Usenet

• alt.2600

Newsgroup of the 2600 hacker magazine.

• alt.cyberpunk
• alt.cyberpunk.tech

Group to discuss how to live in this cyberpunk world. Mostly focused on real life technology, unlike alt.cyberpunk, which focuses on the fictional literary genre.

• alt.privacy
• comp.lang.c++
• comp.lang.forth
• comp.lang.lisp
• comp.lang.python
• sci.electronics.repair

Has a nice FAQ at https://repairfaq.org/

• sci.electronics.design
• alt.usage.english

Some great posts about this group can be found in the archives making elaborate explanations on how to not suck at English. Mostly succeeded by the English category in StackExchange.

• sci.math
• sci.logic
• alt.suicide.holiday

Spiritual predecessor to sanctioned suicide. A place to discuss how to kys yourself the best way and vent about how your life sucks.

A lot of notable people get falsely attributed to the Internet, when it reality those were personalities on USENET.

John Titor was a time travel LARPer (in most likelihood, who knows?) who said he worked for the government in the year 2036 and traveled through time. He plays a role in the anime and visual novel Steins;Gate as well as other pop cultural media. He claimed to have traveled to 1975 to debug old computer code made for an old computer called the IBM 5100. According to him that the IBM 5100 had an ability to emulate IBM System/32 hardware and that this was needed to debug some code. As well he claimed to have made a stop in the year 2000 to visit his family and get pictures he lost in the civial war. It is theorized that whoever was behind the John Titor pseudonym was a computer scientist or otherwise computer-savvy as he seemed knowledgable about programming on the 5100.

Alexander Abian was a mathematician who argued that blowing up the moon would solve most of Earth's problems with natural disasters.

Armin Meiwes, also "The Cannibal of Rothenburg" was a German cannibal who tried eating a man, Bernd Brandes, in a cabin in the woods, but failed to do so after trying to eat his dick. He was left in the bathroom bleeding for a while and died. After keeping the leftovers of his corpse in a freezer, he burried him later. Meiwes claimed to have cannibalized Brandes out of a desire for "intimacy", and also stated that he improved congnitively, most notably in English and math. Meiwes later met up with some fetishists, more or less described as stereotypical twinks – blond hair, young-looking, and slim – but they all didn't go through with it when they realized it wasn't just some weird kind of dirty talk, but rather that he was for real about eating them.

Ludwig Poehlmann, better known as Archimedes Plutionium (lol, lmao even) was known on USENET for arguing that the universe was just a giant plutonium atom.

B1FF was a pseudonym of what was perceived as a newbie or newfag. He would make posts where he came off as tactless and not adhering to newsgroup netiquette.

It is best to PGP-signing your posts on USENET, since everybody can post under any name they want, like with namefags on imageboards, therefor it's best to PGP-sign your posts if you prefer your identity not being stolen.

First off, disregard normal news readers, they will not do post-processing properly and will lack some features essential for making piracy convenient. Good alternatives are Sabnzbd(plus) and NZBGet. Those are meant to be run on server and have consequentially merely a web interface while running as a daemon. On Debian-based distributions Sabnzbdplus has a package with a systemd service file, for NZBGet both the installation and setting it up as daemon is to be done manually, but the command is easy to be turned into a systemd (or any other init system's!) service file.

For the actual downloading you'll want to 2 parts: A provider and an indexer. The provider will provide you a connection and account from which you can download and the indexer will have the deobfuscated .nzb files. The indexer is necessary since most piracy files on USENET are obfuscated and unparsable on their own. .nzb files are NOT the downloaded content itself, but rather something akin to a .torrent file or magnet link.

For USENET there is plenty of providers and you should do your own research, however I can recommend eweka.nl, which are somewhat pricy, but offer 50 connections, unlimited bandwidth, and don't have any arbitrary restrictions, otherwise. As far as Indexers go I have good experience with Nzbgeek, which has a good selection of movies and anime. Things that it lacks are music, in particular soundtracks, for those you should better use Soulseek, and visual novels/eroge, those are also not to be found on Nzbgeek; maybe some other Indexer has some, but you'd probably be better off buying them anyway, since visual novels are a dying breed and yada yada yada, you know it.

Side notes:

• Nzbgeek is spammed with Moozzi2 content, who makes anime look like shit, and has been posting on nyaa.si, too. If you like it, you will have a lot more anime to choose from, normally, however, you'd probably want to avoid that guy's uploads
• There are free Indexers too, but they don't have nearly as much content and if you go full USENET, you can spare your money that you would have spent on a VPN for torrenting for an Indexer. It's approximately the same cost anyway.
• In the NZBGet software you can set categories and make a custom download directory for each category, so you can download directly into some particular directory and have it all sorted without much bothering.

https://olduse.net/

https://narkive.com/

https://www.usenetarchives.com/

https://archive.org/details/usenet