by Calvin Robinson on November 11, 2008.

Okay that title’s a little long, but I thought “better ways to pirate” might get the wrong attention.

I think Bram Cohen is a genious, but I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Bittorrent. In that, I love that it brings me my downloads, but I hate how slow it does it.

Everyone is always “oh you need to tweek it” and “it’s your ports”. Lol, I’m no newbie. I’ve opened the correct ports, tweeked the correct settings, and come to the conclusion: You can only download bittorrents fast, if you use private trackers.
I get banned from private trackers, because I download far too quick, and don’t get time to re-seed as much as I download. That’s due to me having a crazy download speed, with a shitty upload speed – gotta love that UK Broadband industry con.

So I found an alternative.
Years ago I used to download wares over Usenet. But I stopped it was so messy. As far as I knew, there was no index for you to search, you just had to browse the different binary groups and look for things you liked. Then download all the the posts with that software name. There were a few half-decent Newsgroup readers, that would look for softwarename.par01 and download them all – but it was all so clumsy.

Okay I might be a newb, because I’ve only just discovered NZBs.
An NZB file is a lovely XML-based script file that does all the work for you. You go to an NZB indexing site, search for the software you want to download, then import the NZB into your downloading software.
The NZB contains all the information it needs to grab all those pars/rar, including the newsgroup servers etc.
You don’t even need to look at an alt.binaries. It does all that.

I use a program called hellanzb, for Ubuntu. I leave it running in the background, then when I drop a .nzb file into the Queue folder, it begins downloading, just like a torrent would, only with speed.

To give you some perspective, I download films in under an hour, and it took me under 2 hours to download Gears of War 2 (to try it, before I purchased it)!

.NZB is the new .Torrent in my house.