Usenet & The Future of Anonymity Paperback – February 10, 2013

Really excellent book. Simple, straight-forward and easy to digest. Here is everything you need know to begin a life on Usenet. The author also takes us a little further into the future and issues some well-timed warnings about our loss of privacy, with the dangers of the Cloud and the ever-increasing reach of the State and Big Business. Top marks for this one!

A good intro to Usenet, how it is unused, how to access it , and how to stay anonymous while using it. It is well written and a "good read".

Ok, but didn't really learn anything. Does have some information on privacy and anonymity, as title would indicate. Not particularly useful as a how-to.

helped with my research

Very handy but a webpage or magazine format may have been better. Defiantly worth the money and educational in content.

I was skeptical when I bought the paperback version of this book from Amazon UK, but was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a decent read. It's a tough subject to completely cover in only 48 pages but the book does a reasonably good job.Technology changes quickly and some of the materials are now a little dated as the book was published in 2012. For example, the book mentions secure SSL connections as an "option" when signing up for Usenet services but these are almost a universal feature of Usenet packages these days.The book does a solid job of introducing Usenet and discussing its pros and cons, as well as many privacy aspects of using Usenet. The author makes a good case for why to stick with a major Usenet provider and also provides some brief but thoughtful reviews of the leading Usenet providers, including UsenetServer and Newshosting.Admirably, the author is not shy about discussing and recommending some rather "controversial" alt.binaries newsgroups. The book also includes some great tips such as installing your Usenet newsreader app to an encrypted hard drive. I would further recommend saving your Usenet downloads to an encrypted drive or folder too.At times, the book seems to cater to beginners while at other times to very advanced users. Some more in-depth discussion or analysis of some of the topics would have been good; for example, how VPNs provide added Usenet anonymity (yep, they do) and more information about multipart files. The last chapter, `Chapter 6: The Cloud is the Enemy of Usenet and Anonymity' was a bit "off" and contained elements that didn't seem too relevant. I also found that the book ended rather abruptly.Overall, a decent if somewhat jumbled overview of Usenet from a privacy and anonymity perspective.Disclosure: I am the author of the book, Complete Guide to Internet Privacy, Anonymity & Security (Cogipas for short).