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."

Comments

Let me get this straight...

[afay]

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.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Chasing Amy]

> if you really need more than a gigabyte a month then you're stealing.

I hit my 6 GB limit every 4-6 days. What does that mean I'm doing? :-)

Seriously, I've taken to using my USENET feed instead of a VCR or TiVo for shows I know will get capped and posted in high quality. Since they don't come out on purchasable media or purchasable downloads from the netweork's website, and since I've never ever bought a single thing I've seen on a commercial, at least not since I was a kid, I'm not stealing *anything*. You can call it stealing, but it isn't--I haven't deprived anyone of any property, real or intellectual.

Double billed?

[rtaylor]

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?

Re:Double billed?

[rtaylor]

Check again in a few weeks.

I don't have one either with Rogers, but I'm faily confident I'll see one before September.

supernews.com

[Sauron23]

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.

My-Binaries.com

[Utopia]

I have never tried My binaries but they seem to be the cheapest
with 1.5 GB/day for a $10 per month fee.

Easynews. Nothing's Better.

[Chasing Amy]

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.

meganetnews.com

[bedessen]

I don't know how their retention / completeness rates with the others, but meganetnews seems competitive as far as pricing and has a good selection of plans. They offer uncensored newsgroups and ssl connections.

100M per Day == $5.95/mo or $59.50/year
250M per Day == $7.95/mo or $79.50/year
500M per Day == $9.95/mo or $99.50/year
750M per Day == $11.95/mo or $119.50/year
1500M per Day == $21.95/mo or $219.50/year
2500M per Day == $34.95/mo
5000M per Day == $64.95/mo

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.

What about software?

[adolf]

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...

Re:What about software?

[Per Wigren]

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.

You said it: Giganews

[Bklyn]

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.

meganetnews.com ridiculous anti-bot policy

[splorf]

Meganetnews's prices are attractive but their AUP is emphatic that you can't use any kind of automated news client--they don't want you sucking or archiving newsgroups and they repeat this several times. I personally don't see how anyone can use 5000MB per day without an automatic client so I don't know who they're kidding, but they seem to state that provision seriously. I think it's crazy--if you pay for the bandwidth you should be able to use it any way you want. Specifically I want to make automated personal archives of some low to medium volume newsgroups, maybe 5 MB/day total, and it's not allowed even if I'm willing to pay for 100 times that much traffic.

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.

Hell, I'd pay -not-

[Mordant]

to have 50GB/day of alt.binaries.ugly.naked.fat.men.pretending.to.be.
hot.horny.chix0rs downloaded onto my hard drive.

100proofnews.com

[willfe]

$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.

The very best option is newsfeeds.com!

[Per Wigren]

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...

Re:The very best option is newsfeeds.com!

[Per Wigren]

Oh, I forgot..
You also get anonymous posting, access to more than 100000 newsgroups, a "spamkiller"-server, and the best of all.. On the dedicated servers there is more than a month retentiontime, even in the most active binaries-groups...

Re:1GB?

[Per Wigren]

No it isn't! A normal DivX DVD-rip is ~700MB...

Or maybe you were talking about pictures or crappy 30-second-clips? :P

I have about 60GB of bizarre-porn on my HD, only full DVD-rips :)

Newsguy

[John Hasler]

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.

alt.binaries.news-server.comparison

[Fencepost]

Is the Usenet group where such things are generally discussed. There are a few folks on my ISP who've tried several and settled on Giganews. Expect to pay whereever you go.

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.