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?
The relative anonymity that I refer to is the lack of validation of posting profiles. This isn’t on a level of layer 1, 2 or 3 but on how providers don’t need any information linked to an ID or at times even emails (for those servers that don’t require authentication for posting) You could define any email, name and user agent in the header fields as a posting profile and it would just accept it.
However, this particular aspect that in my eyes, as a whole, was a good thing regarding the system it did provide a strong foundation for the systemic spam problem that was seen across the board in all newsgroups. Accountability could not be maintained and the only thing to stop bad posts from getting through was quickly overwhelmed moderators.
So no, this isn’t the same level of anonymity that we would expect from modern solutions but there also wasn’t the same guardrails and requirements of identity that has been imposed upon the public like with modern accounts requiring email addresses and phone numbers.
There was a time where accounts didn’t require an email. Side note, this is precisely why I like XMPP as a concept. Though I have found little use for it due to the network effect.
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.
It’s kind of federated. You can purchase access through providers and use proxy/vpn.
Most ISPs no longer host or provide access.
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)
Prepaid visa bought with cash. Next question?
No longer legal in my European country.
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.
Although options there seem to be declining as well, at least where I live.