I have been doing torrents + VPN for years now and thinking about switching.

Is usenet and debrid safe to use without a VPN in the UK? What about other piracy streaming sites?

From what I understand it’s cheaper to use a VPN than have debrid + usenet + private indexers but I am not sure.

I have heard some questionable justifications as to why it’s safer such as it being encrypted (torrents can also be encrypted). Are the index sites also safe? I have heard it both ways about this. Including people saying index sites are not encrypted which they normally are.

  • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    A usenet download can either fail due to being taken down after a DMCA or similar request, not being in one of the newsgroups cached by one’s usenet provider, or because one’s usenet provider has fewer days of retention than the age of the usenet release. In terms of telling a binary newsreader program (i.e. downloader) such as SABnzbd or NZBGet what your provider is, there’s a page in the settings of those and similar applications to enter the domain name, port, username, and password associated with any usenet provider subscriptions and/or block plans you have.

    • areyouevenreal@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyzOP
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      1 year ago

      I maybe wasn’t clear. I have SABnzbd setup with the provider correctly (got it to download one file I found successfully). What I mean is can I set the indexer websites to only show stuff that’s avaliable from my backbone as I only have one usenet provider on the Omicron backbone.

      • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Unfortunately as most usenet indexers aren’t usenet providers or vise versa, as far as I know there isn’t a way for indexers to know which backbones have cached a given release or not. If any are able to deliver that it would be Easynews, which is both an indexer and provider, but even then that would just be for releases indexed by Easynews itself.