For every selected segment, the test used the NNTP ARTICLE command to request the actual article body, rather than relying only on STAT or HEAD, which can report metadata even when the body is gone.

Fuck the providers who do this. This is a disruptive behaviour. The author should name and shame and the community shouldn’t use those servers.

then every other system that lets people upload files is P2P, including things like Rapidshare, Google Drive, forums, etc. That wouldn’t make sense.

P2P means peer to peer.

Here you have a graphical description of usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#/media/File:Usenet_servers_and_clients.svg

From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user’s news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network

Please pay attention to: Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them.

hmmm… it sounds like p2p.

Here you have the fucking RFC for the command to share articles between servers: https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3977/#section-6.3.2

Even if you check the article headers you can see the path the article it took to reach to you. If the article wasn’t uploaded to your server, you can see that some articles that you are downloading came from different servers until it reached your server.

Tell me, if rapidshare, mega, google drive, etc works like this. Well i don’t think so, because first you don’t even have different servers from different providers… You just have their servers, so they can’t share shit with anybody else’s servers.

It’s not p2p for the enduser, but that’s why i said it was server p2p.

OR maybe you operated a NNTP server with only 1 feed? (which i doubt).

The reason P2P systems exist is that they avoid things like takedowns (since you’d need to take down every user instead of a central server), and Usenet doesn’t have that advantage.

If you had used usenet before obfuscation took place, you could see that some articles where removed from some server but still available on another ones. That’s why there was a rule of having servers from different backbones https://cdn.rexum.space/usenet/Usenet Providers and Backbones (Version 2025-06-30).svg

usenet is p2p: server p2p. The servers share the articles between themselves in a p2p manner