The world’s best Usenet provider Giganews has managed it once again to set another milestone by creating a software called Giganews Accelerator which uses header download compression to download the headers of the newsgroup up to 10 times faster. Header downloads are the most annoying part when it comes to using the Usenet. It sometimes takes longer to download the headers of a popular newsgroup than to download a 700 Megabytes file with my 16 Mbit connection.

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Par2 Files are common on the Usenet today.They are not that common on the Internet in general and I can’t think of a location where I encountered them except for the Usenet. Par2 Files can be used to repair broken archives. That is the basic explanation of course, the technical is a little bit more complicated. Lets use a example to make it clearer. Let us assume that you have downloaded a number of rar files (.rar, r01, r02 and so on) that can be unpacked to create the file test.avi which has a size of 700 Megabytes.

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Newsgroup indexing sites such as binsearch.info and binaries.nl make it easier to search for files that have been posted to the Usenet by allowing searches in all groups. If you are familiar with the Usenet you might know that you can only search one group at a time which does not help much if you do not know if the file(s) that you are looking for have been posted in that group.

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The usenet provider Giganews announced today that they would increase the retention of all binary newsgroups to 100 days over the next two weeks. If you never have heard about the usenet before let me explain the concept with just a few words. The usenet can be divided into binary and discussion groups. Thousands of binary groups for every purpose, from mp3 to movie to games exist and every user who has usenet access is able to download all the files that get posted to the usenet daily.

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P2P is in the news, every day. You see organizations like the RIAA hunting down fileshares, you read about trojans and virii that are spread through P2P networks. Everything seems rather risky at the moment. A new player is emerging from the shadows which is using a very old communication system, the Usenet. You might know a part of the usenet if you ever read something from google groups. Google Groups is an archive of the part of the usenet that looks similar to bulletin boards.

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