Slashdot Mirror

Screwed up the links somehow. Giganews, EasyNews, Newsfeeds.com.

For leeching in the binaries-groups, Binary News Reaper is by far the best one! It can assemble parts from multiple servers, which is a great feature if you are using newsfeeds.com which has a per-server-per-day downloadlimit (17 servers, total of 10GB/day).. Too bad it's only freeware and not Open Source though.. :(

If you only have a single server, PAN is a better bet, as it also supports "normal" Usenet-usage (discussions).. It's a shame that "assemble parts from multiple servers" is not even in the TODO-list for Pan.. :(

For downloading whole groups there is a lot of options.. I've tried them all and I found UBH (Usenet Binary Harvester) to be the most powerful and flexible one.

newsfeeds.com's Premium membership is $19.95/month or $159.60/year. That gives you access to 17 servers, many of which are dedicated to porn, binaries, multimedia and/or warez.. You get a downloadlimit of 300MB-1GB per server per day, which is a total of 10GB per day! I use it with BNR2 which collects the parts from all of the servers so you can use the full 10GB/day without having to connect to another server every time you reach the downloadlimit of one of them...

I hate to say this, but you can pay for access to newsfeeds.com's nntp-servers! I do, and it's worth every öre!
I get superfast access to about 10 specialized nntp-servers and a total daily download-limit of almost 10GB!
I have UBH configured to automagically collect pr0n-videos from all of the newsservers and 600+ newsgroups. Then I have another script that creates thumbnails (using mplayer -vo png and imagemagick) and beautiful html-pages with all kind of info (size, length, codecs etc) and uploads everything to FreeNet (Key not yet announced - still under development) :-)

Most ISP's don't want to include NNTP news service for their low unlimited, all you can eat DSL service. ISP's want to make money, and providing a large bandwidth service doesn't pull in any revenue. That's why you pay for a news service that has multiple servers across the country, on high speed backbones. Single NNTP servers miss posts, some are even deleted on purpose. With multiple NNTP servers across the usa, cross posting, you never miss any posts. Professional news services have multiple terra byte servers across the USA, and allow multiple connections via very fast backbones. 20 bux a month is worth these Premium services.

Long time ago, I would run newsbin (windows) on newsfeeds.com and was able to get almost every post for alt.bin.mp3.80's (or something like that).. No ISP NNTP server could max out my 768K dsl, but these professional NNTP providers could. I would have a couple of GIGs of MP3s when i got home. (And a week to sort and burn onto cd..)

The only thing you really get from your ISP is bandwidth speed and an IP. Don't expect much more from them. ISP's are in it for the money, anything that they can cut to save money, they will.

--
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. - Publilius Syrus (~100 BC)

Hell, why do people subscribe to porn sites, when they have a newsfeed? Because the material available in alt.binaries.nekkid.women is sporadic, and flooded with spam.

No, because neither their ISP's newsfeed nor Deja carries binaries, and the alternative costs as much as the porn sites. Besides, filters catch most of the unsolicited commercial postings.

I can pay however much ($5.00 US wasn't it? I don't think the article said) to Napster for the privalege of using their once free service, which does nothing more than let me trade MP3's with other users who are doing the same.

I currently have a $19.95/month service through Newsfeeds (http://www.newsfeeds.com) that gives me high speed (50-80 k/s) access to about a dozen different NNTP servers, each of which is dedicated to a different topic or service, such as MP3's, Multimedia (All the fansubbed anime you can stomach!), Discussion w/Spamfilter, Anonymous postting, etc...

Being that MP3's on Usenet are typically ripped and encoded by people who know what they're doing, and the feed from Newsfeeds is usually pretty complete and error free, *and* I get to download several hundred megabytes of anime, movies, and the discussion groups I visit every day, I think I'm getting a better deal.

Feel free to disagree, however...