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I have been out of the loop for over a decade, where do I begin?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Title, I haven't Yo ho ho'd in forever in internet time.. What/where do I need to start again? I'm tired of ads and 3+ streaming services to watch stuff that's interesting. Running windows. Thanks dudes and dudettes.
The strong bias seems to be toward Torrents instead of USENET? Why? Cost of providers with decent retention?
I always assume that Usenet (with anonymous payment and a separate VPN) is a safer option than torrenting since I'm not the one publishing / sharing content. A copyright holder would have to go after that Usenet host (with a general court order), extract logs from them (if they exist), figure out who was actually infringing on copyright, then go after the VPN provider, to deanonymize me.
Usenet is great, but it's a client-server model, and things can be deleted from the servers (e.g. due to DMCA requests). The copyright agencies for very popular content automatically send DMCA and NTD takedowns for them.
On the other hand, torrents are peer-to-peer. They're practically impossible to shut down since there's no central server in control of everything. You don't even need a torrent file, just a magnet URI, which can be generated by anyone that already has the torrent.
Usenet is much better for rare/unpopular/uncommon content, since good providers have thousands of days of retention, whereas an unpopular torrent from 5 years ago would likely have 0 seeds left.