this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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usenet was used before the world wide web really took on. Nowadays it's mainly used to host & download movies, shows, games, etc. etc. It's basically like one of those direct download hosts where you simply download a file. So unlike torrent it is NOT peer to peer and you don't have to hope someone still seeds it.
But unlike direct downloaders the whole system is split into two parts. You have your "Usenet Providers" which are the host servers where all the files are stored. You cannot interact with those files directly however. They are all encrypted and fragmented and completely randomly named. What you need to actually download those files are Indexers. Those are sites like Drunkenslug, nzbgeek, etc. They will provide you with tiny little "textfiles" that contain a list of decryption keys and a list of filenames corresponding on the host server.
You then put those "textfiles" into a usenet download program, here i used SABnzbd, and it will take this list + keys, go to the usenet provider and starts to download those random files. After that it will unpack them, put them all together and ét voilá you have your fully assembled media file.
Most usenet providers are incredibly fast and can match your gigabit internet if you have it. The one i use for example goes up to 950Mbit/s. That combined with the fact that the files are either there or not, but nothing in between like it could be on torrent is a really really reliable and fast way to download stuff.
How come those big hosters get away with such infringements? I guess they must be less popular than Megaupload and such
I don't think they are less popular.
But their whole system works different. There is not a single file there that's called Inception.h265.HDR.mkv for example
Its all just billions of g24hg54j2k7j6nb2n1n5b5j files with absolute gibberish as content. So you need the nzb files to actually get stuff out of it.
But the nzb files also don't hold any copyright infringing material in and of itself.
So copyright holders have to fight two thing at once
No matter which encoding is used to store data, the hoster is still responsible for it. On mega, the data is encrypted, yet mega is still held responsible for removing content reported by copyright holders (the decryption keys being included in reports).
They get DMCA'd regularly and content get removed on Usenet as well. But the fact that they have to report literally thousands of individual files every time make it slow and inefficient. People will just reload the same item many times and it's always there.
Each copy, each single file in which the copy is split needs to be identified and asked for removal. Compared to torrents, it's a long and complex task.