Mashable: The Best Thing Since Napster?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins about Mashable...

Remember USENET? I do. It was one of my first forays into the Internet. According to Google’s archive my first post (at least my first post under my own name, as opposed to my middle school and high school teacher’s account) was back in 1995. It was shortly thereafter I learned the joys of flamewars, nettiquette, and inevitably the binary groups.

It was soon thereafter that the Web itself made its rise to prominence, and soon binary files and all the fun sort of trafficking that took place on USENET ended up either in IRC, FTP traders and inevitably on the Web itself.

But while illicit Web and FTP traders were getting busted left and right, Shawn Fanning rose to dominance and then experienced his humbling fall from grace, USENET remained a haven for binary trading of all types.

NewTeeVee has made a nice little discovery of an application that looks like it could make USENET just as popular as when Google bought DejaNews. The utility is called BinTube, and it’s a desktop application that runs like a media player, but pulls as it’s source video files from USENET.

One of USENET’s keys to longevity is the decentralized and entrenched nature of the protocol. The RIAA can and has gone after specific USENET service providers, but unlike going after a centralized service like The Pirate Bay or Napster, the protocol is open and can be located in companies with laws more favorable to service providers offering these types of services. Much like the whack-a-mole game at Chuck E. Cheese’s, they may be able to attack one or two of them, but several more can and will pop up in that time to fill the void.

Thus, if more tools like BinTube start popping up, we could start seeing a resurgence in the good ol’ days of Napster. In other words, the online culture surrounding digital entertainment could get real interesting (and mainstream) again.

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