Proliferation of private password protected files (NZB's)

[afragler]

I was wondering what the current take on private nzb's that link to password protected files? To me, this is just a money making scheme that greed has cooked up. over the past 5 years i have seen a huge proliferation of these files. It does not impact me (other than band width loss) because i can always find an unencrypted alternative but for noobs, noobier than me this is just frustrating.

My biggest problem with this is that long after these people(the encrypters) are gone from the scene these files will litter newsgroups, driving the immediate gratification crowd away from usenet. We need the continual new blood or else i foresee an american presence death in usenet. Do a cursory scan of most binary groups and you'll find dutch, german, italian, russian, portuguese, spanish and look an english language nzb ( oh shit the downloaded file is password protected).

[anon]

Unfortunately, copyright takedowns make encryption and obfuscated filenames almost a necessary evil at this point. It sucks if you're not part of any NZB "clubs" and don't have access to the passwords, but it is what it is.

[Gregg987]

I encounter passworded files exceedingly rarely. Basically never via FST. And I think SABnzbd detects them in the nzb stage, before you've wasted your bandwidth. If the file were accompanied by a message something like I'll send you the pwd for $5, I could understand, sort-of. But my few encounters ended in no password, just a wasted download. So what I wonder is, if password-encrypted files are posted by The Bad Guys to poison the well of Usenet as a source of content.

[jbond8]

I have seen both...posts with PW that seem to be there just to piss people off...but I was also part of a group that posted files that were PW and they shared it with the group. It was their way to keep things up and not targeted by all the bots. It is definitely a changing world out there as both sides compete for this space.

[AnythingOldSch]

I don't think it's a money scheme at all (at least with 98% of them). I think it's more of a matter of people are not up to date with their knowledge of usenet. People are usually stuck in their way of downloading. Using NZBget ad SABnzbd almost illuminate those minor annoyances. At the same time, I always obfuscate my uploads, so I guess technically I don't need to use a password. I guess it's just a tradition carried over.