This would be equal to force search engine providers to block a full country from appearing in the search index because some domains with the country extension were found to contain child pornography. A highly disproportional move by the Internet Service Providers. Time Warner made the decision to discontinue their Usenet service completely while Sprint / Verizon is blocking the complete alt hierarchy.

The alt hierarchy is known to be the group with the largest bandwidth requirements and it could be that the ISPs saw this as a welcome initiative to reduce their bandwidth costs.

Giganews, my Usenet provider of choice, is offering specials for Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers who would like to keep uncensored Usenet access.

Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers get 50% off of Diamond access and 20% of every other plan in the first month which is probably a good way to test the excellent service provided by Giganews. I’m a customer for more than 2 years and never looked back to other Usenet providers. Unparalleled in retention (200 days), speed and security in my opinion.

Members must click on the Free Trial link on the above landing pages and sign up with a valid Time Warner / Sprint / Verizon email address to receive the special.

I just realized that they added another ten connections to my Diamond subscription which means I get 20 simultaneous connections now. Speed is already maxed out with ten connections though, and that is 16 Mbit per second.

The free application aids you by sending you text messages or emails when you reach a defined amount of minutes that are left in a month. All that needs to be done would be to download the Watch My Cell application and configure the application once to add the login details for your cell phone provider, the minutes that are free in your account and when you want to receive a notification.

Watch My Cell supports only a few major cell phone providers at the moment and all seem to be Us-based which makes the application at its current stage useless for users from other countries. Supported companies are Cingular / At&t, Sprint / Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon. It is also possible to check the remaining minutes in your system tray by simply hovering over the icon of Watch my Cell.