I’ve heard dmca is an issue there. I’m not sure how stuff stays up there.

I used the wiki on r/usenet, which was pretty helpful.

From my understanding, you need 3 things:

1. Usenet Provider (these are servers that host all of the content - you pay them to have access to download the content)
2. Indexer (this is kind of like Google but for the usenet providers - they will find and give you the .nzb file which will be used to access the content from the usenet provider above - you pay the indexer for their service)
3. Usenet client (This would be akin to a torrent client like Qbittorrent - it is the program which you use to download the content from the provider, using the .nzb file provided by the indexer)

Benefits of Usenet I believe are the high speed of downloads, generally accessibility to older and more niche content, and ease of use. You don’t need to fish through torrents hoping that the seed/peer numbers are enough to actually get all of the content in good time. I’ve found a lot of stuff there lately that I have not been able to find via torrenting sites, but are important childhood media to me/my wife.

Fair enough, I was under the impression that if you are using SSL, all an ISP or VPN provider could see is that you are connected to whichever backbone provider you were connected to. I.e. The content of what you are downloading is encrypted.

You could be downloading stuff that is not illegal, and I don’t think that is necessarily knowable by anyone except yourself.

I may be way off here, I’m not an IT person, but that was my understanding of SSL.

I have wondered this as well. Seems like it is pretty linked.

Tbf, Usenet and indexers are strictly speaking, legal.

And your 2FA seed phrases

This seems the most ethical to me. Don’t pirate smaller stuff. I would say it’s ethical to also pirate where the artist has passed away and it’s just their estate who get the money, but I’d take that on a case by case basis.

I agree it can get very convenient. You could get the *arr suite of apps running with Ombi and never have to touch a browser to find stuff. The *arr suite fail to find things pretty often though (see: downloading singular seasons of old shows) and I can see why someone just doesn’t want to deal with all that.

Yeah I think this is about convenience right? Pirating is more work than scrolling through an interface.

Sure, I have no issues with someone cracking adobe photoshop. In my case, I’m not going to be doing any serious photoshopping, so GIMP and KdenLive are suitable alternatives for me, a hobbyist, that wants the minimum effort required to use the tool every now and again.

It depends on the movie, but I agree people do need to keep seeding more for those older, niche films.

FOSS alternatives are out there for most software. I don’t really care for pirating photoshop when GIMP is free.

You can’t really kill P2P file sharing. If there is a need for creating a seed then someone will do it if the film/show is popular enough. Will probably be hosted through a DMCA non-compliant country.