You get a newsgroup reader and subscribe to one. They cover all kinds of topics, and are essentially a mix between a forum and IRC. It's kinda like an email environment where everyone can read everyone's messages.
You may get free newsgroup access (both binaries and newsposts) from your ISP, I do, but I'm capped at 2 x 16KBs connections. Slow, but steady. I use a newsgroup reader/downloader for that and everything goes through that.
Or you could pay $10 a month for binaries only from a www provider where you may have a daily/monthly cap of say 1.6g a day/50g a month. All access is through Safari/*whatever. Again you'll probably be limited to the number of concurrent downloads, ie 3 at once, but you can configure a good download manager to queue up say 100 downloads and work through them 3 at a time.
You'll also need to be versed in .par and .rar files (unrarX is a good bit of software for this).
