Where’s the peanut butter?!

This post should probably be titled “pirating anything for dummies” or “Yes, there really is more porn on the internet than you could ever know what to do with (not that you don’t have some ideas…)” but there are some slightly less corrupt uses of usenet and what anyone does with information like this is really up to that person.

What’s easynews?

Easynews is just one online provider who sell access to usenet. Usenet, then, is an old newsgroup system on the net and one that is still in wide use for newsgroups - collaborative forums where people post conversations and also tons and tons of binary files (music, pictures, and videos). A lot of people aren’t familiar with usenet at all so an analogy might make it a little clearer - hotmail:email::easynews:usenet. Hotmail is Microsoft’s service that gives you access to the technology known as email. Or livejournal:blogging::easynews:usenet. Sort of. hopefully you get the idea.

The model works like this: I decide to start a conversation (or upload some file). I send that post to my usenet provider (easynews). It propagates to other usenet servers (hosted by other companies, like giganews, etc.). You access your usenet provider, see my post or the file I uploaded, and then we have a flame war. Or violate copyright laws. That’s free speech in action, baby!

Why easynews?

There are other providers who sell usenet access (and you probably get some free usenet access from your ISP, whether you know it or not), but easynews offer a couple nice features.

First, they have a bitchin web interface. This is really what this post will be about once we get down to the “how do I use it?” section.

Next, it’s very fast. Way faster than bittorrent or the other systems you may have used. At least this is true for me.
Next, their retention is pretty good. All companies who sell usenet access have to purge old posts that have been uploaded because they don’t have unlimited disk space and people are constantly uploading new goodies to the fray. So after a week or a month or a couple months, those files will be gone from your usenet provider. Based on my rough experience - easynews offer about a 45-60 day retention in binary newsgroups, which means there is still always more stuff to download than I could ever even go through (and I’m a pretty hardcore packrat).

They also rollover your account quota. You pay $10 a month and can then download 10GB of files. If you only download 5GB, then next month you’ll have a 15GB quota.

Why not usenet?

You can’t download anything in the word off easynews - you can only get whatever someone else has recently uploaded. The collected bittorrent networks and other systems like oink probably let you be a lot more selective and get exactly what you want. Usenet (and easynews) is a lot more like going to a really awesome smorgasboard.

It’s probably still piracy. There are plenty of legitimate uses of usenet, but a lot of it isn’t - so please remember to not just rip off the artists or engineers if you think about using it in that way.

How do I use easynews?

The traditional way to access usenet is (naturally) with a newsreader. This is a special program designed to access usenet newsgroups over NNTP (like how your web browser accesses webpages over HTTP or how your email program talks to an email server over SMTP or IMAP). But this can suck sometimes and almost definitely sucks if you’re looking for binaries on usenet. Newsgroup hierarchies are pretty arcane. Also, you might need to search a dozen newsgroups to find the group that has the file you’re searching for (or to find that the file is currently unavailable).

Easynews offer a web interface so that you don’t need to use a newsreader or really understand a lot of the headaches you’ll see in a dedicated newsreader (like configuring its connection parameters, dealing with complete or incomplete multipart binaries, assembling parts of multipart binaries, and so forth).

It feels like you didn’t answer “how do I use it?” No, you didn’t. How do I use it???

Simple - after you get an account with easynews, you just…

1. Fire up your browser and go to their global search page. This lets you search across all newsgroups and gives you a convenient view of search results.
2. Set your search criteria for what you’re looking for. Some convenient filters…
   • If you only want music or videos or archive files (.zip, .rar), check the appropriate “Type” checkbox to exclude other file types from coming back in the search.
   • If you’re searching for a video of a recently uploaded TV show, set the “Date & Time” to only search posts from the past 7 days.
   • Also, if you’re searchig for a video of a recently uploaded TV show, you might find that people upload these with different video qualities. There might be an HDTV upload that is something like 1GB for a half hour TV show, or there might be a 250MB xvid version. You can probably set the “Size” range so that only the format you want comes back in your results.
   • Depending on what you’re searching for you might want to get back a list of files posted or (for videos) you might want to see a thumbnail of the video (otherwise when you try downloading a video from your search for “Shooter” you might get something very different from what you expect).
3. Then run your search and see that there are many things you might like to download.
4. Now you’re ready to download!
   • To download a file, click the file and it’ll start.
   • To download a bunch of files, you can use easynews’ zipmanager. Check a checkbox next to the first file you’d like to save and another next to the last, then click the “range” button and all files between that range will be checked for you. Then click the “zip” button and all those files will be collected for you in a single zip file for you to download.

And that’s all there is to it!

Appendix: isn’t this totally illegal? Why does this system still exist??

That’s a great question and I don’t really know the answer. It would be totally easy to shut down piracy on usenet but nobody seems to have bothered. When you search around, you’ll see that in any given segment of the binaries areas, there are probably fewer than 50 people who are seeding most of the illegal content. It’s not anonymous at all and these people are very prominent (because they’re the ones uploading everything) and there are relatively few of them. It would be a breeze for some anti-piracy group to prosecute 10 of the top uploaders. The absence of these individuals would definitely be noticed (and discussed) by other system users and it would cut off the majority of the of the input to the system. Piracy solved. But I suspect so few people use usenet that the copyright owners just haven’t bothered. It’s really stupid, though, because instead of shutting down one piracy platform that would be very easy to stop and which is responsible for a niche but high-volume market on piracy, they focus on decentralized systems that are almost impossible to control.