My biggest surprise is that Usenet is apparently still that big of a thing. I guess I've been out of the loop, the last time I heard about Usenet was 10 years ago, with people talking about pirating from Usenet because torrents were being blocked. I don't think I've used Usenet since I had dial-up.
Usenet was basically the last bastion of relatively open to the public (but hidden by being obscure) piracy, but over the last couple of years even Usenet has been largely neutered by automatic DMCA requests, at least as it pertains to US-based providers.
Also, HBO TV series, which is all.. er "my friend"... cares about, since HBO refuses to offer "my friend" any way to pay for their content that doesn't involve getting a full-blown oligopoly-supporting cable TV subscription (while also not putting much of their content on alt services like Amazon Prime streaming for months to a year after initial air date).
It was actually surprisingly popular while I was going to college and I graduated this year. Most people used it with Sickbeard to automatically download TV shows, but some people thought our university was using deep packet inspection and encrypted Usenet was more secure than torrenting.
