Usenet newsgroups dedicated to piracy are seeing a resurgence in activity as file sharers seek less-policed areas of the internet to trade illegal data.
Some pirated movies are now even appearing in newsgroups before being released worldwide across popular P2P systems like BitTorrent. The alt.binaries newsgroups -- which mostly carry pirated software, ripped movies and MP3s -- have logged a steady and substantial rise in traffic over the last few years.
Posts to a key "warez" newsgroup, alt.binaries.multimedia, have quadrupled from 700,000 in 2001 to 2.8 million last year, according to Microsoft's Netscan System, which logs all Usenet traffic.
Meanwhile, more than 60 GB of complete DVD rips are now being posted each day to a single Usenet forum, according to stats at NewsAdmin, which tracks Usenet usage.
Many pirates are being driven to Usenet by the threat of lawsuits or by fear that their ISPs will soon be slapped with subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America.
Newsgroups offer relative anonymity compared to Kazaa, eMule and BitTorrent, which are now heavily monitored by the RIAA and MPAA.
In the '90s, the alt.binaries newsgroups formed a key part of the underground "warez" piracy scene, offering scads of illegal software and music for download. But Usenet has always been regarded as a poor man's piracy resource, thanks to its unreliability and lumbering performance. Posts to this dinosaur of a P2P system take days to ripple across a planet-wide network of news servers.
Additionally, each file posted to the system must be split into separate parts, thanks to an inherent 10,000-line limit on each post. For a 700-MB DivX movie of, say, Revenge of the Sith, that means thousands of parts must be collated and reassembled by the diligent downloader. If just one is missing, the file is garbage.
And parts do go missing all the time, routinely lost or often indiscriminately auto-deleted by servers trying to save disk space. Successful downloading depends on luck and the quality of your news server.
But a recent open-source technology, the NZB file, solves this age-old problem. Developed by Usenet indexing site Newzbin, the XML file permits the automatic gathering of scattered parts of Usenet postings.
NZB files are supported by most popular newsreaders, including NZBGet for Mac and Linux, and NewsBin Pro for PC. There are now also several dedicated alt.binaries.nzb newsgroups.
More dramatically, NZB allows web searches of files posted to Usenet, making Usenet almost as easy to use as eMule or Kazaa.
This new file format and the rise of commercial high-bandwidth Usenet services -- such as NewsGroups and Usenet.com -- are fueling the revival of Usenet. Pirates now are discovering, to their surprise, that the old newsgroup system, patched with modern technology, outperforms most other P2P networks.
"The download speed butchers any other system you use to download data," said Gilgamesh, a U.K.-based downloader currently moving part of his operation to newsgroups. "A lot of new servers can shift data as fast as you're prepared to accept it."
Part of the performance boost comes from the way Usenet acts like a bulletin board system.
"With standard peer-to-peer, you're a slave to the peer who's making the file available," said Gilgamesh. "Sometimes you have to wait for them to be online. On a newsgroup, once the file is there, it's there all the time -- at least until it scrolls off the server."
And best of all, for pirates like Gilgamesh, Usenet kills the inherent socialism of P2P. While BitTorrent and eMule demand that you share data to download it, Usenet imposes no such restriction.
"You don't have to share anything," said Gilgamesh. "Everyone downloads. Everyone is a leecher."
And this is the big advantage for those seeking to evade the copyright police.
"Historically, the RIAA have targeted those who share, not those who download," said Toby Lewis of MusicAlly, a digital music consultancy that advises the record industry on technology issues. "So, yes, technically it could be 'safer' for people to download from Usenet."
Whether the RIAA and MPAA actually have their sights trained on Usenet is unclear. The RIAA declined to comment when asked about its policy toward Usenet piracy.
But Lewis believes newsgroups are still very much under the radar.
"Though the copyright industries boast significantly improved geekery and monitoring technology, Usenet remains relatively unmonitored," he said.
Even if the industry groups did turn their attention to it, he said, it's hard to envisage how they could stop it.
"Websites hosting BitTorrent files are easy single points for the RIAA to attack and shut down," Lewis said. "Usenet is such a massive sprawling entity, with thousands of points of entry. How would you stop something like that?"
