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. [...]

Categories: The Web

1000 days of retention, wow, that is a lot. That is almost three years full of data retention. I remember that my first Usenet provider stored data for a few days after which they were deleted. Not enough time to go on holiday for two weeks and to come back to continue where you left [...]

Categories: The Web

Usenet traffic has increased from 5 Terabytes per day in January 2009 to almost 9 Terabytes of traffic per day two years later. The statistics have been collected by Giganews, one of the world’s largest Usenet providers. Especially the last six month have seen an incredible growth by almost 50% in daily traffic. This increase [...]

Categories: The Web

So called nzb files have been created to make the downloading of files from the Usenet (often referred to as newsgroups which is technically not correct) easier and more comfortable. Files are uploaded in parts to the Usenet, and while Usenet software did a good job at recognizing and merging those parts to file names, [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Newzbin was one of the first – if not the first- Usenet indexing services. That was a long time ago and IIRC it was free back then but turned to a paysite eventually. The main achievement of the site operators was however the nzb format which made it a lot easier to download multiple files [...]

Categories: The Web

My Usenet provider of choice Giganews has reached a binary retention level of 600 days with no end in sight (That’s a huge leap considering that they were the first to reach 100 days in 2007). Binary retention refers to the time the binary data, that is the files that are uploaded to the Usenet, [...]

Categories: The Web

The Usenet can be best described to users who have never come in contact with it as a global forum with hundreds of thousands of groups and the ability for everyone to post and reply. The messages that get posted and read are called articles or posts and they are posted to so called newsgroups [...]

Categories: The Web

Giganews has been my Usenet provider for the last couple of years. Before that I switched from service to service only to be disappointed eventually by poor performance or connection problems. Yes, these services were cheaper than Giganews but you did get what you paid for, at least back then. The Usenet provider landscape has [...]

Categories: Online Services, The Web

Users who work with newsgroups usually use desktop clients such as Newsbin, Grabit or Microsoft Outlook to do so. Some Usenet providers offer web access to newsgroups with options to download files right from the web interface which can be very comfortable in certain situations but especially when no desktop clients can be installed on [...]

Categories: Linux, Software