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AT&T Dropping Usenet Netnews; Low-Cost Alternatives?
franknagy writes "This announcement message has appeared in all the news groups on
the AT&T/SBC News Server: 'Please note that on or around July 15, 2009, AT&T will no longer be
offering access to the Usenet netnews service. If you wish to continue
reading Usenet newsgroups, access is available through third-party
vendors.' So what free or low-cost alternatives are available for Netnews and
the NNTP services for clients?"
It depends what you mean by "alternative" - but (sadly in my opinion), most people will just say "the web" and mean HTML-based bulletin board discussions eg Facebook.
Oh well. I loved Usenet.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Sleazynews
It's better anyway :-P
No great loss
Unless you are using binaries groups for music or pr0n, is Usenet even worth accessing anymore? I remained dedicated to the network long after most nerds departed because there was still a fairly decent amount of educated discourse on sci.lang and rec.music.classical, but even those groups are no innundated by spambots and most of the most worthwhile conversation partners have moved while only the crotchety remain.
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Usenet/Public_News_Servers/
Low-cost is a subjective term, and it really depends on how much you use it, but Giganews is rock solid. Super fast (I can get 20Mb sustained -- that's my connection max) and over a year retention on binaries.
Like so much else in life, there is Good, Fast, and Cheap. You can only have two of the three.
I liked Giganews when I read Usenet. They're good, and fast.
Now that they're cutting a portion of the service out - do you get a cut on the monthly rate as well?
I was always wondering why this protocol and all related software have not disappeared yet.
Craigslist is the way to go for the public.
If you actually want to READ and POST text news, then I don't know why anyone would use an NNTP client nowadays. Google Groups is a far superior gateway.
If you are interested in binaries, then I would point you to Astraweb. They have great price plans.
I've never found a free one that was worth a damn, but there are several pay alternatives that are quite good. I'm currently with easynews.com.
If you don't need the binary groups, I'd bet the chances of finding a usable free one will be much higher, though.
Whack a copy of INN on your Colo and hook up a feed with your BOFH friends.
I use Astraweb as its currently the best unlimited monthly payment going
http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html
$11/mo
SSL
Unlimited downloads
I've never had a problem capping my connection's bandwidth or with the service.
I use the aptly named newshosting, and have been quite impressed.
Cheaper then giganews, and has excellent retention and completion. Speed is only limited by my connection, and SSL and compression are available for even more speed.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I use EasyNews to get my pr0...um...er...oh...make that 'I heard EasyNews is good'.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
They're especially cheap(I pay $11 US per month for unlimited 20 connections) and they're upgrading their retention to 360 days, right now it's at 295. I don't work for Astraweb, I'm just a very satisfied customer. The only downfall, if you consider this a downfall, is to get the $11 a month deal you have to pay through PayPal's subscription service, which isn't all that bad. Here's the link: http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html Click the "Now Accepting PayPal" button.
The good thing about your ISP providing Usenet is speed. The connection is strictly between your home and the ISP. You don't go across "the wild Internet."
With the 3rd party providers, you're going across any number of connections and the speed is MUCH slower.
It really depends on what you need it for, the best place to go is here: http://www.newsgroupreviews.com/usenet-providers.html
Out of the list I liked binverse.com and usenetserver.com, generally if you go thru the links provided by newsgroupreviews you'll get discounts that may or may not be "obvious" from just going directly to the sites in question.
Usenet was my first encounter with electronic forum - questions asked and answered, flame wars, trolls, kooks, some grass-roots projects, etc.
I remember the flame war about people's sig. Some dudes had this gigantic ASCII art sig files, and people were complaining about one-line posts with 20-line sigs, how the bandwidth were wasted, etc.
A trick to have one's question answered rather than ignored: Post the question, and from a second account, post a completely bogus answer with extra dose of condescension. People are so eager to pounce on the bogus answer with full-on indignation.
Oh well. Move on.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you just want text only then there are plenty of free servers out there, just google for them. You can also use the google interface or any other number of free web interfaces. If you need binary access then Id suggest looking at either newshosting or usenetserver. I started out on newshosting and its pretty good all around, I just switched to usenetserver a year ago because their pricing for 3 months of service at a time was cheaper and they also had longer retention. Both support ssl at this point and I think they both have pretty much the same retention and speed as well. Either way those 2 are cheaper than most, though im not sure how good they are for posting, if your posting I think most use giganews or astraweb.
There is a nice thread at FatWallet compiling lots of deals. While the main post hasn't been updated in a while, there are some recent posts with good deals.
I subscribed to a variety of Usenet groups. I used that nice Freeagent software for year. Still do on my Museum PC (Packard Bell running Windows 95 with a tape drive and 128 MB of RAM).
I have a spam filter on my gateway so spam messages vanish.
I haven't gotten a new post in 3 years...
Usenet isn't dying. It's dead with nothing but ghosts left...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
The announcement showed up on Newsguy's servers, too. Seriously, if AT&T sucked so bad at Usenet that they couldn't keep their 'private' announcements in-house, maybe it's just as well.
Speaking of which, Newsguy is pretty darned awesome, in my experience (which is admittedly limited, in that I've only had an account with them since Scumcast dropped their Usenet service a little under a year ago.)
I use giganews, of course I pirate 360 and wii games, along with ds and psp games too. TB hard drives are a must. 1.2 TB grabbed last month. Oh and movies too, I never rent them anymore. Yes I pirate, don't like it, tough shit.
Newsguy.com is an excellent service. Compared to many other USENET services, Newsguy actually has very little spam because of this really clever program they developed called SpamHippo. I also like them because you can buy bandwidth on demand if you want it and the bandwidth balance rolls over each month. The online readers are very focused on the USENET usage experience, with automatic binary downloaders for those binaries with hundreds of parts (and you download the binary version, not the encoded 7-bit version). Of course port 119 is there, too.
Kriston
OK.. Now that USENET is dead.. is it safe to let the secret out?
USENET WAS GREAT.
I use Astraweb. They have a "Limited Time Offer" running, 11$/mo for unlimited access, but it's been going for months, so who knows how limited it really is. They currently have 295 days retention (working their way to 365), offer 20 SSL connections, and I max out my 20mbit cable line with them.
http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.multicards.html
i have been using motzarella for several months now. i started when some of the other big isp's began dropping usenet. my isp still carries it but now i have a back-up plan. http://news.motzarella.org/
Try easynews.com I used them years ago, and they had cool features such as downloading files by http/ftp as a zip file, as well as fast speeds and good completion.
Here I am responding to a sig, bad form but CSS on /. does suck :(
I'd just like to say it's terrible when ISPs drop Usenet. Usenet is part of the Internet culture.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Ahhh, Usenet...
I remember when someone spammed ads in the groups. There was a huge uproar over the notion that someone would attempt to use the Internet for commercial purposes.
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
When my isp dropped usenet, I switched to readnews.com. It was something like $7 or $7.50 a month. I created an account, set up automatic billing, switched my news reader to the readnews nntp server, and forgot about it. It's a lot faster than my old ISP's news server ever was, especially when doing mass newsgroup updates, actually making use of the 20 Mbit pipe. They don't appear to do any newsgroup filtering, if you're concerned about that sort of thing.
Of course, I have no connection to readnews.com except as a customer. My first job on a Unix box back in 1982 was as the local usenet administrator, (ah, the days of "B" news and 1200 baud modems...) have always gotten Usenet for free, so it grates to have to pay for it, but I have to admit, the service works flawlessly.
Someone will inevitably point out that you can access news on groups.google.com. That service is excellent for searching for articles, but it fails when you're trying to browse a lot of articles. The interface is just too slow. If you're using usenet as a resource, google groups is fine. If you're actually trying to actively participate in any really effective fashion, you'll need a local news reader and an nntp service.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...is
news.individual.net
10 Euros/year only. No binaries - so that means you won't see pictures of recipes in alt.binary.food.
But that's enough for posting your questions in your favorite comp.lang.* groups.
And anybody with half a brain who's not born yesterday (Facebook/Tweeter kiddos) who's tried using Usenet newsgroups knows there's nothing better for tapping into the wisdom of experts.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Wait, didn't that happen last Tuesday, right after the rapture?
Back on topic: I suppose Usenet had to die at some point, just like Gopher/Archie/Veronica. It is kind of sad, but as OP said, there are various other tools that do the same job (albeit not as decently), and are easier to access. Thus its time was sort of inevitable.
Seriously, how many people use Usenet anymore? Mostly aging hardcore geeks, I'm guessing. Which isn't market enough to keep it living.
Sadly, I stopped using it when it became a huge pain to use. My ISP's support is VERY spotty, and doesn't offer access to vast amounts of areas (bin and alt, mostly), and really doesn't offer any easy information as towards how to access it. Last time I set up a connect, I had to call the ISP, and listen to some Indian support guy act confused about the whole idea of this "internet" feature thing, repeatedly asking me the URL for usenet.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
check Hot Deals Forum in Fatwallet.com search for usenet for the deals thread on this topic
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
What's that?
When I ran a little ISP, we kept a 7-day Usenet feed. It came off MCI, took almost 10GB, and was a pain to manage. We got a satellite link and cut back to 3 days, then back up to 7 when some users howled. My boss said to cut back to 3 days unless users had 'legitimate' needs, not ABPE for instance.
Users dutifully provided legitimate uses. Comp.* was the favorite.
Well, it grew to the point that storage was becoming a pain, and an hour's delay overnight got my pager whining from the ABPE fanbois going apeshit over not having the next day's segments to download over their modem link. Please.
SO we abandoned it, and got users going to MCI's Usenet feed directly. Not better, but I saved a whole server.
Some day day we will be sitting around a nice fire, beverages in hand, and waxking poetic about the demise of SMTP. How in the old days, email was so simple, except for the spam and phishing.
We are close to the end of an era. The kinder, gentler, family Internet. It hasn't been that way for a while, of course, but dammit I miss Jon Postel, and getting things done with an RFC and three guys saying "Hell yeah, it SHOULD work like that!". And being able to call someone and get a spammer shut down for a few weeks, until they found a new MCI rep. And people who's purpose was just to figure something out, not to ruin your service and strip your bank account.
Ah, the days...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Various AT&T employees at various levels have yet to confirm to various customers that this isn't a hoax. The one person who occasionally posts to AT&T's fire-walled internal help groups and actually is responsible for maintaining the company's nntp servers has yet to comment.
Have you ever ran INN?
I've been running it more or less continually since I upgraded from C news back in the early '90s. Before that I ran Cnews, before that I ran Bnews.
The amount of bandwidth is I N S A N E.
Depends entirely on how many peers and groups you get. If you want to carry alt.binaries.pink.copyright.violations... yes, the bandwidth you'll burn up is insane. But why would you carry groups you don't actually read?
A lot of discourse that used to travel over Usenet now happens on web forums, which are frustrating for people who remember what Usenet was like. The worst part about web forums is that they effective have only one client. I miss being able to choose from among the huge variety of news readers, each of which competed for features and users. News clients did everything imaginable, from automatically threading and searching messages to maintaining customer scoring rules. Even when forum software implements these features, support is often fragmentary. I've yet to see a system besides Slash that gives me something approaching slrn's scorefiles.
On Usenet, a user choosing a poor client doesn't affect anyone else. You used different clients to read the same messages. But on a web forum, your only choice is to move to a completely different forum if you don't like the single hard-coded "client" built into the forum software. The messages to too closely bound to the software used to read them, and we suffer for it.
Usenet also has advantages like a single group hierarchy, the offline message queuing, efficient crossposting, and message cancellation, but these are minor next to the ability to use my own damn client.
But I suppose web forums have one advantage over usenet, from a certain point of view: you can slap ads on a forum.
Instead of raising your bill 50% by Christmas, they'll only raise it 40%.
So yes, it's a rate cut over the evil-twin-alternative-universe where they don't cut the service.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
BinTube Usenet Access (http://www.bintube.com) offers a great unlimited package for only $10.99 a month and includes a copy of their streaming Usenet software.
Anyone know of providers outside the US and the Western Europe?
(If lived in one of those tiny islands/countries, I would specialize in servicing content outside the US/UK/Germany/etc. Big Brother societies).
I've never found a free one that was worth a damn
Enable IPv6 and use these free ones:
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers
The story suggests the article appeared "in all the news groups on the AT&T/SBC News Server". It also appeared throughout the world,
due to a typo: "Distributrion: internal".
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If you're one of those rare souls interested in discussion, sign up at individual.net. It's ten Euro a year (twelve US dollars or so), decent spam filtering. No binaries groups, but some of us view this as a bonus, rather than a shortcoming.
There goes our ability to suck down terabyte after terabyte of really lousy UUencoded porn.
(I find it more erotic in base64.)
J00 R 50 RI9H7, d00D!!!!
--- Original Message ----
Bunch:
Of:
Headers:
It's when you reply to a string of earlier messages and place your reply on top, so that whoever reads will have no idea of the context.
What's top posting?
Let's all go into comp.lang.c and start top posting to threads. They LOVE IT when you do that.
Should I do this instead?
No, no, no. When trolling a programming forum, make damn sure you post in HTML-formatted text. If you can figure out how to include the tag, you could probably hear their heads explode from halfway around the world.
If not, your best bet is to include code snippets in multiple languages, each using different tab-stops for indentation. Make frequent references in how this would be much easier in Java, unless posting to comp.lang.java, then post on how C# fixed it and is really Java done right.
Oh, and make sure to quote a multi-page question fully and answer only with one sentence. They love that.
Finally, big sigs with ASCII art and geek code blocks. The bigger the better. True masters have sigs bigger than their actual post.
There are still conversations on Usenet.
There is still pr0n.
There is still a boatload of warez.
There is still a ton of spam.
There are still many, many groups and messages.
There are still plenty of Usenet access providers and willing customers.
There is still plenty of software to access Usenet.
ISPs are still reducing services while raising prices.
So what's new and why is Usenet apparently dead?
mmmm...forbidden donut
Yes, there are a few places where Usenet is the main place for discussions. One such place is rec.games.pinball, which often has over 1000 posts per day. There is no web-based forum that reaches anywhere near as many people as RGP. There's a thread there today about the very subject of AT&T dropping Usenet. Many people use web-based Google Groups, but there are often interruptions in service and the web-based interface is much clunkier than most dedicated newsreaders.
The newbies on RGP are almost always coming in through Google Groups (as is virtually all of the spam), and the newbies rarely have any concept of Usenet at all.
Are you sure you need NNTP to get your kitty pr0n?
When those around you are loosing their heads while you are keeping yours, maybe you've misunderstood the situatiuation.
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers
Public:
news.ipv6.eweka.nl
newszilla6.xs4all.nl
Requires signup:
reader.ipv6.xsnews.nl
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
"Seriously, how many people use Usenet anymore?"
Might it be because it has been more and more dificult to find decent feeds?
"Sadly, I stopped using it when it became a huge pain to use."
OK: you already answered.
I use Easynews.com for my Usenet access. Been a happy customer for well over 7 years now.
Providing your primary interest in Usenet isn't simply warez and porn, there are a number of inexpensive providers. I use Individual.Net, and I think it costs me about $15-$20 a year (who knows right now with the weird exchange rates). It's purely text-based groups, but the main one I frequent still receives a minimum of 200 on-topic (or at least relatively so) posts a day.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would recommend Easynews if you want a web interface to the binaries newsgroups. For retention Giganews can't be beat (>300 days at last count). Google Groups is great for regular text newsgroups.
Unlimited plans $20 per month, but all the plans offer SSL.
If you don't need access to binaries then try Datemas. It's free of charge. Just send them an email and they'll set up an account for you. It's based in Germany and you know them Germans always make good stuff. :-)
Altopia is just $6/month for unlimited usage with SSL. Long history of protecting free speech.
or use SDF!
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
But GigaNews has ONE year (365 days) retention!
EarthLink used SuperNew that was bought out by Giganews, so you can get 10 hours dial-up plan (useful if your broadband goes down and if you still have a dial-up modem) that comes with unlimited Giganews access (EarthLink's SuperNews servers). No SSL and only two connections at once though. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Nobody knew about usenet until he opened his big fat trap. I mean, what's the first rule...?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For a long time I was feeding ALL my mailing lists to local newsgroups.
I use piratebay to replace all my porn and software pirating needs. An it's FREE!!!
But they might raise your monthly rate, as some sort of 'network recovery fee'
Sad to see usenet get to this point, but it was inevitable.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
1: Distributed discovery mechanism for new servers. Servers could simply announce on a control group and automatically be added as peers for nearby (by hop) systems.
2: Automatic peer reputation system. Automatically drop peers which spew crap.
3: User reputation system, which feeds the peer reputation system.
4: All non signed messages are considered spam and dropped immediately by everyone. Non dropping affects reputation.
Reputation system being the important feature required to reduce the junk on usenet and make it actually usable again. Any reputation system is going to have to identify individuals, servers *and networks*.
Something like Credence: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/
NNTP on it's own is useless on an unregulated and untrustworthy network.
Deleted
ever since TimeWarner RoadRunner no longer hosts their own usenet service. I went with NewsHosting because I get 12 connections, unlimited downloading, and my retention is about 250 days. That package was the middle ground between limited downloading and unlimited downloading that cost over $20. That package is only $15 a month. The $20 package costs more because it allows 20 connections and SSL which I don't need. I use the binary groups as well as text-only groups such as the linux, programming, windows, and home repair groups. It's been a year since I started with NewsHosting and I'm happy with them.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Easynews.com has the best NNTP service on the web. Their bandwidth pipes are freaking insane..
So um.... what is Usenet and how is it any different from the Internet?
I've stumbled across some stuff that I think was from it when looking up fan groups for the Wheel of Time/Robert Jordan (R.I.P.), and it just seemed convoluted and hard to find information/talk to people/post stuff/find information that had already been posted.
Why not just use the internet/P2P/standard forums now?
I use http://www.megabitz.net/ -- been with them for a year or two, service has been decent. There have been a couple of outages, but they were pretty brief.
I don't use Usenet as much as I used to, but when I want Usenet, it is useful to me that I have access to a good Usenet service. I've been liking it better than relying on my upstream ISP, which I used to do.
Key points:
* Flexible pricing (you can choose whether to pay by total bandwidth or by instantaneous bandwidth)
* Supports multiple simultaneous connections
* Good support for binary groups (only occasionally significant, but when it is, it's pretty useful)
* Competent techies
* Responsive support
Full disclosure moment: I did some work for them once. Specifically, I helped with cleaning up some of the text describing their service at one point. Here's the thing: That's not written by marketers. When they say "We listen!", that doesn't mean that some marketer determined that 37.6% of a key target demographic liked companies that claim to listen. It means they really do, and they think you'll care. And yes, they really do. Quick responses to emailed questions have been the norm.
So, basically, I'm a big fan, and I'm not a current employee and don't expect to be one again (too busy, if nothing else), but I really like the service, and happily pay for it. (I could probably get by with a cheaper plan, but the one I'm one is useful on the occasions when I want to try to grab an ISO and for some reason torrents aren't my first choice.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
aioe is a free Usenet server that also allows posting.
Simply use your own Usenet client (like Pan) and use "nntp.aioe.org" as the news server.
Unlike the average Slashdotter, I know my personal anecdotes have nothing to do with reality, hence the apparent self-evidence.
I'm sure a lot of it dried up because the web is generally more convenient when you already have a browser open. I hate to say it, but sadly Usenet had better, more intelligent discussions than the web does. I'm not sure if I'm insulting web forums, or complimenting Usenet though.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Their retention is nearly as good as GigaNews, and I like being able to support a place with a leftist/pro-civil liberties stance on access logs.
If you're looking for some exceptionally esoteric porn you're probably better-off with a different server. But if you just need the basics, with long post-retention and no random pain-in-the-ass post purging, EasyNews should definitely be on your short list of candidates.
Other things I like about EasyNews:
As internet traffic continues to increase, ISPs will remember the purpose of USENET. By hosting files locally, USENET cuts down on internet traffic over long distances. I would be willing to bet that at least a few ISPs start toying with the idea of hosting popular bittorrent traffic locally and then preventing that traffic from going outside their local network. This will obviously not happen in the current US marketplace, but perhaps some other countries will start doing it, and our corporations will see the profits that it makes for those involved.
Honestly the perfect place to start this geographically would have been Australia, but from all the Australian ISP horror stories I have read on Slashdot, I'm guessing that's not going to happen.
Seriously, how many people use Usenet anymore? Mostly aging hardcore geeks, I'm guessing. Which isn't market enough to keep it living.
I do. I'm 33, so I'm definitely aging, but I really don't consider myself a "hardcore" geek, more of a softcore geek with over the top moaning but no penetration.
I use GigaNews Platinum. I'm quite happy with them, had my account since my ISP got rid of Usenet access a few years ago. Usenet used to be a great place for finding somewhat rare and obscure things, but lately (a long lately) it's been filled with spam and trolls. BitTorrent seems to be where most of the action is these days.
On a geek BBS no one suggested running your own.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I have been using arcor.de for decades.
They are free like in free beer, have no limits, no binaries, just create an account on arcor.de and use the account and password to join their nntp-server. They are professional, doing it for over ten years, their servers are powerfull, what else do you want?
Besides you'll find more free providers at http://www.google.de/search?q=free+nntp
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
*puts tinfoil hat
Don't you see guys? this "franknagy" (nagy@fnal.gov) post is just a cheap MAFIAA attempt to get to know the U-know what- services that we use to warez^H^H^H^H download our Linux ISOs!!
And at this time, you have provided a very comprehensive list of service providers to sue...
remember... the FIRST rule of U-know-what is... you DO NOT talk about it!
*removes tinfoil hat
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Cox
Remember when it was possible to read all of Usenet?
I'm quite happy with newsguy. It was cheap, and I have no problems.
mark
I had this idea for a website some time ago. I'm too lazy to implement it myself, so I'm offering it up here in the hopes someone will actually implement it. Heck, I might even help you for free :-)
The website would be called "Popular Usenet Binaries" or something similar. What would draw people in would be front-page links to direct, fast downloads over HTTP of the top 20-50 movies/etc. posted to Usenet over the past few days. The average warez-loving user who has been stripped of Usenet access by his ISP, and is afraid of uploading on bittorrent would love this site. How would this work?
On the front page, you would have an index of the various alt.binaries.* groups, ordered by post counts. Users could click on the different groups, and see a collapsed selection of the movies that had been posted. Most movies have obfuscated titles and filenames (e.g. "raxip-pu" for Pixar's "Up"), so you would let users enter their own un-obfuscated titles which would be displayed prominently alongside. Users would vote for which titles interested them. Your server would then automatically download these files, recombine the posts, resplit into 100MB or 250MB chunks, and upload to rapidshare, megaupload, and the few dozen other similar large file hosting services. For hosting sites that require captcha response, your server would simply pass the captchas on down to your users, and reward them with karma for answering the captchas. When the uploading was finished, a front-page link on your site would appear to the file, along with the unobfuscated title.
To stay legal, you'd of course honor DMCA safe-harbor takedown notices. Of course, the files would already have been uploaded to the dozen file-hosting sites, so your users could still fetch them with cached copies of your link pages. This idea is free for anyone to implement.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
It seems to me that just having a different interface for desktop versus portable would be simpler. It's usually best to have a very linear flow anyhow on portables in my opinion. There's only so much auto-pruning you can do with declarative interfaces like CSS. CSS-centric designs are often driven by separate-content-from-presentation purists in my opinion. It's good to separate, but don't force it when it's not fitting smooth.
Table-ized A.I.