Giganews are running trial offers right now that reduce the price of their two most popular Usenet accounts by 50% for the first three months. That means that you can get their most popular account (the one that I’m using btw.) for $14.99 instead of $29.99. The account will get you unlimited bandwidth, 256-bit SSL encryption and 20 connections to their services which usually means full speed downloads even for fast Internet connections. I cap at 1.8 Megabytes per second with my 16 Mbit connection and 10 connections to Giganews.

Users who want to test the Usenet account do need a Usenet client as well to be able to connect to the Usenet servers. There are a few free clients available like Alt.Binz. That’s all that is needed to get everyone started with Usenet. Some additional tips include using the Giganews Accelerator to speed up header retrieval from Giganews servers and to take a look at the Usenet Search article to access some of the best search engines available to find the files that you are looking for.

The Giganews accounts come all with a 14-day free trial period for extra safety. You will not be charged if you quit in that period and followed the rules outlined on the Giganews pages.

Here is the list of steps again:

• Visit the Giganews website and signup for an account.
• Download Alt.Binz or another Usenet client.
• Download Giganews Accelerator to speed up header retrieval
• Use Usenet search engines to find the files that you are looking for.

I think that the offer is a fair one especially for new users who never accessed Usenet in their life. Keep in mind that the monthly price changes to the usual after the first three months though.

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I always had to wait the longest time to wait until the headers of popular groups were downloaded which took an awfully long time. A great thing is that the Giganews Accelerator is also supporting SSL connections. Giganews released a total of eight new versions of the program since the initial release which is an astounding number if you ask me.

The most important changes have been fixes that prevent crashes and handle disconnections better. It happened to me that my connection to the Giganews server died although my Internet connection was alive and both programs were open. This is happening less and less due to these updates to the Giganews Accelerator.

Here is the complete list of fixes for the program:

v1.0.99.1 – June 13, 2007
- quick version bump so upgrade links will work properly

v1.0.98.1 – June 13, 2007
- new installer package should fix problems on some non-English versions
of Windows
- another posting bugfix
- handle socket disconnections better; this should fix many unnecessary
exceptions that happen when connections disconnect
- allow the program to run even if the user’s registry is write-protected

v1.0.97.1 – May 29, 2007
- properly disconnect sessions when reading compressed headers and
connection drops
- fix many different posting bugs
- include better information with crash reports

v1.0.95.1 – May 25, 2007
- new compression handling engine
- new rate-limiting engine
- removed reliance on external C runtime libraries
- fix bug with very large (>2GB) overview downloads with spinners

v1.0.94.1 – May 17, 2007
- redirect errors with compression handling to bug report e-mails
- rework underlying menu code for future expansion
- remove some control characters from log messages
- enforce upgrade to at least v1.0.93.1

v1.0.93.1 – May 16, 2007
- fix intermittent failures with compressed headers
- fix connection crash when accelerator cannot make a connection
- fix application crash with some menu items when system does not
have a default web browser enabled
- include additional version info in crash reports

v1.0.92.1 – May 15, 2007
- fix unhandled exception when server connection is unavailable

v1.0.91.1 – May 14, 2007
- enable more verbose crash e-mails for unexpected application crashes
- update compression code
- label which speed is actual and which speed is accelerated
- prevent application startup crashes on some systems

v1.0.87.1 – May 8, 2007
- initial release

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You are probably wondering: Usenet ? What the hell is this thing ? Here is a short explanation that I copied from one of my earlier posts on the subject: A Usenet provider like Giganews gives you access to the Usenet which is basically a discussion platform where users can also post binaries. The binaries make the Usenet so attractive to everyone who feels that P2P is not safe anymore. Giganews offers SSL encryption which means that your Internet Service Provider does not know what you are exchanging with Giganews. If you want to get an impression of what the Usenet generally has to offer you might want to take a look at Newzbin and Binsearch. Those two sites are Usenet indexing sites that have records on many files that get posted day in day out on the Usenet.

Back to the Giganews Accelerator. The Accelerator is a standalone program that runs in the background in conjunction with your basic newsreader. I use Newsbin for that purpose but any other client is fine as well. You do not have to configure the Giganews Accelerator directly, all that needs to be done is to change the configuration in your newsreader. This is done in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is replace the url of the server with localhost and change the port to 119. You also have to disable SSL but don’t worry, the Giganews Accelerator has it enabled by default.

After making those basic changes you can try and download some headers from some groups and you will witness how fast the process now is. Downloading 5 million headers from a group took a long time before and now it is a matter of minutes (instead of half an hour or even more).

Features:

• Header download compression for header downloads up to 10 times faster
• Enable 256 bit SSL encrypted Usenet access regardless of client SSL support (SSL-enabled account required)
• Control download speeds
• See real-time statistics about each of your connections
• Protect your privacy with fully encrypted Usenet authentication
• Encode Usenet command traffic to work around packet sniffers and rate limiting
• Compatible with any standard NNTP based Usenet newsreader

Guess what, I’m allowed to post the link to the Giganews Accelerator right here on my homepage. Enjoy this fine piece of software. If you encounter any problems let me know and I try to sort them out for you. Still using another Usenet Provider ? Time to change, don’t you think ?

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