2, PS3, GameCube, GB, Nintendo DS, Dreamcast.

Applications. — Huge variety of software for every configuration. Very popular ‘0Day’ sections.

Books. — eBooks, audiobooks, eZines, magazines, books in PDF and other formats, comics, how-to’s, tutorials, manuals, books for students, universities, eLearning.

Miscellaneous. — Image galleries, clip art, templates & textures, fonts, 3D models, recipes, cross-stitch patterns, wallpapers, ringtones, ringtunes, phone software & games, anime, games emulators, porn…(it’s true!), and everything else that can be digitized and shared.

To access the newsgroups, you will require the following:

— Access to Usenet (either via a ‘premium’ service or through your ISP).

— A newsreader (there are many free options).

— A list of NZB websites that index Usenet content.

— A couple of utilities (such as WinRAR or 7-Rar, and QuickPar).

We include the complete, step-by-step process at the bottom of this article.

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Websites for Usenet searching

There’s a few sites that offer search capabilities (some in ‘real time’) for finding content on Usenet. This can be a helpful service to find older posts, especially if you subscribe to a premium online news server like Giganews that will be able to retrieve them. These websites can also be used as a tool for discovering popular newsgroups that belong to your interests.

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Introduction to Usenet

Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. Check the full description of Usenet on Wikipedia.com. It is a virtual peer-to-peer network for exchanging text messages or binary files with people all over the world. Text message files contain just that: text. Binary files can contain images, multimedia, programs or basically anything, all of which is broken down into its simplest format (binary). Each subject collection of posted messages is known as a newsgroup, which number at over one hundred thousand. Users can “post” these messages to the newsgroups for others to read and download. Was this ever handy back in the day! To be able to share files with someone and you didn’t have to copy them to a 5.25″ floppy disk first.

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