What would BitTorrent look like if it was lightening fast, always available, completely private, and secure? It’d look a lot like Usenet. Read on to learn how to ditch Torrenting and enjoy super speeds and selection on Usenet.
What Is Usenet and Why Should I Care?
First, let’s talk about a system nearly everyone is familiar with, BitTorrent. Torrents are a form of distributed file sharing. You get a torrent file and that torrent file connects you to a tracker and in turn that tracker helps your BitTorrent client find all the other computer around the world sharing that file. Your ability to find and download files is dependent on other people sharing and the quality and speed of their connections to the internet. It’s also inherently not a private or secure activity because there is no way, even on the nicer private trackers, to engage in the entire process of torrenting without sharing your identity (or the identity of your proxy or seedbox at least). Torrenting is, even on a private tracker, a public activity.
By contrast Usenet is private, secure, and as fast as your broadband connection can handle. What exactly is Usenet and how does it provide these things? A bit of history is in order. Usenet is, by modern standards, an ancient internet system. Harking back to the early 1980s, Usenet was created to serve as a global distributed discussion system. Sub groups existed for everything from hardware hacking discussion to movie critiques to alternative lifestyles. The heyday of Usenet as a global discussion forum has long since passed (although some groups are still in use). Usenet, however, lives on thanks to the binary groups and the introduction of the NZB file.
For decades Usenet has had binary groups, sub groups that specialize in the distribution of non-text files that are broken up into pieces and shared as text blocks in thousands of sequential Usenet messages. Software, photos, music, movies, television shows, and more can be found in the binary groups. Accessing the binary groups was an arcane art and required multiple steps as well as a lot of frustration when files didn’t download or unpack correctly. Eventually people decided they’d had enough and the NZB file was created.
Although the origin of the NZB format is murky (some accounts claim it was created by Newzbin, others that it was first created by Dutch computer enthusiasts and lifted by Newzbin, etc.) the practical application of NZB files is perfectly clear. NZB files are XML indexes that make sharing and accessing files on Usenet extremely easy. Back in the olden days of binary sharing on Usenet you had to, by hand, find all the pieces of a shared file and reassemble them yourself using a variety of programs. In the early 90s, for example, doing something as simple as downloading a wallpaper pack was a multi-step and failure prone procedure.
NZB files did away with all that tedious hands-on activity and made it simple to retrieve the entire file set with nothing more than a single NZB file. To bring it back to the BitTorrent comparison, NZB files are just like Torrent files except instead of pointing you to all the thousands of file sharers around the world with the file, they point you to the thousands of pieces of the file on a high-speed Usenet server.
When you load an NZB file in a Usenet client you are establishing a direct one-on-one link with your Usenet provider. There’s no extra peers, outside access to your machine, or sharing of files from your collection back to the internet. It’s all the benefits of BitTorrent and none of the downsides.
All you need to get started with Usenet is a Usenet service provider, an NZB index, and a Usenet client. Let’s take a look these three things and get you up and running with Usenet.
One final note on Usenet before we continue: Usenet can be used to download all sorts of material ranging from open-source software distributions to television shows to movies. How you use Usenet is up to you. We’re in the business of creating and sharing useful and accurate how-to guides, not policing what you do with your free time and broadband connection. Keep your comments constructive and on-topic.
Selecting a Service Provider
Unlike BitTorrent, Usenet is going to cost you some money. It’s a small price to pay for blazing fast downloads and privacy, however. Your ISP likely has Usenet servers available but there’s a 99% they’re unsuitable our purposes. If your ISP is one of the remaining ISPs that offer Usenet access they most likely don’t provide access to the binary groups making them useless for using Usenet as a file sharing service. Not only that the speed is likely restricted so between the poor selection and the poor speed it’s necessary to go with a third party provider.
Before we start suggesting potential providers, let’s highlight some critical terms and what you should be looking for in a Usenet provider.
Retention: Retention is the length of time the Usenet server retains the binary files. The longer retention the better. If you’re paying for a premium server you should expect retention on the order of years. Top providers usually have a retention rate in excess of 1,000 days. This is one of the most important things to look at as a server with a low retention rate will be nothing but frustrating. At minimum you should accept nothing short of at least 800+ days of retention.
Quotas/Monthly Caps: Providers offer tiered service that can range anywhere from 10GB a month to unlimited access. We’d suggest taking the free 30 day trial nearly every Usenet provider offers and then at the end of the month checking your usage to determine what tier you’d like.
Server Connections: This is the number of concurrent connections you can have with the main servers. Some people over emphasize the importance of this number. Nearly every Usenet provider offers 10+ concurrent connections and it’s easy to saturate even a 100MB broadband connection with only 5-10. If a provider tries to wow you by saying they offer 20+ connections it’s more for show than for practical application unless you’re sitting on an fiber backbone.
Security Features: The big one here is SSL encryption for your connection. You want SSL. This ensures that nobody between your computer and your Usenet provider knows what’s going on with your connection. You’re taking the effort to set up a Usenet connection for fast, private, and secure downloading. Don’t skip on SSL! Some of the high end providers offer additional security features like VPN services (useful if you want to keep torrenting to access rare files) and secure file storage (encrypted Dropbox like arrangements). Those addons are nice but not critical for our purposes.
Armed with these terms, it’s time to start looking at popular Usenet providers. We’re going to highlight three of the most popular providers here:
NewsHosting: These guys are the best in the business. They offer 2536 days of retention, up to 60 connections at once, a free VPN included with your subscription, full encryption for all connections, and they are cheaper than most of the other tier-1 providers. They even have a free usenet browser so you can easily find things without having to use some clunky app. And, of course, they have a free trial period.
UsenetServer: Yet another tier-1 provider with 2536 days of retention, full encryption for connections, and unlimited data transfer with their paid plans. They’ve got a search interface that you can use, and a free trial period for 14 days so you can try before you buy.
Once you’ve signed up for an account/free trial it’s time to configure your Usenet client.
Installing and Configuring SABnzbd
SABnzbd is, by far, one of the best Usenet clients out there. It’s such a great client, so stable, integrates with so many helper apps, and offers such robust features we’re not even going to waste your time mentioning other Usenet apps. SABnzbd is written in Python and available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, BSD (and other OS you can compile and run a Python application in).
One of the most valuable things about SABnzbd is how lightweight it is. Many Usenet apps are sloppily coded and enormous resource hogs—we’ve tested quite a few over the years that would redline a processor while simply idling, let alone actually downloading and unpacking files.
Grab a copy of SABnzbd for your operating system here. Run the installer, it’s largely a click-next kind of installation. The only thing you’ll want to do is check all the options on the Choose Components screen. You want SABnzbd to run at startup so it’s always working and you want to associate NZB files with the app.
After the installation finishes your default web browser will open up a connection to the local host on port 8080 where you’ll be greeted by the SABnzbd Quick-Start Wizard. Selection your language and click Start Wizard.
In the first step of the process you’ll need to plug in the server and login data for your provider. Make sure to use the proper port for SSL (usually 563) and check the SSL box. When you’ve filled everything in click Test Server to test your connection. If everything went well you should get a Connection Successful! confirmation as seen in the screenshot above.
In step two you’ll configure access to SABnzbd. If you won’t be using SABnzbd from any computer but the computer you just installed it on, you can leave all the default settings as they are. The web interface is enormously useful, however, and we recommend you check “I want SABnzbd to be viewable by any pc on my network” and set up a username and password
Step three is the NZB index configuration step. Skip this step for now; if you end up using the two services SABnzbd can interface directly with (Newzbin and NZBMatrix) you can plug in the information later.
Step four cycles SABnzbd, restarting the service. SABnzbd will give you a brief list of the URLs/shortcuts you can use to access the service from your network and then it will finish restarting and prompt you for the login information you created in step two. After you plug it in you should see a screen that looks like the following:
While SABnzbd is ready to rock at this point, there are a few configuration settings you may want to tweak before moving on to the final step in our tutorial.
Click on the Config tab in the upper left corner. Within the configuration menu you’ll want to visit the General menu to change the port number for SABnzbd’s web interface if it conflicts with any other web-server apps on your computer. You’ll also want to visit the Folders menu and change the temporary download and completed folders to a secondary drive if you’re crunched for space on your primary drive. Finally you’ll want to set up a Watched Folder. We recommend creating a new folder like C:\NZB\ and sharing it with your network. SABnzbd will watch that folder for new NZB files and automatically load them. This is an enormously useful feature for those times you’re browsing NZB sites from another computer on your network and want to dump some NZB files into SABnzbd.
Those are the three most critical changes. Beyond that feel free to mosey through the sub-menus to take advantage of some of SABnzbd’s useful features like scheduling (to, for example, restrict it to downloading only during off-peak hours), create sub-categories for your downloads to enable easy sorting (TV, Movies, Software, etc.); you can read more about the individual settings of SABnzbd here.
The Care and Feeding of Your Usenet Client
At this point you have a Usenet provider, you have a properly configured Usenet client, and all you need is some NZBs to feed to your client—without them you’ll have a bored client and an empty queue. The following are popular NZB indexing sites. Most have free access with limited retention and require some sort of signup and or nominal payment for full access (i.e. $10 a year). An important thing to consider is whether the index is raw or hand indexed. Raw indexes are simply giant searchable databases of all the files on Usenet—powerful to use but a little tricky for new users to navigate successfully—where as hand-indexed databases are sorted, categorized, and quality-vouched for you.
NZBMatrix: Neatly organized, rocks an API that integrates with SABnzbd, extremely easy to search and navigate. Requires a free account for basic access, premium access (which is well worth it) runs $10 for a 10 year upgrade—yes, you read that correctly, 10 bucks for 10 years.
Note: two of these providers are not around anymore so we’ve removed the links to them.
Newzbin: Newzbin is the oldest NZB provider around. The quality of their service is still high but because they aren’t the only game in town anymore a lot of people have trouble stomaching the credit-based system that runs around $3-4 a month. Like NZBMatrix, they have a solid API and are supported by many clients and third-party applications.
NZBClub: NZBClub is one of the more popular raw indexes. If you’re handy with search terms and want to do some deep digging this is a great place to look. Free, no registration required.
Binsearch.info: Another raw index (it’s always good to keep a few on hand!); free and no registration required.
NZB.su: A free service primarily focused on indexing Usenet media for third-party applications. It does include a raw search but provides no hand indexing what so ever. Unless you’re using it for a specific third-party application it’s best to skip this one.
All you need to do to feed your client and get the downloads rolling in is visit one of the above indexes, grab an NZB file or two (or two hundred) and dump them into the Watch Folder. SABnzbd will grab the NZB files, start the download, unpack the files, and place them in your specified Finished Download directory. That’s it. Armed with a long-retention provider, SABnzbd, and a good index, you’ll never have to wait around on a slow, clunky, and public BitTorrent download again.
Have experience with Usenet providers, clients, or useful third-party applications? Let’s hear about it in the comments.