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Commercial NNTP Gateway Recommendations?
plazman30 asks: "I am a customer of comcast.net, which provides usenet access through Giganews, but they cap downloads at 1 GB. Giganews will allow greater access for a monthly fee, but the amount of download you get is based on how much you pay. I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it, but I want to get the best value for my dollar. I was wondering what slashdot users that pay for usenet access are using."
You're willing to pay for the ability to download pirated software and copyrighted media, but you won't actually pay for that material directly? Seriously, I know there's a lot of legit stuff on usenet, but if you really need more than a gigabyte a month then you're stealing.
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If you buy 10GB worth of news from GigaNews will Comcast also bill you for going over the cable modem monthly transfer limits by 5GB?
Rod Taylor
supernews. Basic Monthly is 6 gigs @ 13.95 upto 36 gigs a month at $59.95. I've never maxed out that 6 gigs, but I'm also not snarfing down passive amounts of porn. Cough cough.
groups.google.com
That's a lot of porn per month.
mmm... alt.sex.fetish.hamster.duct-tape.
I have never tried My binaries but they seem to be the cheapest
with 1.5 GB/day for a $10 per month fee.
No binary downloads.
Seriously, go with Easynews. There are several reasons:
1) Article retention is about 15 days in binaries on NNTP, and completion of multi-part binaries is in my experience 100% except when people post from really really poor servers which don't propagate well at all. Non-binaries retention is of course several months.
2) NNTP access is uncensored. Many providers won't offer uncensored NNTP access at all, "banning" groups with controversial content from their servers. While I don't, for example, download illegal binaries from naughty groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotia.underage-admirers , I have read and posted text to those groups when I was researching the types of people involved in kinderporn for a writing project, and made a few friends in those parts. (Nice guys...they just have different taste in pr0n than most of us...) I also am against censorship in all forms; arresting people for posting illegal things is fine, but don't try to censor the speech pre-emptively. I wouldn't support an NNTP provider who chose to censor their feed.
3) They *do* have a download limit, but it's $9.95 for every 6 GB and you can purchase another 6 GB for another $9.95 at any time. That's reasonable, and while you'll find "uncapped" access, it's always at a premium rate and the service just isn't as good as Easynews--I can pull an NNTP feed from Easynews at my cable's full speed, unlike when I've tried other services, and the completion is phenomenal.
4) Easynews also offers an interesting twist--in addition to standard NNTP access with 15 day retention in binaries, you also get Web-based access with a whopping 38-42 day retention in binaries. I actually find it easier to use the Web interface if I'm looking for something specific in a group I don't typically read. And the 40 day retention is amazing.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I get my pr0n from usenet.com. They have different packages with different download size limits (including an unlimited package) and different servers for different uses (a server for pr0n, a server for mp3s, etc). No download speed caps and great article retention.
Not the cheapest, but check them out. Great service. I recommend them.
I think www.newsfeeds.com is run by the same company, too.
You've got to be really into porn and/or warez to go for the 5G/day plan. When you decide to take it to that level you should factor in the extra monthly recurring costs of Astro Glide and/or blank CDRs.
Jeremy Nixon used to work (maybe still does) at a major premium news service so he knows what he's talking about.
He has a comprehensive and reasonably up-to-date list of providers
Also, use your current NNTP server to read as much of alt.binaries.news-server-comparison as you can tolerate.
Most tier-1 colo providers offer their colo customers free access to an in-house news server if they have one available, so if you know someone with a machine hosted somewhere like XO, worldcom, qwest, etc, get them to install nntpcache so you can access their local news server remotely.
The only drawback (besides your own bandwidth caps) is the extra bandwidth on the colo machine's part (for client-side AND server-side nntp traffic)
I'm a Time Warner customer. We don't, as yet, have any sort of download cap, except for a 2Mbps downstream limit (wah, wah). Their provided news server is similarly free.
Only problem is that I'm having trouble finding decent software to work the magic. There is, of course, Agent and Free Agent, which seem to do an OK job of interactively decoding multipart binaries. But what about the *NIX side of things?
Are there any -good- packages for Linux, or in the FreeBSD ports collection, or available for MacOS X? What's good for pulling down every file in a group? What's good for queueing and performing more selective downloads?
Does software exist with even rudimentary file sorting abilities, so that I could, say, tag a bunch of pictures with random filenames of a girl named Charlotte and move them to their own directory with ease, using the subject line to sort them?
My burner just isn't busy enough, these days...
Kid-proof tablet..
I'm also a Comcast customer and have chosen to go with Giganews as a commercial news service. Their retention is nice and long (about 2 weeks on average) and the completeness I've seen it perfect. Its not cheap, but they provide a great news feed. Here is a page with useful reviews of premium usenet providers if you want to do a little homework before you decide.
On the other hand, their privacy policy is just about the best I've ever seen. My guess is they'd never notice my 5 MB/day archiving script. And if their only recourse is to shut off my account if they do notice it, I might just take a chance with it. They'd certainly make more money from me than they make from someone really downloading 100 MB/day manually.
Hi. It's sacriligious, I know, but try out the latest Wine stuff (www.winehq.com) and you can run much good windows software even under linux.
:^)
Not being a big news kindof guy, though, News was basically invented under the *nix umbrellas, and I'm pretty sure there is some excellent newsreading software out there. Witness P.A.N. (which used to stand for "Pimp Ass Newsreader", which it still deserves the title). It's great and gets a perfect score according to the "good netiquette institute". How it handles pr0n/w4rez, I'm not sure, since I use debian, mostly.
--Robert
I was in your situation about a year ago. I first tried newsfeeds, but they sucked. Then I tried Giganews, and stayed with them for a long time - their service is terrific, and for what you get, their prices aren't outrageous.
Then a couple months ago I switched to Easynews, and discovered their service is just as good, and a lot cheaper.
Also, I notice a lot of the big multimedia posters use Easynews, so using the same service means fewer missing parts. Depending on what you want to download, you might check what news service the major posters use, and sign up for that.
Also, if you want to save money, remember to use your ISP's newsfeed as much as you can first (their bandwidth may be limited, but since it's already paid for, it's effectively "free") - then for what you can't get from your local ISP, use your paid service. I do this with two separate copies of Agent (one for mt ISP's feed, and another for Easynews). I understand some other newsreaders can handle multiple newsfeeds at the same time, I just love Agent so much I'm willing to put up with this minor annoyance (which will hopefully get fixed in the next version).
And, as always, read the FAQ in any group you're interested in (many FAQs for binary groups will cover this very question), and if you have additional questions, post on Usenet itself, and you're sure to get lots of replies.
to have 50GB/day of alt.binaries.ugly.naked.fat.men.pretending.to.be.
hot.horny.chix0rs downloaded onto my hard drive.
$8.95 per month. No caps. No throttling. No limit on number of simultaneous connections. Seems to have pretty damned good retention, and I've managed speeds up to 500k/sec from their servers.
Read my stuff.
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...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
" I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it"
I suggest you consult a medical professional, as your mental health problems _can_ be treated if identified in time! There's no need to suffer in silence. Doctors realise that your problem, often called "alt.binaries" syndrome can be treated by counselling sessions, where highly trained advisors will help you understand that downloading 700 MIME encoded messages is not really the best way either to obtain software, or to make yourself happy.
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I've been a satisfied customer of Newsguy (www.newsguy.com) for several years. I pay $40/year for all the news I want. I have no idea what their caps are, however, since I don't subscribe to any binary groups.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you just want text, there are at least two free services out there, at least one of which may allow posting (or you could use your Giganews account for that). Free services are discussed in alt.free.newsservers.
fencepost
just a little off