How I (Would) Find and Download Music and Software
I have a..erm..friend, who had been leeching warez for more than a decade, and music for at least half that long. The techniques and technologies employed in this pursuit have changed alot over that time. I don’t often run across a concise yet comprehensive account of what exactly is involved in breaking the law in this particular way, so I thought I’d jot them down.
First, there are a wide range of sources for warez and mp3s; a google search for ‘warez’ or ‘brittany spears mp3′ is not among them. Frauds and search spammers have more or less taken over these keywords, and even if they hadn’t, RIAA and SPA spiders would find and shut down any legitimate sources.
Summary
There are three technologies that most reliably yield results:
- Peer-to-peer networks like eDonkey (best), Gnutella2, Morpheus, WinMX, etc
- BitTorrent search engines
- USENET
If you’re going to use a P2P network, be very careful when selecting and downloading a P2P client. Most have spyware, especially the ones that claim to have no spyware. The only P2P client I would trust is Shareaza, and only then because of its solid reputation and freely accessible source code. Shareaza uses the eDonkey network, though it also provides a BitTorrent client.
BitTorrent engines help you find torrents, but you still have to download them with a BitTorrent client, like Shareaza, Azureus, or a handful of others. As with P2P clients, beware spyware in commercial clients.
USENET is (and always has been) the dirty little secret of the scene. The RIAA, MPAA, and SPA seem ignorant of its existence, yet it is on USENET that one can find the widest range of binaries, from MP3s and videos to e-books and appz.
P2P
Download and install Shareaza, then start it up. The docs and support forum are pretty helpful. Make sure Shareaza reports a ‘HighID’ on eDonkey; the docs will provide details, but if you don’t get a ‘HighID’ (and instead get a ‘LowID’), it means your firewall/router isn’t providing incoming access to Shareaza from the Internet, and thus your download performance will suffer greatly.
Searching is pretty straightforward; the same principles one would apply to Google apply to P2P searches. Note that search results will trickle in as the P2P client explores the P2P network looking for your files; the first results should come in after only a few seconds, but the result set should build out over the next minute or two.
BitTorrent
Several BitTorrent search engines have been strong-armed into shutting down by the various copyright oligarchs, but a few good ones remain. Of these, TorrentSpy and PirateBay are the best. When they find torrents you want, download the .torrent file and open it with your BitTorrent client; the client will take care of the rest.
As with Shareaza, you need to make sure incoming connections to your BitTorrent client are working, or your performance will suffer. Azureus has a Network Test utility to verify this; others likely do as well. RTFM.
USENET
There’s a reason USENET is a secret: it’s a pain in the ass to work with. Traditionally, you connected to USENET via an NNTP server provided by your ISP. You had to use a special NNTP client, like Forte Agent. For reasons yet unknown to science, all NNTP clients suck profoundly, sporting either UIs so austere and inscrutable as to be the product of an autistic sadist genius, or so functionally limited they could be targeted your grandmother.
Fortunately, this is changing. For years, DejaNews (now Google Groups have provided a web-based, searchable index of the enourmous expanse of text postings on USENET. Now, services are appearing to do the same with the binaries.
EasyNews is ideal IMHO, though GigaNews is also ok. At some point you’ll likely end up needing an NNTP client, in which case AnchorDudes has a decent list, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Handy Tools
Apart from limitless disk space, if you’re downloading MP3s you owe it to yourself to download the MusicBrainz tagger. Whenever you get MP3s from anyone else, you can be certain the ID3 tags (the bits on each MP3 that indicate the track, album, artist, etc) will not be right. MusicBrainz automatically looks up and corrects the tags via a shared database of music fingerprints. The UI is not particularly intuitive, but the effort required to figure it out is well worth it, particularly if you build up an enormous MP3 collection.
Just got EasyNews account; like it
I finally grew weary of my ISPs mizerly 1GB USENET download limit, so I started shopping around for a dedicated USENET provider. The AnchorDudes Usenet Newsserver FAQ was helpful in narrowing the field to two contenders:
GUBA was somewhat appealing, except it only does video and images now; if I wanted pr0n, GUBA would def be the way to go.
At any rate, I settled upon Easynews, both because they are cheaper ($10/mo for 20GB/mo, plus an additional 4GB if you donate compute time to grid.org), and because they are more established, have absurd retention rates, and a global newsgroup search function.
So far, the results have been favorable. The EasyNews web interface is tres retro; first generation web, and as hard to use as that implies. They provide NNTP servers as well, of course, but I’ve spent the last decade searching for a non-shitty NNTP client and have yet to find one.
The only other remark I can make about EasyNews is that their servers are absurdly fast. Downloading a zip archive containing the binaries from a collection of posts, about 230MB total, averaged 881K/s (that’s capital K, kilobytes) from bonzo, who’s hard-wired with 100 megabit Ethernet to multiple redundant OC-42 pipes at CI Host’s DFW facility. I’ve never seen files come down that fast across the Internet; it’s obscene it’s so fast.