Nxbmatrix is officially gone....Wow

[air2004]

The End...
It is with our regret to announce that NZBMATRIX has closed.

We have had to make this decision due to a very large takedown request from a company called Wiggin LLC. These represent the following: Federation Against Copyright Theft Limited ("FACT"), Paramount Home Entertainment International Limited; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Limited; The Walt Disney Company Limited; Twentieth Century Fox Film Company Limited; Universal Pictures (UK) Limited; Warner Bros. Entertainment UK Limited.

As everyone is aware we are DMCA/Takedown notice compliant, and always have been.
Once this notice is completed we are left with an impossible task of policing our indexing bots. Even then it won't stop there, there will be follow-up notices etc.

Coupled with this is problems with payment providers, we have been through pretty much everyone out there, in the end they all pull out.
There are massive server/bandwidth costs to pay, with the payments in-stability this is a very hard task.

NZBMATRIX has never been the subject of any legal issues or threats.

Also the Usenet Indexing scene is going through some changes, with content being removed from pretty much every provider its making the existence of an indexer irrelevant if the content does not even exists anymore.

So it's time for us to bow out...

 

[raulpica]

Usenet was a great concept, but making it requiring subscriptions killed it. Back when there weren't any good alternatives (torrent and direct downloads) it was great, but nowadays it has just lost any meaning.

I can foresee it closing down entirely in the next 5-10 years.

 

[air2004]

Binsearch still seems to be working , but :-( RIP NZBMATRIX

 

[notmeanymore]

Usenet was a great concept, but making it requiring subscriptions killed it. Back when there weren't any good alternatives (torrent and direct downloads) it was great, but nowadays it has just lost any meaning.

I can foresee it closing down entirely in the next 5-10 years.

Not like much has changed though. Older public torrents don't have the seeds needed to get files redistributed, and the private torrent trackers are strict with admission and seed ratios, to the point that there are too many seeders and not enough leechers for everyone's seed ratios to get positive.

Piracy Downloading backups is getting harder and harder, to the point that the best way to do it now is a service like GameFly.

 

[Terminator02]

Not like much has changed though. Older public torrents don't have the seeds needed to get files redistributed, and the private torrent trackers are strict with admission and seed ratios, to the point that there are too many seeders and not enough leechers for everyone's seed ratios to get positive.

Piracy Downloading backups is getting harder and harder, to the point that the best way to do it now is a service like GameFly.

Specifically for retro backups, there is a website that's a Paradise for Emulation. For newer games and etc., there are replacements: NZBsRUs, NZB.su, and some private ones.

Usenet is popular because all downloads max out your connection speed, your downloads are encrypted so your ISP can't spy on you, and because there is no requirement to seed anything back. There's also the added perk of not getting infringement notices like you do from hopping in the swarm of popular public torrents.

Unfortunately, the copyright holders are really taking action, and many NZBs are having some of the articles that they're linked to removed via DMCA notices for every individual usenet provider (and since practically all providers rely on the networks of 3 companies, it's extremely effective). This has been plaguing the Usenet scene more and more, the only solution is to download content immediately once it is propagated onto your provider but before the DMCA notice comes in and to move to a provider that doesn't recieve as many DMCA notices (Readnews based providers such as NGroups seem to be the best).

Then there's the issue of payment processors refusing to do business with indexes that have premium services (usually insanely cheap) because it's "risky".

It's a similar story for the DDL scene, with payment processors freezing assets for hosters and constant DMCA takedowns, and of course the takedown of Megaupload and its chilling effects on all of the other hosters (although that seems to have settled down now, all of the old content on those hosters is gone).


Torrents obviously are the most popular method, and the only things slowing them down are that some countries are forcing ISPs to not give their customers access to torrent indexes and that customers are getting infringement notices with possible penalties. There is the whole matter of lawsuits over Bittorrent, but it's usually just scare tactics to make people afraid of downloading.

The thing is, with torrents there are solutions to its problems, the first being to use a tunneling service that routes all of your bittorrent traffic through them, the second (and more expensive) being a seedbox, which also routes traffic through a different IP, as well as being a huge benefit to swarms. Alternatively, private trackers are still as of yet free of infringement notices (except maybe TorrentLeech) if you can get into them.

 

[FAST6191]

I had noticed these changes and the bigger providers offering more and more services presumably to offset them.

Personally I still really like usenet and have yet to find a superior alternative (being part of the scene proper takes way too much effort for my liking unless you are a courier which is even more effort to do well).

Either way though usenet has had a hell of a run.

 

[BORTZ]

I never got the chance to ever usernet.