Just wondering what a rough split is of people using either Usenet, torrents, or both?
I’ve only just discovered Usenet and while it is paid, it is very cheap and much more convenient than torrents.
Using torrents as well with the *arr suite set up for my various Linux ISOs.
I’m mostly downloading fairly recently released stuff, so there’s no shortage of torrents on public trackers.
I also don’t want any payment details associated with anything not explicitly legal, so that’d be a further deterrent from Usenet. Sure, I could use crypto, but even that links me to a wallet that might someday be traced back to me, so I’ll pass.
I have wondered this as well. Seems like it is pretty linked.
Tbf, Usenet and indexers are strictly speaking, legal.
Right, but whatever I’m doing on there really isn’t.
As a matter of fact my current jurisdiction doesn’t even pursue copyright infringements, but I still don’t want to be linked to anything commonly seen as shady.
Fair enough, I was under the impression that if you are using SSL, all an ISP or VPN provider could see is that you are connected to whichever backbone provider you were connected to. I.e. The content of what you are downloading is encrypted.
You could be downloading stuff that is not illegal, and I don’t think that is necessarily knowable by anyone except yourself.
I may be way off here, I’m not an IT person, but that was my understanding of SSL.
Wait, you have to pay for using Usenet?
Well since someone has to host the data, someone needs to pay for it :P
It’s funny you put it that way, because torrents are based fundamentally on the idea of freely hosting the data so nobody has to pay to access it.
You pay for traffic. There are some free versions out there, but they limit you to 10-25 GB or something. Might be an option for the 1% you can’t find on public trackers.
You can get free accounts from sites like Eternal September, but you only get access to text groups, which are mostly full of spam anymore. If you don’t download much, it’s best to just get a block account.