Usenet

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sun, 6/29/08, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have you ever heard of Bittorrent?  You can get what you
> want from there.  Bittorrent is the modern replacement for 
> USENET NEWS (for Warez, that is).  That's how I watch my 
> Grand Sumo Tournaments.

On a practical note, bittorrent is also not a good replacement for Usenet NEWS for "warez" and other such copyright infringing stuff, at least for the uploaders and downloaders who want to avoid civil copyright-infringement lawsuits.  Any Bittorrent client can record all the IP addresses of all the other clients which connect to it, making the system very public.  Bittorrent also requires that one remain connected to the transfer file for hours to days, sometimes weeks, giving the law enforcement body watching their file transfer plenty of time to link an IP address to a person.  

Usenet NEWS, on the other hand, allows one user to upload anonymously (often to an unintentionally-insecure NNTP server), upload all files exactly once to one location very quickly, and then disappear.  The end users all download from the Usenet NEWS server on their ISP, and the ISP isn't watching because of "common carrier" provisions.  Anonymity means more stuff ends up on Usenet NEWS than on Bittorrent, and the previously mentioned "lost postings" problem is neatly resolved with PAR and PAR2 files (which can be anonymously reposted later on if necessary).

It's really weird that someone engaging in copyright infringement is defending replacing a system which made it very hard for law enforcement to catch up with copyright infringement violations, with another system that makes it somewhat easy for law enforcement to catch up with copyright infringement violations.