Usenet FAQ

Both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are right in here since this topic is kind of a grey area: in much the same way as VPNs, the Usenet uses SSL so you’re only partially visible to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Having said that, the way that your ISP can only see up to the point you enter the encrypted VPN tunnel is the same as when you enter the Usenet. All they see is a variable amount of connections between you and your Usenet provider. This is why VPNs are often good and common additions to the Usenet: not only are you using the Usenet’s SSL but you can add another layer of security on top of that, making it close to impossible for ISPs to tell precisely what it is that you are downloading.

But what about the providers themselves? Nowadays the big majority of Usenet companies let you connect to the Usenet via SSL secure ports, so you’re pretty safe when downloading. However, what they can do is track uploads using a unique encrypted key that only they can decode (called X-Trace header), which points directly to the uploader of a certain post. Furthermore, although its access is completely legal, the Usenet has its own share of illegal content such as copyright material and more.

Who can tell whether the NSA, the FBI or the CIA is behind the Usenet server you happen to illegally download a movie from? Also, many companies will ban users if they receive repeated DMCA strike notices from the same account, so it’s safe to assume there’s a way that providers can pinpoint some action directly towards you. However, if you’re not doing anything illegal, you shouldn’t worry too much about it.

The Usenet is a decentralized network for file sharing and it can be compared to the internet almost entirely, despite being a decade older. Where you require a web browser to access the internet – with software like Firefox, Chrome and others – the same is true for the Usenet. Many email clients work as Usenet browsers since they allow the distribution of files via the News Network Transfer Protocol (NNTP), the main protocol utilized by the Usenet as opposed to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) that is used for the normal internet. Nonetheless, there are also specific Usenet providers who offer different browsers, called newsreaders.

However, the main difference is that you need to pay a Usenet provider in order to access this world, unlike the internet, which can be accessed for free or by paying an ISP (Internet Service Provider).

The Usenet is divided into hierarchies and the so-called Big 8 are the main ones (“comp.”, “humanities.”, “misc.”, “news.”, “rec.”, “sci.”, “soc.”, and “talk.”). Inside those there are newsgroups, discussion groups where users post text and binary files for other users to download, reply to and share. The organization of the Usenet works almost like a tree in which you follow the branches from the more general top-level of the hierarchy through to newsgroups and so on until you finally reach the articles. For instance: to find articles related to Wagner, you’ll need to follow the humanities.music.composers.wagner path.

Many files can be downloaded for free and with no legal implications. However, note that some newsgroups can have copyright material such as music, movies and more, of which distribution is illegal, particularly in alt.binaries, so tread carefully.

Alive and well! Although it is true that the service has witnessed a rise and fall over the last few years, the Usenet is still very much alive. Honestly, when we talk about something being dead that means there’s no way to resuscitate it back to life, which is pretty much impossible for the Usenet unless all its many servers are shut down. In fact, so long as two servers still share NNTP connections then the Usenet is alive, despite how much traffic there is in it.

Yet one major indicator of the Usenet’s life is the fact that providers still invest in it, offering paid customers larger retention times and bandwidth limits, faster speeds and more security. And since we’re on security, the Usenet is still one of the safest alternatives out there even when compared to torrent websites, since not only is it decentralized but it uses SSL connections too, not to mention that sometimes, you’ll even get a VPN in the bargain. Given that personal and digital privacy is something that seems to decrease with every passing day, the Usenet actually has a strong value in this regard.

One of the reasons people were abandoning the Usenet was the huge amount of spam that was going around in there. However, even after over 30 years since its creation, there are thousands of new articles posted everyday in several different newsgroups, which in turn have also evolved over the years and are even used by big corporations to provide extra support to their customers.

The Usenet is entirely legal. In fact, to make this as simple as possible: you should compare the Usenet to your general internet use. Just like the internet, access to it is completely legal, although there are some parts of it that are indeed illegal. Ultimately, it is the way you behave on the Usenet that dictates whether your practices are legal or not.

Having said that, if you want to access the Usenet simply for its primary purpose – to communicate with others by reading and commenting on posts – then there’s absolutely zero problem in doing so. However, since the Usenet is built around the downloading and uploading of files it has become a fertile ground for a lot of copyright material, such as music, movies, pictures and much more. Downloading simple text files and responding to them is fine, but when it comes to copyright content and its distribution then it obviously becomes illegal.

The creation of a sub-hierarchy alt.binaries quickly became the main way of spreading copyrighted data attachments like these, which ultimately began to connect Usenet with illegality, however wrong that may be. Also, the fact that no content on the Usenet is censored creates opportunities for the spread of illegal content worse even than copyright infringement that you should stay definitely away from. As no Usenet provider can act as your personal police officer, many of them they add VPNs to the deal and let you navigate freely so long as you don’t get the company whose provider you’re using a DMCA strike notice.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, the Usenet is one of the safest alternatives for file sharing, ahead of alternatives like torrenting and even TOR (The Onion Router). This is due to the fact that your IP address is not visible to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) when you’re downloading since (depending on the provider) it is possible to access the Usenet via encrypted ports, making use of a handy SSL protection. However, this is not magic and you’ll still be visible to your Usenet provider, so if you want to remain invisible even to them then make sure you pick one with a trustworthy no-log policy.

Also, don’t forget that the majority of Usenet providers additionally offer VPN services, too, which adds another layer of security to make your connection as safe as it can be. Activate the VPN first and make sure to use an SSL encrypted port and there’s pretty much no way that anyone could lay an eye on your Usenet session. However, the best way to remain as safe as possible is to stay away from copyright material, which the download and distribution of is obviously illegal.

“What’s the first rule of fight club? You don’t talk about fight club.” The same principle applies to Usenet, as its first rule is precisely to not talk about it. This ‘rule’ was created as an allusion to the hit-movie Fight Club with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The movie came out in 1999, around the same time that Usenet was being ‘killed’ by the regular web. Users then created this “you don’t talk about Usenet” rule in order to ensure the service remained up and running, ‘secretly’.

The core question behind the rule is that this is inherently related to questions around legality. Access to the Usenet is completely legal but there’s so much copyrighted and other illegal content distributed through the service that the more people openly talk about it, the more likely it is for it to become more and more difficult to access.

This is precisely what happened in 2008 when Time Warner Cable, a known U.S. internet service provider, removed their Usenet service, which was one of the favorites among users because of its unlimited downloads, good retention and stellar speeds and this made many people start paying for native Usenet providers. This had a direct impact on what the Usenet is today, a world full of providers offering a different range of service with different retention, bandwidth and prices.

Everyone’s heard of the internet these days, but did you know that Usenet is a decade older and is, curiously, the place where the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web back in 1991? The original Usenet was created in 1980, though the first experiments were already taking place one year before. Its objective was to be a means of connecting the computer science departments of two universities close to one another – Duke University and University of North Carolina – at a time where contact between students was limited to expensive phone calls or postal letters.

Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, who at the time were two students in Duke University, established the first communication link between the two universities with the help of Stephen Daniel. Daniel wrote the first news compilation software – called A News – and developed the dotted newsgroup naming structure that we know of today. Dennis Rockwell also took part in the project, developing the first communication network – called UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program).

How Usenet helped create the internet

Still in 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through the University of California in Berkeley. ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network and was a packet switching network, the first to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite that would later become the technical foundation of the internet. Not even a year later, the number of people using Usenet increased immensely and counted more than 50 member sites, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma and Bell Labs for instance. Therefore the number of newsgroups started to increase and to distinguish from one another in their nature, with the majority being devoted to different computer-related topics, but with space for recreation purposes too.

But Duke University’s A News software was only designed for one or two articles a day, which simply wasn’t enough at the fast pace that Usenet’s popularity was increasing. An improvement was necessary and the B News software was created at Berkeley in late 1983, and was already able to handle about 50 articles a day. C News came in 1987 from the University of Toronto and although it featured the same article capacity, it offered much faster processing.

The internet vs Usenet

But given the spread of local area networks and the internet itself, it became necessary to update from the direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers so that anyone could have software on personal computers that allowed accessing Usenet content while connected to local networks. NNTP was born, and newsreaders were built precisely for the exchange of newsgroup articles.

Over 30 years later the Usenet is now a well-organized structure separate from the internet, with dozens of providers making business from it by offering paying customers hundreds of thousands of newsgroups for many different kinds of content. These can be accessed from newsreaders using the NNTP protocol or even via web browser’s HTTP connection. There are millions of text and binary files nowadays, but it also needs to be handled carefully due to the existence of some less advisable content and even copyrighted material.

This means that, sadly, the Usenet has become a refuge for torrent fans. To answer this problem, many providers already include their own built-in VPNs and encrypted connection ports. The future is uncertain for Usenet but given its low popularity when compared to the internet, all the material it deals with nowadays and the increased popularity of VPN tools, it is possible that Usenet may become an extra service offered by large VPN companies instead of the other way around.

That ultimately depends on you, but if you’re a privacy enthusiast who regularly downloads content then you should definitely give it a try. Actually, one of the main reasons Usenet gained so much popularity is because it’s safer when compared to other file sharing alternatives, such as torrent websites. In fact, the main advantage it has over BitTorrent and others is the fact that your IP address is not exposed except to your Usenet provider, which is great for those who fear their ISP may throttle their connection. But if you’d rather have your Usenet provider mind their own business without keeping track of your use of their services then there are also some good no-log alternatives in the market too.

Furthermore, many Usenet providers offer SSL connections via secured ports, which prevents even your ISP from laying an eye on your downloads, and if you add a VPN to the package then your connection becomes pretty much bulletproof. Fortunately, VPNs are actually one of the main extra services that many Usenet providers offer their customers because of the fact that there’s a lot of copyrighted material stored on the Usenet too.

Access to the Usenet is entirely legal and so are the downloads of the majority of text files, but it’s when it comes to binary files that you start facing a lot of copyrighted content such as movies, music, photos, and much more. We advise you to enjoy the Usenet responsibly and try to stay away from illegal and copyright material.