What is usenet and why should i be using it rather than torrents?

Okay, so you already know how torrents work. Everybody shares little bits. You download some and share them, and eventually everybody has a copy. It's free. It can be very slow or very fast, depending on the popularity of a particular torrent file. It can be risky.

Let's change hats and talk about Usenet. I upload a file to a Usenet service (that I pay for) and it is shared among thousands of Usenet servers all over the world. Other users (that pay for their Usenet access) can download the file millions of times. It can be extremely fast, but you have to pay for it.

Free Usenet access used to come with your ISP, but most of them have done away with that. Either that or you could get a free introductory (slow, limited) access through a paid provider, just enough so that you would get hooked and buy more access. Nowadays, most everybody has to pay.

I have had a paid access to a Usenet service for about 12-13 years now. Mine is around $100 a year. I make use of it, although I use it less and less now. It used to have bandwidth caps, meaning you could only download maybe 1 movie a day. Most paid services have unlimited data now.

Keep in mind that there is a separate group for anything under the sun. (More than 50,000 active newsgroups.) Also, no moderation, so lots and lots of viruses. Be careful.

The advantage is that you have almost no chance of being caught / fined, unless you are one of the people uploading content. And there are ways of masking your identity and IP address so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be caught. Many Usenet services either don't keep a record of what you download, or they only keep it for like 90 days in case law enforcement wants to look at their download records. I have never heard of anyone getting busted unless they were trying to distribute child porn.

So the newsgroups are divided up into categories, which are further divided so on and so on. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newsgroups. So you might have alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical and alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classic-rock. Your alt.* newsgroups are going to have a lot of file sharing going on... music, photos, movies, porn, games, you name it. Pretty good list at: http://binsearch.info/groups.php?server=2 .

Some Usenet services have browser access. Most do not. You will need a newsreader program. I use Forte Agent.