Usenet is the “Fight Club” of the downloading scene and has always done a good job in hiding away from the likes of P2P and Torrent scenes. That is until now.

I am breaking some of the unwritten rules of usenet by talking about this… but then again this is about Newzbin which is very close to my heart and has been for many many years.

If you would like to skip my ramblings and get to the court stuff just scroll down and read the Newzbinrelease.

Newzbin indexes files that are uploaded to newsgroups, if your a Torrent user you could look at Newzbin as the Demonoid or ISOHunt of the Usenet scene. Newzbin offers NZB files which work like Torrent files in that they link to all the files for you to download.

As Usenet files are normaly broken up into small 1.5MB files you need a site like Newzbin to make it more easy to download everything. Say id like to download a Linux OS which is 800MBs. This would be broken up into 1.5MB chunks which are make into RAR files parts. The NZB file will get all these parts and link to each part do you do not have to hunt them all down.

Newzbin does NOT host these NZB files as they are generated on request and all the files you download do not come from Newzbin but come from the newsgroups where they were uploaded.

So in some regards Newzbin is just like Google or Yahoo. They index anything that is uploaded to Usenet and give you the results that YOU request. Google, Yahoo, and MSN do not index Newsgroups so without Newzbin or other NZB sites we would have NO way of searching this LEGAL service. I don’t see anything illegal in this and if there was Google, Yahoo and MSN should be shut down.

Newzbin is a paid for service which is VERY cheap and costs just £0.30pence (Around $0.15cents) per week. In this you can browse pre-indexed content or browse RAW posts from the world of Usenet.

You can then select what you wish to download and generate a NZB file which you then open using a Newsgroup downloading program.

Everything that is uploaded to Usenet is hosted by Usenet providers like Giganews. Giganews will host this content on its servers for 240 days (Its getting longer and longer each year) and normaly will max most connections in speeds. I know some people who max their 100MB connections using Giganews.

You can find illegal content on Usenet like you can on the internet. All you have to do is type in “indiana jones Crystal skull torrent” into Google and you will find a whole list of places to download the movie for free. So should Google be sued for this? Should Google be making sure that these sites are removed? If these Torrent, P2P, and now NZB sites get taken down should Google also follow with them?

You can find all the legal software you would like on Usenet. I download a lot of Linux Distributions and OpenSource software from Usenet which is both legal and much faster than downloading from their own sites. I would normally only get around 100-300KBS on their sites as to 1500KBS when downloading from Usenet.

Here is the news from Newzbin itself:

Newzbin has recently received two serious complaints regarding the indexing we perform, and raising doubts as to its legality.

It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights. We will be defending ourselves vigorously against both the complainants if necessary and we believe a court will agree with our view that linking to content on Usenet is indeed legal and our method of dealing with unlawful content is appropriate. We believe that, or we wouldn’t still be here.

We are not in a position to disclose the identities of these two complainants (though I’m sure you can guess one of them) but we will report more as we can.

These cases are against us, not you. Having an account on Newzbin is not going to be a problem for you.

So, basically, if you start seeing press releases that legal action is commencing against us, don’t be alarmed - we know, and indeed it’s a good thing that we’re getting these issues laid to rest.

Remember these things take time however, so it’s unlikely we’ll have further news for another few weeks - please don’t hassle us for information, we will give you it when we have it.

(Comments are closed: Sorry, but this isn’t an invitation for a discussion on the merits of what we do, what we should be doing, or general hysteria around the matter. We have better things to be doing than moderating hysterical comments right now.)

I’ve been testing the Spawn of FireFox called “Flock“. Flock is basically Firefox dressed up for Social Media sites. if your the type of person who loves sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others then this may be your dream browser! It is these types of sites that this browser is made for… This is not to say it is its only use though.

Flock has some nice features for bloggers. It has a cool feature-full writer for all the top blogging platforms. I never liked it much though, it just was not what i am used to. It would be great for people who use Blogger… But for wordpress users it will not offer everything you need. If you like me you have some plugins and some of these plugins might change a few things on the fly, of course this writer has none of things.

It does have some nice sharing features for sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. It also has a nice way of integrating the browser with Social sites, you can simply drag any content like a whole web-page or photo into a sidebar which has all your friends. It will then send the content to them and hopefuly they will check it out. Features like this is what really sets it apart from Firefox. It has a cool top menu which is great for quickly checking mail, RSS feeds, and your friends.

One feature that looks really cool is how you can search for media. This tool searches sites like Google and youtube for Videos and images. It then displays them in a nice top menu with imasges and other info.

The only thing I really use is Twitter and RSS feeds. The RSS reader is great, it is one of the only real features I used. I found the email checker a bit frustrating to use though

Flock also gives you your own home page. This homepage is hosted on your computer. It grabs your feeds and other content and displays it as a sort of MSN/AOL/iGoogle type page and gives you everything you need in one easy to use page.

Conclusion

Flock is simple not a browser that is built for me. It is made for the Facebook generation who love to share things and spend a lot of time chatting. For me I would only really use Twitter which I can find a better plug-in for FireFox ( TwitterFox).

Like twitter most of the features can be found in Plug-ins for FireFox. The only real selling point is the way Flock displays these plug-ins. It also has a nice Homepage which was nice to use… But it is not really anything you cant get for free from Google or Yahoo!.

For me I think I’ll stick with FireFox and Chrome. Maybe when I get all hip and start using all the social media sites that come and die I will switch… But don’t expect this for sometime