Sharing of copyrighted material is big news these days, every week a file sharing site is usually forced to close down due to pressure from various agencies. However one older method of sharing files that arcs back to the early days of the internet still exists and provides access to binary files much faster than any of the modern peer to peer equivalents.
This system is called Usenet. Usenet resembles the older bulletin board systems in a lot of ways except that there's no central server or owner, discussions on Usenet are organised into topic by News Groups. Whilst this all sounds great for the general conversion, it also allows users to post binary information, posts containing this information can be grouped together and downloaded by a suitable client. As there are limits on individual post sizes a large file of files would need to be spanned across various posts. These are then grouped together using a file called an NZB, similar in a way to a Torrent file, you open the NZB with your NZB client and it connects to your News server and downloads the relevant parts which it will then merge together afterwards.
The main advantage of this over something like bit torrent is that this system doesn't rely on peers, you'll normally need to pay a monthly charge for access to a news server that has all the binary news groups and retains the posts for at least 200 days, however you can then downlaod at your internet connections maximum speed as you're no longer relying on other internet users sharing the files with you. This means a typical movie in Divx, Xvid format can be downloaded in under an hour, creating an almost on demand service. Most types of content can be found relatively easily using an NZB search engine. This includes Video Game ISOs, Nintendo DS ROMs, Xbox 360 Games, DVD Rips, HD Movie Rips and more.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Dan Goodwin
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