f13.net

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-gaming-firm-for-1635m-1726215.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-gaming-firm-for-1635m-1726215.html)

Surprised this hasn't made it on here yet.
I've seen this confirmed by the owners of pirate bay in their blog.
Also read that they seem to think the new owners are going to continue with the file sharing in some sort of 'legal' way by selling the tracker to 1 company and the file list to some other company so they company that owns the track will not know what's being downloaded? Personally I don't think a judge will be that stupid, but whatever.

In any event, this is pretty much the death of the site. I don't know what the new owners are thinking they are going to do with it, they're going to get their pants sued off of them within the week while all the users of the site mount a mass exodus to other trackers. I'm going to miss reading about these guys in the news.

Not like this will make any sort of dent.  Google works better for finding torrents than Pirate Bay ever did anyway.   :awesome_for_real:

I guess the company that bought them out is being accused of insider trading (http://www.swedishwire.com/business/422-pirate-bay-buyer-suspected-of-insider-trading-).

Moral deviousness from someone buying Piratebay!?!?

Too bad. Any good trackers left out there? Someone needs to come up with the next great thing in piracy. Darknets are all I can really think of at the moment, but to be honest all Darknets will result in is the complete banning of "unlicensed" cryptology on the internet since there isn't a single politician that understands technology.

Oh please. Pirate Bay was mostly crap anyway.

Just Google the name of the thing you're looking for plus "torrent".  It'll turn up links to half a dozen tracker sites that have it, frequently with more seeds than Pirate Bay does (or did).

Googling for Torrents is a pain cause the sites that get themselves listed at or near the top are almost always the "SEO" sites that have links that require paid membership or logins to download the Torrent files.

http://isohunt.com/ I guess everyone knows that site?

The one year jail term is crazy. If this causes the 'content industry' to draw the conclusion that 'sueing works' we might see a chain of other cases against less well known trackers out there. :/

Cala

Newsgroups still crush torrents and are much easier to work with. Astraweb still has their $11 unlimited package and then you just go to ISOHunt above or Newzleech (http://www.newzleech.com/).

I don't remember the RIAA going after the other music P2P sites after Napster bit the dust.  Either they don't really understand how file sharing works or they're just after symbolic victories.

Newgroups just took a huge legal blow since a provider lost in court on charges of copyright infringement.

Yea, you can really tell. :awesome_for_real:

Yea, Newsgroups suck. They were really cool when downloads were under a couple hundred meg, but getting a file that's a GIG+ is really annoying.
VPNs and private trackers are the only way to go.
Btw, if anyone has any invites for a private tracker, PM me :-)

Tell me that's green and I'm missing it. I max out my connection (1.5 MB/s) and have never had a problem finding a file. Clearly you do not know how to use newsgroups.

Usenet is good for recent stuff, as long as you have a reader that's good at dealing with the arcane Usenet binary file formats. For older stuff, though, you have to use Torrents (though seeding may be an issue) or poke through the file sharing services.

I never got into Newsgroups at all. I could not find a way to do so for free nor do I know how to use them.

That's exactly the problem... It used to be $40+ per month for unlimited bandwidth.
Now I think it's down to around $15/month.  Still not worth it.

Now... if your ISP still supports newsgroups... that's pretty awesome. They're going to be free, and REALLY fast.

After doing the whole torrent/rapidshare thing for games and  movies there is NO comparison with Newsgroups.

Nix and I share an Astraweb account and I can get anything up to 270 days old at speeds of 1.3MBS or more. 8GB 'files' ;) take me an hour to download. There is no way you can have that speed on items that were released 1-2 hours ago let alone older items with torrents. I tried to grab a movie on torrents this past week and it took me 2 1/2 days to grab a 1GB file. That just doesn't happen on Newsgroups. And once you figure out how to download and search on them it becomes incredibly easy to use.

And for those complaining about cost $11 a month is nothing to have the latest releases moments after they are released at speeds torrent users could only dream of.

1.3MB a second is 4.6GB an hour. Just sayin.

But yea, Newsgroups or nothing.

Thanks folks - signed up for an astraweb account, and yeah - I'm getting fantastic download speeds. Any recommendations on readers, and apps to decode files? I'm currently messing around with Thunderbird, and a trial of Newsbin pro.

Schild had found a really good one that's made by someone from the "scene" and it was on part with Newsleecher, which isn't worth the cover price, but considering the topic of this thread, I'm sure you can find it elsewhere.

It's called alt.binz.

http://www.altbinz.net/

There you go. Schild's service auto extracts files to their file server, but with other services you need to learn to use PAR2 files. It's easy stuff and you can set it so it repairs broken rars and then auto extracts. So nice.

I use Newzleecher because I can repair (Never needed) and extract from the same program and I can automate this process and leave the computer alone.

Thanks chaps, appreciate it.

For the Mac users out there, Unison is a great news reader to use with Astraweb.

http://www.panic.com/unison/ (http://www.panic.com/unison/)

Why would mac users want to download a bunch of software they can't use?  :why_so_serious:

Usenet is great with 300 day retention.  Not that I would know or anything.

I use GrabIt.

Back when I was using Usenet, GrabIt was my program of choice. It's been a while since I've used it though.

Most of the things I use torrents for are pretty old. Usenets dont help me much, if it is something newer a torrent is still more efficient for me.

Back when I was using UseNet, trn was my program of choice. It was that, rn, nn or vnews basically.  :geezer:

The first rule of Usenet...

Like, 1990s old? Cause I haven't had a problem finding anything around 5+ years old.

Yea, IF you want to pay $15/month. Which I don't.

There is one great feature that I love about newsgroups though.
Say I go out to the bar, and theres some bluegrass band there and I have a good time...
Now I go home and decide I want some bluegrass. With torrents I'm kind of at a loss. I don't know what to get... where to get it, what bands are good.

With newsgroups I can go to alt.bin.music.bluegrass or whatever and just download the first 5 albums I see. In general, people on usenet don't upload stuff that they don't like. So you end up with a bunch of stuff that's generally pretty good. Rather than hunting all over for whats new and great in a category, you can just go to that category and select all.

Necro for some help, since this thread seems to have turned into the newsgroups discussion thread.

I've started using newsgroups, but need a little help on how to search for files.  I've been using that alt.binz program that was mentioned earlier, and its pretty good.  However, I can't figure out how to make the damn search functions work.   Always get zero returns for any of them.  I've found websites that let you search for NZB's though, and have just been downloading those from there, and then opening them in alt.binz, which works good.  However, I'm getting some really mixed results with some of the random nzb search sites I've found, and know there has to be a better way.

So basically:
1.)  Does anybody know how to search groups using alt.binz, or knows another good reader for that. 
2.)  What are some recommended sites for searching and downloading nzb files?

Use websites for searching because it's much easier. Newzleech and binsearch are the top two.

I've been doing the same as you, and searching on websites (newzleech) then opening in alt.binz. I believe the free version of alt.binz has broken searching - it used to work, but got broken by changes which were never updated. IIRC you can pay a 'donation' for an updated version of alt.binz with working search, but I've not done this myself, so ymmv.

Or I guess I could just search on newzleech for a copy of the "not broken" version of alt.binz, and download it through my broken alt.binz  :awesome_for_real:

Thanks for the help everybody, sounds like what I've been doing is the norm (though newzleech works a ton better than what I was trying to use before).  Guess I just wanted to make sure I wasn't 'doing it all wrong'.

If you're getting your downloads, how can you be going wrong? :why_so_serious: