8 ms·

Funny none mentions piracy. I love being on hacker news but I don't understand 98% of the lingo haha.

• jgoerzen 3y ago
  These servers don't carry the "binaries" groups. They carry the discussion groups, so there should be no piracy going on there.
  • jandrese 3y ago
    Also, games grew well beyond what would be reasonable to send over Usenet. There was really only a time in the late 90s when games were small enough to not require you split them into literally millions of parts. This happened to coincide with the maximum popularity of the Usenet, but as a distribution platform today it's just not practical. Still useful for music albums and DVD movies I guess, but as the parent post pointed out nobody carries alt.binaries anymore. The pirates have long since moved on.
    • MiscIdeaMaker99 3y ago
      Porn was also a big thing in the binaries groups back in the day, specifically photos.
      • bradknowles 3y ago
        And at Belgacom Skynet we had people dedicated to the task of finding the illegal photos and purging them from our systems. I sat next to Thierry who was doing a lot of that work. Poor guy. I caught only glimpses of some of the stuff he had to witness, and I would not wish that job on my worst enemy.
    • piperswe 3y ago
      There are plenty of full-size games and UHD movies being distributed over alt.binaries. Pirates pay to use newsservers that carry the massive alt.binaries.