How to use Newsgroups and usenet. | The Virus Must Be Stopped

Whats all this about usenet and newsgroups & how do I do it?

February 23rd, 2008

For a while now I’ve been using newsgroups off and on to download things, its extremely quick and can max out the speeds of your connection. I’ve downloaded stuff off it at 20mb/s with my cable connection, people get great speeds over ADSL connections as well.

What is it?
Usenet is where the newsgroups are, it is a global, decentralized, distributed internet discussion system. Basically its a load of servers located all over the world that are all exact copies of each other. What this means is that the server that’s closest to you will have the same data as every other newsgroup server around the world.

Some servers delete the content on the server by date basis to conserve space, this is called retention. if a server has a retention of three days it only has stuff that has been uploaded to the newsgroups in the last 3 days, most servers offer at least 120days tho.

What’s on Usenet?
Almost everything can be found in the newsgroups from general discussions about football matches to mental discussions about chemical equations or theory’s and stuff. Although the main reason why most people have started using Usenet lately is not the discussions but the ability to download any file uploaded to it at great speeds no matter where you are in the world. And people upload a lot of files everything that’s on them p2p programs and torrent sites are on Usenet as well and usually before the others.

How do I use it?
First, you need access to a newsgroup server. Some ISPs such as Virgin Broadband in the UK give you a free newsgroup access with their internet packages, although it has a short retention with only 3 days. Personally I would suggest getting an account with a premium Usenet provider its cheap and you’ll get a much better retention. A company I would recommend is NewsDemon - www.newsdemon.com, they have servers based in Europe Asia and America as well.

Secondly, you need a program to be able to access the newsgroups and download the files, i recommend GrabIt. A really great program that’s a breeze to set up. It’s only for PC unfortunately but if you’re a Mac user I’ve heard MT-NewsWatcher does the job too.

Last but not least you need to let the program know what to download. There are various websites on the internet that list what is on the newsgroup servers but i suggest these 3:

Now to bring it all together you need to set up your program with your newsgroup details. You’ll need to enter the address of the server, your username, password and the number of connections that are allowed at once. There is a good guide for help setting up GrabIt here.

Go to one of the sites above in the list and search for something you want.

Lets say you went to binsearch and wanted to search for “freeware” type it in the search box and set the max age of post to the retention of your newsgroup server. I’d suggest making the results per page larger as well. On clicking search you’ll be greeted with a page of subjects you can select with a tick box, some times there may be collections of files, these are usually the files your looking for and ticking the box next to it and clicking on “create nzb” you will be prompted to download a nzb file for that collection. This is what GrabIt or whatever program you’re using to access the newsgroups needs to allow it to download the data. (think of this like a torrent file, or directions to the files).

So download the nzb, open it and it should start downloading the files to your computer. By this point you should be dropping your jaw at the speeds.

The other sites I listed above are more like they way torrent sites worked and much simpler to use, but I much prefer binsearch as you can actually choose what parts of a file you want to download.

Files on newsgroups are usually compressed in seperate parts so you will need a program like WinRar or the Mac alternative to extract them once the download is complete.

This is only a short tutorial so if you don’t understand anything or want to know more leave a comment and ill try my best.

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