Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Commercial NNTP Gateway Recommendations? 46

Posted by Cliff from the as-public-NNTP-becomes-extinct dept.
plazman30 asks: "I am a customer of comcast.net, which provides usenet access through Giganews, but they cap downloads at 1 GB. Giganews will allow greater access for a monthly fee, but the amount of download you get is based on how much you pay. I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it, but I want to get the best value for my dollar. I was wondering what slashdot users that pay for usenet access are using."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Commercial NNTP Gateway Recommendations? More

Commercial NNTP Gateway Recommendations?

Comments Filter:

  • Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by afay ( 301708 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @10:11PM (#3741087)
    You're willing to pay for the ability to download pirated software and copyrighted media, but you won't actually pay for that material directly? Seriously, I know there's a lot of legit stuff on usenet, but if you really need more than a gigabyte a month then you're stealing.
    • > if you really need more than a gigabyte a month then you're stealing.

      I hit my 6 GB limit every 4-6 days. What does that mean I'm doing? :-)

      Seriously, I've taken to using my USENET feed instead of a VCR or TiVo for shows I know will get capped and posted in high quality. Since they don't come out on purchasable media or purchasable downloads from the netweork's website, and since I've never ever bought a single thing I've seen on a commercial, at least not since I was a kid, I'm not stealing *anything*. You can call it stealing, but it isn't--I haven't deprived anyone of any property, real or intellectual.

  • Double billed? (Score:3, Funny)

    by rtaylor ( 70602 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @10:11PM (#3741089) Homepage
    If you buy 10GB worth of news from GigaNews will Comcast also bill you for going over the cable modem monthly transfer limits by 5GB?

  • supernews.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sauron23 ( 52474 )
    supernews [supernews.com]. Basic Monthly is 6 gigs @ 13.95 upto 36 gigs a month at $59.95. I've never maxed out that 6 gigs, but I'm also not snarfing down passive amounts of porn. Cough cough.
  • That's a lot of porn per month.

    mmm... alt.sex.fetish.hamster.duct-tape.
    • It's amazing how much porn you can download in just a day! :-) Seriously, though, there a LEGITIMATE binary sites out there. I don't download software. What need is there when Linux comes with everything I need. I don't have a single piece of computer equipment in my house with Windows on it any more.
    • No it isn't! A normal DivX DVD-rip is ~700MB...

      Or maybe you were talking about pictures or crappy 30-second-clips? :P

      I have about 60GB of bizarre-porn on my HD, only full DVD-rips :)

  • My-Binaries.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by Utopia ( 149375 )
    I have never tried My binaries [my-binaries.com] but they seem to be the cheapest
    with 1.5 GB/day for a $10 per month fee.

  • Easynews. Nothing's Better. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Chasing Amy ( 450778 ) <asdfijoaisdf@askdfjpasodf.com> on Thursday June 20, 2002 @11:23PM (#3741419) Homepage
    Seriously, go with Easynews. There are several reasons:

    1) Article retention is about 15 days in binaries on NNTP, and completion of multi-part binaries is in my experience 100% except when people post from really really poor servers which don't propagate well at all. Non-binaries retention is of course several months.

    2) NNTP access is uncensored. Many providers won't offer uncensored NNTP access at all, "banning" groups with controversial content from their servers. While I don't, for example, download illegal binaries from naughty groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotia.underage-admirers , I have read and posted text to those groups when I was researching the types of people involved in kinderporn for a writing project, and made a few friends in those parts. (Nice guys...they just have different taste in pr0n than most of us...) I also am against censorship in all forms; arresting people for posting illegal things is fine, but don't try to censor the speech pre-emptively. I wouldn't support an NNTP provider who chose to censor their feed.

    3) They *do* have a download limit, but it's $9.95 for every 6 GB and you can purchase another 6 GB for another $9.95 at any time. That's reasonable, and while you'll find "uncapped" access, it's always at a premium rate and the service just isn't as good as Easynews--I can pull an NNTP feed from Easynews at my cable's full speed, unlike when I've tried other services, and the completion is phenomenal.

    4) Easynews also offers an interesting twist--in addition to standard NNTP access with 15 day retention in binaries, you also get Web-based access with a whopping 38-42 day retention in binaries. I actually find it easier to use the Web interface if I'm looking for something specific in a group I don't typically read. And the 40 day retention is amazing.
    • I agree - Easynews rocks.

      I was in your situation about a year ago. I first tried newsfeeds, but they sucked. Then I tried Giganews, and stayed with them for a long time - their service is terrific, and for what you get, their prices aren't outrageous.

      Then a couple months ago I switched to Easynews, and discovered their service is just as good, and a lot cheaper.

      Also, I notice a lot of the big multimedia posters use Easynews, so using the same service means fewer missing parts. Depending on what you want to download, you might check what news service the major posters use, and sign up for that.

      Also, if you want to save money, remember to use your ISP's newsfeed as much as you can first (their bandwidth may be limited, but since it's already paid for, it's effectively "free") - then for what you can't get from your local ISP, use your paid service. I do this with two separate copies of Agent (one for mt ISP's feed, and another for Easynews). I understand some other newsreaders can handle multiple newsfeeds at the same time, I just love Agent so much I'm willing to put up with this minor annoyance (which will hopefully get fixed in the next version).

      And, as always, read the FAQ in any group you're interested in (many FAQs for binary groups will cover this very question), and if you have additional questions, post on Usenet itself, and you're sure to get lots of replies.

  • I don't know how their retention / completeness rates with the others, but meganetnews [meganetnews.com] seems competitive as far as pricing and has a good selection of plans. They offer uncensored newsgroups and ssl connections.


    100M per Day == $5.95/mo or $59.50/year
    250M per Day == $7.95/mo or $79.50/year
    500M per Day == $9.95/mo or $99.50/year
    750M per Day == $11.95/mo or $119.50/year
    1500M per Day == $21.95/mo or $219.50/year
    2500M per Day == $34.95/mo
    5000M per Day == $64.95/mo


    You've got to be really into porn and/or warez to go for the 5G/day plan. When you decide to take it to that level you should factor in the extra monthly recurring costs of Astro Glide and/or blank CDRs.
    • Meganetnews's prices are attractive but their AUP is emphatic that you can't use any kind of automated news client--they don't want you sucking or archiving newsgroups and they repeat this several times. I personally don't see how anyone can use 5000MB per day without an automatic client so I don't know who they're kidding, but they seem to state that provision seriously. I think it's crazy--if you pay for the bandwidth you should be able to use it any way you want. Specifically I want to make automated personal archives of some low to medium volume newsgroups, maybe 5 MB/day total, and it's not allowed even if I'm willing to pay for 100 times that much traffic.

      On the other hand, their privacy policy is just about the best I've ever seen. My guess is they'd never notice my 5 MB/day archiving script. And if their only recourse is to shut off my account if they do notice it, I might just take a chance with it. They'd certainly make more money from me than they make from someone really downloading 100 MB/day manually.



  • Jeremy Nixon [exit109.com] used to work (maybe still does) at a major premium news service so he knows what he's talking about.

    He has a comprehensive and reasonably up-to-date list of providers [exit109.com].

    Also, use your current NNTP server to read as much of alt.binaries.news-server-comparison [alt.binari...comparison] as you can tolerate.
  • Most tier-1 colo providers offer their colo customers free access to an in-house news server if they have one available, so if you know someone with a machine hosted somewhere like XO, worldcom, qwest, etc, get them to install nntpcache so you can access their local news server remotely.
    The only drawback (besides your own bandwidth caps) is the extra bandwidth on the colo machine's part (for client-side AND server-side nntp traffic)
    • Doesn't your friend get stuck with the bill eventually? I mean last time i checked, Bandwith isnt cheap, even if you are colocating. If i read the topic correctly, this guy wants to download somethign like 10GB a month. Might as well just go with one of the services mentioned in other posts.
      • 10GB/month comes out to roughly 32Kbit/sec on a continuous basis.
        If the colo provider can allow no-charge on-net traffic to/from their news server, the traffic wont affect the total charged by much.
        In fact, if you could manage to pull down 100Kbit/sec, which is barely anything on the scale of average colo bandwidth usage, you'd end up with at least 850MB/day, or over 25GB/month (rough estimate, give or take overhead, etc).
        I know it's unlikely that the average person actually has a friend with equipment on a colo network, but it's certainly practical by any means, as long as there's an on-net news server available to the colo customers.

  • What about software? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by adolf ( 21054 )
    I'm a Time Warner customer. We don't, as yet, have any sort of download cap, except for a 2Mbps downstream limit (wah, wah). Their provided news server is similarly free.

    Only problem is that I'm having trouble finding decent software to work the magic. There is, of course, Agent and Free Agent, which seem to do an OK job of interactively decoding multipart binaries. But what about the *NIX side of things?

    Are there any -good- packages for Linux, or in the FreeBSD ports collection, or available for MacOS X? What's good for pulling down every file in a group? What's good for queueing and performing more selective downloads?

    Does software exist with even rudimentary file sorting abilities, so that I could, say, tag a bunch of pictures with random filenames of a girl named Charlotte and move them to their own directory with ease, using the subject line to sort them?

    My burner just isn't busy enough, these days...
    • Hi. It's sacriligious, I know, but try out the latest Wine stuff (www.winehq.com) and you can run much good windows software even under linux.

      Not being a big news kindof guy, though, News was basically invented under the *nix umbrellas, and I'm pretty sure there is some excellent newsreading software out there. Witness P.A.N. [rebelbase.com] (which used to stand for "Pimp Ass Newsreader", which it still deserves the title). It's great and gets a perfect score according to the "good netiquette institute". How it handles pr0n/w4rez, I'm not sure, since I use debian, mostly. :^)

      --Robert
    • As someone else mentioned, Pan [rebelbase.com] is pretty much the GUI newsreader of choice. I use to to browse and read news.

      As for downloading, I find it a little lacking, though and do all my bulk downloads with nget [sourceforge.net]. It's a command-line client with great regexp support and it's easy to set up a queue script to grab a bunch of stuff, usually to run overnight for me. It also has nice handling of multiple servers, with weighting, so you can have it grab the bulk from one source (ie your free one) and missing parts from another (the premium).

      ObTopic: I also recommend Easynews. Almost always complete (if not, the problem was probably on the sender's end) and the retention is sick through the web interface. At $10/mo for 6 GB, it's a great fills server solution to complement a free ISP-provided server.

    • What's good for pulling down every file in a group?

      If you specifically want to grab every article in a group, and you run a unix like OS, your best bet would be to run your own local news server. I have investigated several, and found that leafnode [leafnode.org] works well, is much easer to setup than the industrial strength alternatives, and it is perfectly adequate for one or two users, reading a dozen or so groups.

      Leafnode can be setup with different download policies for different groups, but the default is to download everything, which for a binary group could suck 100's of MB.

      Personally I would recommend it for home linux users reading text groups, but I would recommend caution with binary groups.

      I hope this is useful

    • For leeching in the binaries-groups, Binary News Reaper [co.jyu.fi] is by far the best one! It can assemble parts from multiple servers, which is a great feature if you are using newsfeeds.com [newsfeeds.com] which has a per-server-per-day downloadlimit (17 servers, total of 10GB/day).. Too bad it's only freeware and not Open Source though.. :(

      If you only have a single server, PAN [rebelbase.com] is a better bet, as it also supports "normal" Usenet-usage (discussions).. It's a shame that "assemble parts from multiple servers" is not even in the TODO-list for Pan.. :(

      For downloading whole groups there is a lot of options.. I've tried them all and I found UBH [sourceforge.net] (Usenet Binary Harvester) to be the most powerful and flexible one.

      • It's a shame that "assemble parts from multiple servers" is not even in the TODO-list for Pan.. :(

        You might be able to fake it (make all your feeds look like one, containing the union) with something like nntpcache [nntpcache.org].

    • Brag [sf.net] is a very simple TCL script that does subject line filtering. You can set up both .accept and .reject files. I was using it for quite some time to collect episodes of TV shows like Futurama. My reject list is something like this *.rm* *.avi* etc.. Also you can add the title/ep# for the ones you already have.

      I havn't tried it lately (I don't have time), but there is a new version that supports yENC. It also features using the XOVER rather than just sequentually asking for the SUBJECT, which caused problems with the Twister server.

      Using symlinks and some cronjobs to frequently purge old parts I was able to use 2-3 servers at any given time. While I doubt this is as efficient as something like NewsBin Pro, it's FREE and I can read/understand it over a beer.

      good luck

  • You said it: Giganews (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bklyn ( 21642 )
    I'm also a Comcast customer and have chosen to go with Giganews as a commercial news service. Their retention is nice and long (about 2 weeks on average) and the completeness I've seen it perfect. Its not cheap, but they provide a great news feed. Here [exit109.com] is a page with useful reviews of premium usenet providers if you want to do a little homework before you decide.
  • to have 50GB/day of alt.binaries.ugly.naked.fat.men.pretending.to.be.
    hot.horny.chix0rs downloaded onto my hard drive.

  • 100proofnews.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by willfe ( 6537 )
    $8.95 per month. No caps. No throttling. No limit on number of simultaneous connections. Seems to have pretty damned good retention, and I've managed speeds up to 500k/sec from their servers.
  • newsfeeds.com [newsfeeds.com]'s Premium membership is $19.95/month or $159.60/year. That gives you access to 17 servers, many of which are dedicated to porn, binaries, multimedia and/or warez.. You get a downloadlimit of 300MB-1GB per server per day, which is a total of 10GB per day! I use it with BNR2 [co.jyu.fi] which collects the parts from all of the servers so you can use the full 10GB/day without having to connect to another server every time you reach the downloadlimit of one of them...
  • " I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it"

    I suggest you consult a medical professional, as your mental health problems _can_ be treated if identified in time! There's no need to suffer in silence. Doctors realise that your problem, often called "alt.binaries" syndrome can be treated by counselling sessions, where highly trained advisors will help you understand that downloading 700 MIME encoded messages is not really the best way either to obtain software, or to make yourself happy.

    • I sought medical help and was directed to a program called brag. Now I can happily download all the alt.binaries that I want at about 2:00 AM in the morning. So, now I get my binaries AND I get my life back!
  • I've been a satisfied customer of Newsguy (www.newsguy.com) for several years. I pay $40/year for all the news I want. I have no idea what their caps are, however, since I don't subscribe to any binary groups.
  • Is the Usenet group where such things are generally discussed. There are a few folks on my ISP who've tried several and settled on Giganews. Expect to pay whereever you go.

    If you just want text, there are at least two free services out there, at least one of which may allow posting (or you could use your Giganews account for that). Free services are discussed in alt.free.newsservers.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close