You get bad files far more often with usenet. With torrents, if it has thousands of seeds and lots of upvotes, you can be pretty confidant it's a good file.
I thought there were more fakes with torrents.
If the file gets damaged or you miss a part what can you do? Most files on Usenet come with par files to fix problems.
torrents are much easier. who knows which one is more private or safe, but if i had to guess i would say neither. but i encrypt my torretns, and the RARE times i have a problem its because i used a tracker site that i normally dont. my only guess is i connected with a monitoring server, because there is no other way anyone could know.
I thought there were more fakes with torrents.
If the file gets damaged or you miss a part what can you do? Most files on Usenet come with par files to fix problems.
What about torrent files that aren't popular? How many times are you left with an incomplete file? With Usenet it doesn't matter if it's not popular or old. You can get files that are more than 5 years old with confidence.
People get nailed using torrents because everyone in the swarm can see everyone else's ip address. Blocklists are of marginal utility. All someone has to do is use a home connection, join a torrent, and set their client to log. They get the addresses of everyone that joined the torrent, and their ip address doesn't show up on blocklists. Encrypting the connection doesn't do anything. That's meant to defeat traffic shaping by ISPs, not cover the torrent activity.
To get around that you can use a vpn that doesn't log, or use private trackers. Private trackers aren't foolproof, but the investment for companies is too great to spend the time on it due to much smaller numbers of people.
Both usenet and torrent sites are full of fake passworded rars, broken files, movies with out of sync audio, movies in other languages that aren't labelled, etc.. The difference is, with usenet you can't tell what's good and what's shit. You have to guess.
Torrent sites have upvote systems and files with lots of seeds are generally good. Also, if you're downloading a movie, you can see you're getting an actually video file and not a rar which could be passworded. With usenet, pretty much all large files are packaged as a bunch of rars due to limitations of usenet.
theres no way to track newsgroup users though? it seems like it would be even easier
You get bad files far more often with usenet. With torrents, if it has thousands of seeds and lots of upvotes, you can be pretty confidant it's a good file.
The RARs help with torrents too.
"Scene" releases of various content are distributed as RARs for a reason and that reason also applies to torrents. You can get the RARs from multiple sources (Usenet, private FTPs, IRC fserves), and then seed a torrent if you want.
As I said before, I've found incomplete torrents before, obtained the missing RARs elsewhere (including Usenet) and then seeded the torrent.
I use to like Deja News, but Google screwed it up with Google Groups.
Usenet will never go down. It is impossible to take down. Sure there is DMCA but they never get all of them.
I use Astraweb and it's great.