I’m not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point… Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn’t/couldn’t).
Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?
I could name a few I suppose:
- Relative anonymity
- Access to a large amount of history
- Nostalgia
- Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups
I don’t know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys’ opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.
I don’t know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it’s peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.
I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?
Usenet is a bit like the fediverse, it has tons of different servers that all talk to each other, and the admins of each server decide which groups it carries. So it you use a server outside the jurisdiction of the police you’re afraid of you’re somewhat anonymous.
They rely on safe harbor provisions within the dmca. Its like how your isp can’t be sued for you downloading warez, usenet providers just provide access to the network and look the other way at what goes over it.
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Purchasing and anonymous don’t really go together.
In my experience, most servers encrypt the data transmitted. So, they can see you are connected, they can see how much data you are using, but they can’t see what that data is. For all they know, you are downloading every Linux ISO in existence and nothing more. In the US at least, unless a service accepts cash or bitcoin (some do) it’s not really anonymous but most are pretty secure. I’ve paid for usenet for probably 20 years now. No issues.
Usenet just encrypts the connection from you to their server, they can see perfectly well what the data you download is. They aren’t prosecuted because they claim ignorance and that they’re just providing you network access, which is why usenet providers that specifically advertise for piracy have been shut down. This is also aided by usenet not advertising what you’re downloading (unlike torrents), so it’s hard to send a dmca claim.
See https://www.vitallaw.com/news/copyright-c-d-cal-perfect-10-failed-to-establish-that-usenet-service-provider-did-not-qualify-for-dmca-safe-harbor/ipm013b319a047bc91000b319d8d385ad169401 for example, whereas old usenet.com actually provided indexing too and got shut down for it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/judge-throws-book-at-usenetcom-in-riaa-lawsuit/
(I’m a happy long term usenet provider too)
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Although options there seem to be declining, as well, at least where I live.
To actually do this “anonymously” you would need to:
Too much trouble, pass. Do any USENET services accept Monero?
This is just overkill 😆!
Fair enough though imo often using half-measures for privacy doesn’t provide meaningful gain. If you aren’t willing to go the full mile, just pay for USENET using your credit card, you’ll be fine unless the feds are actually specifically after you, in which case pre-paid visa+cash work help either.