I’m very fond of the Usenet client Newsbin which I have been using for many years. It’s not a free software and I made the purchase because at that time it was definitely the best client available. I’m sometimes getting asked if there are free alternatives to Newsbin and I always have to say that [...]

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Windows

This article is going to list some of the best Usenet search engines that are freely available. The Usenet is considered by many a dark side of the Internet, something that those who know do not talk about and those who do not know don’t want to know about because it seems utterly complicated to begin with.

Categories: Knowledge, Online Services, Search Engines, Software

I’m using the Usenet (Newsgroups) provider Giganews for several years already and recommend the service to anyone who wants to sneak peak or go knee deep into Usenet. I don’t want to talk about the performance of their servers, the reliability and file retention which sets a very high Industry standard that all the other Usenet Providers have a hard time keeping pace with.

Categories: Online Services, The Web

I have explained the concept of par files before. In short, they can be used to repair any rar file that is part of the archive as long as the blocks of the par file are at least of the same size than the corrupt rar parts. A software like Quickpar can be used to split big files into smaller ones and create several par files to be able to recover the whole archive if part of it gets corrupted.

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Tools, Windows

When you normally download a video from the Usenet you do the following. You fire up your Newsreader, download the files, unpack them and watch the movie in your favorite movie player. NZB Player offers a different solution which is great especially for small nzb files that point to a video file directly. The player streams nzb files that you load into it from the Usenet directly which is nice for preview reasons and if you want to use a shortcut to view the video.

Categories: The Web, Tools

I wrote about the Giganews Accelerator when it first came out which was just a bit more than two months ago and have been using it since then to speed up header downloads with my own Giganews account. The Giganews accelerator speeds up header downloads by the factor eight on my connection which is really great.

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.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

There are two possibilities to download binaries from the Usenet. The first one is the most common one. You download the headers of a newsgroup that you are interested in and select the files that you want to download. All of this is done in your newsclient. This method has some serious disadvantages.

You may not search through many newsgroups at once for instance or search for files in a large list of groups. Usenet indexing sites try to aid users by offering a way to search the contents of many newsgroups at once. They index new posts that appear in the observed groups and offer web interfaces that users can use to search for files.

Categories: Online Services, The Web

I have been trying several newsreaders for the Usenet until I finally found the one and only newsreader Newsbin. I purchased it years ago and can only recommend it to everyone else who is serious about the Usenet. I do know however that some users prefer free software and that is why I took a look at the Pan newsreader which is available for Windows, Mac and Unix.

Pan Newsreader is offering a lot of features that commercial Usenet readers such as Newsbin are offering as well. It does support download binaries of course offering single-click encoding, multiple connections and simultaneous downloads and image previews of downloaded images.

Categories: Linux, Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

I first read about Trimark at the Torrent Freak blog. This new anti-piracy solution targets websites and the Usenet by scanning the contents for serial numbers that have been implemented into the music files. An identified serial number would lead to the owner – the person that purchased the music – who will be held reliable for the damages caused by the spreading.

The article did not contain information about the technology behind Trimark other than that the “identification code maintains it’s integrity, despite copying or ripping.” This is a very bold statement and I personally don’t think that such a system will be possible unless they implement it in music that can be purchased in digital form only.

Categories: P2p, The Web