Sam Gibbs - 

The Newzbin saga has been raging for over a year now, with big media first managing to sue the original Newzbin out of existence, and then winning a court order to block the revived Newzbin2 off the face of the planet. But now the hackers behind Newzbin2 have thrown in the towel. The original Usenet indexer that brought binaries into the mainstream, is no more.

After the ISP blocks, Newzbin pushed out an encrypted client to circumvent them, in a similar vein to The Pirate Bay’s massive game of IP-address whac-a-mole. To prevent domain seizure, Newzbin even went and switched to a Spanish .es domain. But honestly, in the end it all came down to money.

Apparently the ’700,000 users’ it was claimed Newzbin had originally, was actually in the 100,000 range. Newzbin2 only managed about 40,000, and of those few, only a small handful actually paid for the service. To make matters worse, the MPAA went after all the payment providers that allowed people to cough-up for the service, effectively cutting funding. The result was cheap, crippled servers and no money to fix them, which is why Newzbin2 has finally called it quits.

Considering Newzbin actually created the .torrent-like .NBZ file, which was a massive Usenet enabler, it’s a sad day for pirates and appreciators of the internet’s underbelly everywhere, even if the media industry must be very happy with themselves. [TorrentFreak]

Image credit: RIP from Shutterstock