It's incredibly alive thanks to piracy. Look at r/usenet for a peek of what people are doing with it nowadays. There are numerous sites which index binaries on Usenet, many use obfuscation to avoid DMCA/NTDs.
Obfuscation and quasi uncrackable passwords usually. The big problem being that when a .rar file goes missing (and not enough parity files were used), the download is dead forever but is hard to flag as such.
