I’m very cautious when I see sites making claims that they offer a service for free for a lifetime. There is usually a catch, just like there is when you see hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth, but that’s another story.
The Dutch Usenet provider XSUsenet is currently offering free lifetime accounts to access the Usenet. Usenet in this regard includes access to binary groups which usually are not offered for free Usenet users.
You get free life time access, a solid 600 day retention, no IP retention, no personal details on file. All you need to do to sign up is to enter information into the registration form on the provider homepage.
Here you need to enter a valid email address and a country (only Netherlands, Germany and Belgium are selectable). Once done you get the login and server details send to the email address that you have entered in the form.
You can then use the information to connect to the Usenet. The speed is capped at 1Mbit per second at two connection tops. Users who need more speed or connections can upgrade their account to premium access starting at $6.99 for a 100 Mbit connection per month.
Free Usenet clients that you can use are the web based SABnzbd or Grabit. Please note that Usenet or newsgroups are not only about downloading binary files. You find many discussion groups there, Mozilla is for instance using the Usenet for some of their development discussions.
It is likely that the company will eventually close down the creation of new free accounts. I’d suggest you grab a free account as soon as possible.
I have tested the service and it worked just fine. I received the confirmation email with the Usenet server information in my email. Setup was a breeze and connection speed was as advertised.
Users who are just starting with the Usenet, or want to try it without giving away personal information can use the service to do just that. It is not anonymous though, considering that the service still sees the IP that you signed up with and that you connect with.
You can check out the service’s homepage here. The sign up form is at the right side. (via)
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So this won’t work in the US?
I’d say it should works, but have not tried,
Thanks guys
why does Peerblock blacklists it as “Netrouting Telecom”?
could it be a honeypot?
Martin, did you use the Grabit client? It’s not working on SABnzbd…
I used SABnzbd.
Ben: Because PeerBlock is a crappy program that doesn’t “protect” you.
What’s more interesting, is why the reader.xsusenet.com SSL cert points to reader2.xlned.com (and is issued by news.xlned.com). Does XSUsenet have a ‘connection’ to XLned?
Hoi Martin, Thanks for the tip. I have put this tip from you about the offer (not your article) (with a thanks to you) on main facebook account. I hope that this not a problem?
No problem at all :)
Does not work…Dont see where to register
I got the access password etc for my account but cant seem to gain a connection, from New Zealand. I wonder if they will lock this down to Europe…. hope not..
The page doesn’t even load for me…
Site down?
Yes appears to be down, maybe they have been swarmed by new users.
Hi,
I managed to get an account for xsusenet with confirmation email and downloaded sabnzbd but am a total n00b to usenet.
I gather sabnzbd is a downloader like utorrent is for torrents and I was able to input my account details into sabnzbd.
What I dont understand is how you search for the nzb files.
Can someone point me in the right direction please.
thanks in advance
try this guide http://www.howtogeek.com/71315/the-how-to-geek-guide-to-getting-started-with-usenet/
You can use binsearch.info for instance for that, check this out http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/08/the-best-usenet-search-engines/
Thanks guys, the missing piece of the puzzle has now been found.
Can’t register. I got the following message instead:
.Submit erroe: SyttaxError: Syntax erroe
Duplicate entry ’14251′ for key 1
Same error for me:
.Submit error: SyntaxError: missing ) in parenthetical
Duplicate entry ’14251′ for key 1
I get the same error as above two. Is this confirmed to work for US?
Looks like they got SQL injected?
Getting the same error here in the Netherlands
Can i get subscription in to this iam from india?
Same issue (Duplicate entry ’14251′ for key 1) here in CANADA. Is this only for the countries listed in the drop down?
Ya facing the same prb as Paul.i’m frm India
I’m facing the same problem as Paul and I’m from Belgium! Me thinks their site is a bit broken… I’m feeling tempted to try the Bobby Tables trick…
Same thing here. Argh.
Confirmed as working now, From NZ, slow but working
Thanks for letting everyone know. As I said, they have probably been swarmed with reviews and new users.
Further to my last,
I registered yesterday when I first spotted this artcle ( thank you)
and got an immediate username and password issued from the site.
I tried logging in with Sasbzdb last night with no result, time-out on the connection. This morning however it worked on a test App download of 3 Meg. That’s when I reported it was working. I’ve since tried with a 600 meg file and that stopped after 30 meg, with a connection refused status, I’ll keep stabbing at it, and as you say its probably the rush and they didn’t expect half the planet to take them up on it. It will come in handy here in NZ since they brought in the skynet law on 1st Sept. I’ve a lot of less tech friends who torrented and are now nervous.
Not working yet. Maybe it is slow for registered users. But the submit button get the same error.
Submit button is still broken for me. I’ve submitted a support ticket on the site which actually worked fine, but no reply yet.
Website’s down
After trying intermittently all day, it worked for me at 3:30pm mountain time.
I got the email with my username and password however now I can’t get past the login as it times out. You get what you pay for, I guess. FWIW, I’m in the US and not using any proxy.
argh, I KNEW this was going to happen.
November 26 2011, 11:43 PM CET
Signups have been temporarily suspended due to high demand, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Not sure why it says November though
I think 1 Mbps is very slow speed (comes around 256 k bytes per second). I have 10 Mbps connection and I am able to achieve speed of 1.2 MBps with torrents. Why use usenet then?
It is slow because it is free. If you pay, you get faster speeds. Usenet is more like downloading from file hosts than it is over a P2P network. Only the provider sees your connection, whereas other peers see you when you download or share files via Bittorrent.
We expect to start accepting new signups again this afternoon. As mentioned before, we have been swarmed with new users and our front-ends simply could not deal with the significant load increase.
We apologize for the inconvenience. For those who have already opened an account with us, we hope it is to your likings! For those waiting to create one, please bear with us a bit longer.
Kind regards,
XS Usenet Team
Registered yesterday, all worked fine using SABnzbd.
But since tody, between 11 and 12 pm (GMT +2), there is this error:
502 reader1.xsusenet.com: Access denied to your node