8 ms·
The End: NZBMatrix closes
- tptacek 14y agoThis is a Usenet binary sharing site whose front page, in a Usenet "video review", was a table of movies, TV shows, and video games. In other words, it wasn't even possible for the owners to look at their own site and not know that it was being used almost exclusively as a tool for piracy. Extremely common DMCA misconception: it's not enough to be "takedown compliant". That's not how the law works. You also can't ever operate with specific knowledge of infringing content; you are, in effect, required to "take down" any pirated content you find.
- cdh 14y agoHas it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious. My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.
- tptacek 14y agoThe NET act criminalizes any willful "copyright infringement" (the term used in the act) so long as it's done for financial gain. Contributory or vicarious liability for copyright infringement for linking is well established. At any rate, services like these rely on the DMCA Safe Harbor provision. Regardless of whether the potential liability is civil or criminal, you can't have actual knowledge of infringing activity on your site and the ability to remove that activity from your site and claim safe harbor.
- cookiecaper 14y agoWhat about Google? They make a copy of almost every image on the internet with the full knowledge that they are nearly all covered under an absolute copyright license of "All Rights Reserved", including the right to store and rehost a copy of that content. How would Google's financial outlook change if they decide to follow the letter of the law and never use pieces of copyrighted works "for financial gain" without explicit permission from each rightsholder first? It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is that the media companies like one more than the other.
- Terretta 14y ago> It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is that the media companies NEED one more than the other.
- jondiggsit 14y agoThis is a sad day.
- emehrkay 14y agoI really feel some type of way about this. This site (and netflix and hulu) allowed me to live without tv for almost four years
- skippy 14y agoThe masses need to pick a new site to invest their energies in, rather than scatter at random to lots of different sites! Any particular one out there that's better than the rest?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- troels 14y agoAs someone who hasn't used usenet for downloading content, why is it that it seems that a few central indexing services are the way people access this medium? Wouldn't it be possible - and preferable - to distribute the index through p2p? That way, there would be no single point of failure.
- nwh 14y agoThe index would be insanely huge. A lot of these indexing sites are used for their API. Dedicated applications like SickBeard automatically compile lists of wanted files (movies, TV rips and music) and use them to search against the provider. The provider returns a file (NZB) that contains references to hundreds of encoded files hosted on newsgroups. Here's a breakdown of one NZB, for a single 3.88GB file. Inside are 74 RAR files, and 15 additional PAR files containing parity for recovering corrupted data. Each of these 89 files is split into 37 parts of 1.4MB for ~3200 pieces total. These pieces are then encoded with yENC (similar to base64) and then uploaded to the newsgroup. Every single one of these yENC pieces is referenced in the NZB file, making for a total of 400KB. Just because of this, the NZB indexs are enormous; hundreds of gigabytes, probably terabytes in some cases.
- morsch 14y agoThere's no need for everybody to serve the entire index. Set up a DHT and let interested parties exchange the NZBs. All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.
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- skippy 14y agoLOL dude, Usenet has been around forever. Some of us have known it for many, many years.
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- thehodge 14y agoI had noticed almost everything had been failing over the past few weeks with NZBMatrix... Back to torrents / DC++
- shelf 14y agoI haven't experienced any missing binaries or bad NZBs recently, neither from NZBMatrix nor Astraweb. Can anyone corroborate this?
- cookiecaper 14y agoI was getting a good amount of missing blocks on Astraweb only; I bought a backup news account from blocknews and haven't had any missing block issues since. It helps if people put big pars out.
- shelf 14y agoI'll not jump ship until my downloads are frequently disrupted at the block level, across multiple providers. Pretty difficult to achieve, given the architecture. Indices come and go... Much of the Usenet crowd know how to set up an indexer if need be. Perhaps a hidden service is warranted?
- tatsuke95 14y agoI've been using Usenet and Newzbin/NZBmatrix for 4 or 5 years. New content has been getting taken down the past few months. Go look at the comment section of any new movie. It got progressively worse, to the point that I was starting to consider what to do next. I suppose I'm not surprised to see this this morning. But it was abrupt.
- tharshan09 14y agowhat is DC++ ?
- archivator 14y agoA centralized, IRC-like network for file exchange. Or rather, DC++ is the client to that network.
- spdy 14y agoCoupled with this is problems with payment providers, we have been through pretty much everyone out there, in the end they all pull out. Here lies the real problem
- StavrosK 14y agoThese guys could benefit from BitCoin, if it were ubiquitous. Too bad...
- skippy 14y agoThe page up at Newzbin2.es (or at least the Google cached version for those of us in the UK) which shut recently mention that BitCoin is too complicated for most people. I never used it so can't say...
- hackerboos 14y agoI agree with the premise that Bitcoin is too hard to use for all but the most technically minded people.
- StavrosK 14y agoThe fundamentals may be, but the implementation doesn't have to. One could easily just make do with "send" and "receive" functionality. Blockchain has a very nice android app.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoThe problem isn't in the payment part, it's with obtaining bitcoins from dollars.
- StavrosK 14y agoOh, yes, definitely. Once a healthy amount of Bitcoin starts circulating, though, that won't be as big a problem.
- StavrosK 14y agoCan anyone explain what this was, for us who didn't know it?
- omfg 14y agoAn index of movies, shows, apps, etc.. for download from Usenet servers. Similar to The Pirate Bay.
- tallanvor 14y agoThink of it like Pirate Bay, but for newsgroups. Newsgroups are massive with some providers archiving binary groups for up to 4 years (and growing). Sites like NZBMatrix index the content and provide nzb files which tell your client what to download so that you don't have to constantly download the headers for a bunch of sites and search through them. Sites like NZBMatrix were also somewhat curated to help keep passworded files out of the results.
- tibbon 14y agoAnd combined with a private usenet server, it was non-P2P and relatively secure file downloading at exceedingly high speeds.
- aes256 14y agoThe usenet servers live on, and all the files (minus a small percentage that are the subject of takedown requests) are still there. NZBMatrix was just one of dozens of indexing sites.
- Roelven 14y ago+ the great thing about nzbmatrix was to use their API for the searches. You could then have a local process download the actual files after doing a request to nzbmatrix.
- MozMorris 14y agoMacGuffin!! Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!1
- alternize 14y agorunning your own custom tailored usenet indexer seems pretty easy nowadays thanks to http://www.newznab.com/ http://www.newznab.com/ - if you have a need for one in the first place, that is.
- aes256 14y agoNever understood the appeal of NZBMatrix. Just use a search engine like Binsearch, NZBIndex.nl, etc. In any case, with more and more takedown requests being directed at usenet providers, I think usenet's days as a safe haven for piracy are numbered.
- cookiecaper 14y agoBinsearch is much harder to navigate.
- hackerboos 14y agoCoupled with http://abteevee.allfilled.com http://abteevee.allfilled.com and http://abmoovee.allfilled.com http://abmoovee.allfilled.com it's easy.
- tucosan 14y agoHow does this work? Could you elaborate on how to use those sites a bit? Thx
- aes256 14y agoIf you're looking for scene releases, just use a pre database like preDB.com. Find a release on preDB, copypasta the release name to binsearch, create the NZB, done. Generally speaking it's very easy to find material just using binsearch. If you want a 1080p copy of a particular film, just search for the film name along with '1080p' and you're almost guaranteed to get relevant results on the first try.
- kinnison 14y agoI don't think usenet itself will be taken down - it actually pre-dates the world wide web - but the battle lines are now drawn.
- josteink 14y agoAutomation is allot easier on a pre-indexed, pre-QAd, pre-tagged and pre-filtered data than it is on the raw underlying data itself. Almost all the automation tools spoke newzbin and nzbmatrix.
- tvdw 14y agoThis is awkward... When newzbin shut down, I was without a NZB provider for a week. Then 2 days ago I paid for my membership at NZBMatrix. And now it's gone?
- gadders 14y agoMe too. Bastards. I'll have to raise a chargeback or something.
- kinnison 14y agoSimilar position.. but I was waiting a week or two before committing to actual money :) Glad I did. Going a bit old school at the mo, downloading headers from a.b.mm for example. Get some retention up myself, might take a while!
- shelf 14y agoDespite being 99% illicit content, could somebody explain why this is not a case for Safe Harbour? Is this principle enshrined in any law at all, or is it just some neutrality idyll that we assume others share? *Thought it was part of the DMCA
- aes256 14y agoTheir safe harbor protection is not in question at the moment. They have allegedly shut the site down because they lack the resources to handle the growing tide of takedown requests.
- ubernostrum 14y agoThe "safe harbor" includes more requirements than responding to take-down requests. In particular, the service provider must "not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing", and "in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent". In other words, though you don't have an active duty to police your site, if you do become aware, and don't take action, you're not protected. Similarly, if you set up something with the sole purpose of distributing copyrighted material, and try to hide behind a "gosh, we never knew that kind of thing was going on until you told us", you're probably not going to get a court to believe you.
- shelf 14y agoI was commenting on this sentence, in particular: >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. This seems to me like they're being told to actively police automatically-indexed content after this notice is processed? I'm not sure how provable that 'knowledge of infringement' clause is.
- ubernostrum 14y ago"knowledge of infringement" basically boils down to "you know damn well what you're running here". It's not that every site operator has to actively police every single submission for possible infringement; it's that if even a ten-second glance at your service reveals obvious massive presence of infringing content, you don't get to pull the "well, gosh, we never knew" and claim safe harbor (this is the "is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent" clause).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- upper2bits 14y agoI've never used torrents and I've always used newsgroups. Does that make me old? Anyway, I feel naked now, with newzbin down and now this I feel I'm going to have to end my fun or try torrents which I'm worried about the legal issues. Are torrents "safe" now a days, what's the best approach (Seedbox?)
- cookiecaper 14y agoTorrents aren't really safe or unsafe, it's mostly about the quality of the trackers you use. There are some OK cultivated communities out there, but the worry over ratio and constant leech on one's upload stream is a real bummer when you can just purchasing blocks from a news server and not have to worry about it. A seedbox is way more expensive than a news account and usually comes with quotas which one must mind. All in all, nzbs are a much more pleasant experience if you can afford the account (and pretty much any employed person can) and have a good indexing site (harder to come by, and now I don't have one either :( ).
- zenocon 14y agoI'm old too (using USENET since mid-90s). There are other indexers out there. Try http://www.nzbsearch.net/ http://www.nzbsearch.net/, http://binsearch.info http://binsearch.info - and if that one goes belly up, there will be others, or install your own private indexer (or write your own). I stay the hell away from torrents.
- cookiecaper 14y agoWould be nice if they would a) publish their code and b) upload their nzb database on Pirate Bay. Would make it much easier for someone to pick up the torch.
- dsl 14y agoNZBs die pretty quickly, so a back catalog wouldn't be that useful. They even mention on the website that content is getting taken down faster than NZBs can be updated.
- cookiecaper 14y agoI've used NZBs that were 3+ years old and they've mostly worked fine. Occasionally blocks are missing, which of course is more likely the older an NZB gets, but most of the catalog is still together. They're right that many providers are getting hit with notices, which causes them to remove a few chunks of each rar from their server making it impossible to complete the download and too pervasive for repair by typically-sized parity file, but this can be circumvented by using a lesser-known news server as a backup; you still use Astraweb or Giganews for 99% of the transfer, but your fallback picks up the pieces that have been DMCA'd out of AW/GN/another major carrier. I would be happy to see a more intelligent splitting system than rars, as one missing block in a couple of rars will often make it really difficult to extract the content you DO have and use a more robust delivery system, like a torrent, to download the blocks you're missing. This is going to become increasingly important. News servers are interesting because they really are a non-optimal method for this kind of transfer that has incidentally become a hot bed for filesharers, probably just because of the plausible deniability ("yes officer, of course we only intend our server to be used by those discussing photography..."). I too wonder if it's not time for a new protocol, something more direct than torrents (webseeds kinda works here, but not quite what I'm looking for) but less hacked-up than NZBs and ASCII-encoded binaries in split files. It's time to stop skirting around the issue and try to put together a serious underground analog to direct-downloaded binaries, something hearty and immune, or as immune as possible, to interference and foul play like this.
- daniel777 14y agoyou can bet your bottom this fact''Federation Against Copyright Theft Limited''will be into all nzb providers now by attacking the index list making sites like nzb matrix take down massive amounts of copyrighted movies and other copyrighted items, changes in the usenet indexing this looks bad all round for us downloading they cant get the server providers so they will go after the next best thing the index system that list content.
- omarchowdhury 14y agoAnd why aren't they able to get the server providers?
- Rhythmic 14y agoIt was probably cheaper to force or induce the closure of index sites that are done more as a love of community than of profits, not make nearly as much as the usenet providers themselves. These index sites, I'm sure, understand the legal costs and risks of continued operation if those options were presented to them. With the majority of them down and out of the way the providers themselves will see a reduction in revenues and may not put up a fight when they fall into legal pressure to close up shop.
- portsmouth657 14y agoa lot of chat about "we never use them and get by" ,,how about some feedback for alternatives!!!!! i have only ever used newzbin ,,then yesterday paid matix ,and today not sure where to go?
- ComputerGuru 14y agoThe second Newzbin also closed this week: http://www.newzbin2.es/ http://www.newzbin2.es/ Apparently their last payment gateway wouldn't deal with them any more.
- zenocon 14y agoalternative: http://www.nzbsearch.net/ http://www.nzbsearch.net/
- mimog 14y agoThat's not really an alternative..
- zenocon 14y agowhy not? admittedly, i didn't use nzbmatrix, but i do use nzbsearch and the ui is simple, easy to use - search is ok, but it seems to get the job done.
- pyre 14y agoSounds like NZBMatrix had an API for auto-download clients to consume. If NZBSearch doesn't have that it's not really a replacement.
- edwardh 14y agoGotta say that I find it very questionable how many people dump on nzbmatrix or say that it was not necessary anyway. Sure, if you only watch high quality stuff like Skyfall and listen to Lady Gaga, a site like nzbmatrix is probably useless to you. But for those who appreciate things that aren't that easy to come by, it is essential to have some sort of an index to even HEAR about them. My estimate is that at least half of the movies and games I got through nzbmatrix, I had not heard about anywhere else. And as every usenet user knows, it's basically just not possible to "browse" the usenet itself. Then there are software releases where 95% are fake or bug-ridden. Where it saves a LOT of trial & error if people help each other out by posting only those that are for real. And I found no other nzb site as useful when it comes to finding all new releases. And I have looked at them all because I did not appreciate nzbmatrix's own censorship.
- res0nat0r 14y agoYou don't need a usenet indexing site to learn about good indie movies or music. There are dozens of websites that review and discuss these things without releasing them for free against the authors wishes....
- prezjordan 14y agoBinsearch [0] usually does the trick for me. Admittedly I'm not a hardcore user. [0]: http://binsearch.info http://binsearch.info
- emehrkay 14y agoOpen source the code. Id gladly run my own private nzbmatrix
- spudlyo 14y agoFeel free. http://newznab.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ http://newznab.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
- emehrkay 14y agoYou've derailed my Sunday. Thanks. Is this the nzbmatrix core?
- spudlyo 14y agoNo, it's a GPLv3 clone of an nzbmatrix-esque site. Somewhat popular sites like nzb.su use it. It has a Sickbeard compatible API too.
- emehrkay 14y agoI got this running btw. Thanks again. Just a heads up for whoever wants to do the same: the process that it goes through to create the releases is that it downloads all of the binaries and parts and then runs that through a few regular expressions to determine what goes with what and how it should be categorized and displayed. The free community edition only ships with two regular expressions and it wasnt creating releases for me. I donated to the project and got a lot of regexes plus some other stuff and now it works as expected. I'll be building a box to handle this in my home.
- thechut 14y agoThis is a major blow to usenet. But more importantly this could be the start fo something very very bad for usenet. It, and it's users of who I am sure there are plenty on HN, have so far been able to fly under the anti-piracy radar of the big media companies. This clearly demonstrates that they know exactly what is going on, and may be on the war path to shut down more indexes and search engines.
- tptacek 14y agoNauseating. Piracy killed the real Usenet, and now pirates are upset that enforcement is killing the goofy little playground they built inside its corpse. When I was 18, I ran a competitive (on the Freenix leaderboard) full-feed Usenet server for the ISP I worked at. Every ISP in the world could have provided full-feed Usenet access, but for the assholes who loaded the system down with ASCII-encoded binaries. Even while it was possible for an independent provider to offer Usenet to customers, it was still a total nightmare because of the ludicrous storage requirements for binaries, which ensured that only an ever-dwindling number of providers would take the time to offer it at all. It's startling to me that there's a Usenet at all anymore, since it's essentially been reduced to a collaborative system for sharing pirated binaries.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI like the imagery. So I am chuckling at the idea that some young guns who want to be "free" to do what ever they want in their network of computers to come up with a scheme where they are will use telephones to call up one computer to the next, and addressing will be free form a series of "hops" where you tell the computer what sequence of machines will have to be called in order to get your message from you to your destination. You could use a character like ! to separate the hops making an address 'bobs-machine!piratebay!alices-machine!alice' delivering through three hops to Alice.
- NateLawson 14y agoHoneydanber + Node.js. Ugh, can't wait.
- nicksterling 14y agoQuestion for those with Usenet know how. When downloading raw headers, I have observed a convention where the title is a random string of letters and numbers, and within the post are for example 50 rars and 10 pars. How are consumers 'decoding' the title so they know what they are getting? Does the uploader provide a translation? Or can the 'real title' be recovered programmatically? Many thanks.
- voltagex_ 14y agoCan you give an example?
- nicksterling 14y agoHere's one from a.b.boneless... "2TU4K75C6Z" (45 rars, 9 pars) And here's one from a.b.multimedia... "DTTBiAp23.101.by.NYCrules" (14 rars, 11 pars) no .nfo included and no way to know what's inside. Does anybody know how people are decoding these titles into meaningful information?
- nicksterling 14y agoHere's one from a.b.cheerleaders... "291112_08_29" (60 rars) There are lots of these and they are interesting because the first part suggests a date, 29/11/12, and the second part suggests a sequential number. The size is almost 6 gig.
- voltagex_ 14y agoAaaaand I'm glad I didn't look that one up on the work PC. I'm assuming you can get the filename info by looking at either the RAR headers or the first archive.
- voltagex_ 14y agoSorry it took me a while to get back to you. The first one is passworded, presumably detected by looking at the RAR header. I can't find the second.
- xer0x 14y agoSuch disappointing news compounds last weeks troubles. When nzbs'r'us shutdown over similar payment problems. Payment is a huge achilles heel for these services. Blocking payments was used to hurt WikiLeaks, and Dutch usenet providers have recently lost the ability to use paypal for payments too. A popular bitcoin-esque service can't happen soon enough. http://usenetreviewz.com/dutch-usenet-providers-banned-by-paypal/ http://usenetreviewz.com/dutch-usenet-providers-banned-by-pa...
- xer0x 14y agoI like that Europe scolded visa for stopping payments to wikileaks, but that is unlikely to ever happen for anything piracy related. http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/europarliament-scolds-visa-mastercard-paypal-for-killing-wikileaks-donations-initiates-regulation/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/europarliament-scolds-visa-m...
- greencopper 14y agoThere is NO such thing as priracy, there is only sharing of property between people. When I buy something I own it, no matter what those fools say, and when I own it, I copy it if I like!
- Rhythmic 14y agoAnd thus we explore a brief glimpse of the tragedy of the commons.
- cmccabe 14y agoWelcome to the NZBMatrix. I don't care who you are, if you see an agent, you do what the rest of us do. You run. You run your ass off.
- whiteymj 14y agoMove the site to TOR and let digital copyright enforcement cops try to figure that one out. All they can do it push it completely underground and once the site is on TOR they have zero recourse or means to track down the operator.
- foobarqux 14y agoDo not do this. The Tor network cannot handle that kind of traffic.
- cookiecaper 14y agoThe site is just text transmission, like torrents. Your connection to the news server would not have to be piped over Tor, just your access to the web interface where you download text files telling your news client what to download.
- foobarqux 14y agoRight, sorry. I misinterpreted the parent.
- jrockway 14y agoI guess in this era of Bitcoins and Tor hidden services, it's inevitable that a site using credit card funding and a public IP address for piracy is being shut down. Low-hanging fruit.
- rdl 14y agoIs USENET anything other than file sharing (mostly piracy) now?
- jockc 14y agoI know that comp.lang.lisp is still active.. I assume there are plenty of other groups still active as well.
- TomHere 14y agoA bunch of fucking assholes. They took my money the day before. Wish I could get my hands on them....
- tonystamp 14y agoI'm currently using www.nzbzombie.com and its been great , has an API that works with CouchPotato & Sickbeard and phpBB forums.