Now we see UseNetServer offering 550 days of binary retention for $10 a month.  That’s over a year and a half of retention for $10!  Quite an accomplishment considering how important a few extra days of retention was in the past.

When it comes to binary retention Giganews still leads the way with 577 days.  Followed by Astraweb at 567 days.  However, neither offers unlimited Usenet access for $10 a month like UseNetServer.

There are also other newsgroup services in the same price range.  Supernews at $9.99 a month offering a very reliable service with 350 days retention.  NewsDemon offers comparable retention to UNS plus a free newsreader for $10.95 a month.  Astraweb offers an additional 17 days of binaries for $11 a month.

In the end though UseNetServer is the best deal going right now.  The combination of price and retention make them very hard to beat.

If you’re waiting around for a $10 Giganews account you should hedge your bet.  I think it’s more likely we’ll see premium providers like Giganews, Newshosting and others start to set themselves apart by offering valuable add-on services as we’ve seen with the recent release of Giganews VPN access.

We always encourage month to month Usenet accounts.  The UNS $10 deal is just that.  You receive unlimited newsgroup access for $10 a month for the life of your account.  Stay for years or cancel anytime.  They also offer an annual account option for $95.40 a year.  A great value that breaks down to $7.95 a month.

Cake #1 – Welcome Home

Granted we live in the South so “we’ll come home” is fitting but not when your shooting for “Welcome Home”.  It doesn’t quite have the same effect.

Cake #2 – Happy Birthday

At first glance this cookie looks fine.  Until you realize it was Spencer’s 36th birthday celebration.

Next time around we’ll contact QuickPar for our party needs.

Here are some high points of the Newsgroupdirect service:
- 530+ days of binary retention
- 1,400+ days of text retention
- Access to over 107,000 newsgroups
- Up to 50 simultaneous connections
- Free 256-bit SSL encryption
- Free News Rover newsreader
- Server farms in the US and Europe
- 99%+ completion rate
- 24/7 tech support

Head over to the NewsgroupDirect special page at NGR for more details and the coupon code to sign up for the NewsgroupDirect $12 unlimited account.  You’ll be up and running in minutes!  To learn more about the service read our NewsgroupDirect review.

Let’s take a look at some of the cool features SABnzbd 0.5.0 has to offer:

1. Cross Platform Support (Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, BSD)

As the image notes SABnzbd runs anywhere.  SABnzbd is written in Python and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix and BSD environments.  Better yet since SABnzbd runs in a web browser you can check in on your queue from anywhere.

2. Language Support (English, French, German, Swedish, Dutch)

The new SABnzbd 0.5.0 release supports multiple languages out of the box.  These languages include English, French, German, Swedish and Dutch.

3. Customizable Themes

Themes for SABnzbd let you change the look and feel of the reader.  Since it is all browser based adding a new skin to your PC or mobile device can make a big difference to usability.  Themes include the default “SMPL”, Plush and a cool new Mobile skin which replaces the old iPhone template.

4. Third Party Applications

A major advantage to SABnzbd being open source is the ability to develop and use third party add-ons and applications like nzbStatus (Firefox), SABConnect (Chrome) and myNZB (iPhone).

Note: all the images above were sourced directly from the new SABnzbd homepage.  They do such a great job of explaining the advantages of the client we couldn’t see recreating the wheel.

If you haven’t tried SABnzbd yet then go for it!  Once you get comfortable with the web UI the reader is very easy to use.  If your looking for an easy way to download, repair and extract binaries then SABnzbd is a great choice.  Add in the ability to check your queue from anywhere,  support for virtually any platform including mobile, customizable themes and some very cool third party applications and you get the new SABnzbd.

That’s great right?  It depends.  Its great that Binsearch has dedicated the resources necessary to test an increase but the higher capacity drives mean slower search results.  If you regularly look for posts 500+ days old then the upgrade is great news.  However the higher retention means a hit to performance and possibly reliability.

According to Binsearch:

As an experiment, we will increase the retention and let you search for even older posts, in the coming days.   However this comes with a price. To have enough storage space available, we will be using higher capacity -but slower- storage.

This means your searches will get slower, and there is a risk they will time-out during rush hour.

Binssearch is currently offering a poll for users to vote on which they would prefer:

300 days of retention with fast search speed

or

600 days of retention with slow search speed

We commend Binsearch for dedicating the storage to support 600 days of retention and also for giving users a voice in the final decision.  At the time of writing this post the vote was split right down the middle.  With 50% (7,190) voting for 300 days and 50% (7,314) voting for 600 days.  Most notable to us is the even split of the vote.  That means 50% of Binsearch users don’t care to go over 300 days retention.  At least they don’t want to give up performance or reliability for the increase.

Might we draw the same conclusion for Usenet providers?  Retention is a plus as long as it doesn’t come at a cost.  Either in higher price, slower performance or poor reliability.  That means other factors like features, speed, reliability and bundled / add-on services could become increasingly important to those seeking newsgroup access in the future.

NewsDemon gives customers lots of free extras including free Usenet client software, SSL encryption and more.

Here are some high points of the NewsDemon service:
- 535+ days of binary retention
- 1,265+ days of text retention
- Access to over 107,000 newsgroups
- Up to 50 simultaneous connections
- Free 256-bit SSL encryption
- Free News Rover newsreader
- Server farms in the US and Europe
- 99%+ completion rate
- 24/7 tech support

Go to the NGR NewsDemon free trial page for more details and to sign up for the NewsDemon 30 day, 300 GB free trial.  You’ll be up and running in minutes!  To learn more about the service read our NewsDemon review.

Visit our newsreader section to compare and contrast all the newsgroup clients.  Then head over to the downloads page to grab the latest version of your favorite Usenet reader.

Newsreader: SABnzbd+
Latest version: 0.5.0 RC6
Release date: Feb. 7, 2010
Operating system support – Windows, Mac, Unix
Helpful links:  Free download, SABnzbd+ 0.5.0 Quick-start, Release notes

Newsreader: Unison
Latest version: 2.0.4
Release date: Feb. 2, 2010
Operating system support – Mac OS X 10.5+
Helpful links: Demo download, Unison setup guide, Release notes

Newsreader: News Rover
Latest version: 15
Release date: Sept. 8, 2009
Operating system support – Windows
Helpful links:  Trial download, News Rover setup guide, News Rover 15 features

Newsreader: BinTube
Latest version: 2.8.9.3
Release date: Feb. 12, 2010
Operating system support: Windows
Helpful links:  Free download, BinTube setup guide, BinTube review

Newsreader: Forte Agent
Latest version: 6.0
Release date: Nov. 21, 2009
Operating system support – Windows
Helpful links:  Trial download, Forte Agent setup guide, Agent version 6 info

Newsreader: Thunderbird
Latest version: 2.0.0.23
Release date: Aug. 20, 2009
Operating system support – Windows, Mac, Unix
Helpful links:  Free download, Thunderbird setup guide, Thunderbird newsreader info

New to Usenet?  Take a look at our newsreader tutorial to learn more about how Usenet clients work and tips for choosing the right software for your needs.

Cheapnews.eu is offering a special Twitter promotion for the first 10 users who sign up using the promo code prwk24.  Enjoy 100 GB block (Cheapnews medium block account) for € 5,95.  The normal price is € 29,95.

We have not had the chance to test Cheapnews Usenet service.  According to the site they offer 350 days of binary retention (growing to 400), 99%+ completion rate in over 100,000 newsgroups, 12 connections and SSL encryption.

Visit cheapnews.eu for more details.

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Day 1 – Feb. 2nd

First day kicked off at 10:30am with the opposing barrister delivering his opening speech, which lasted about 3 hours. Apart from mostly being full of how evil we are, he explained, mostly for the Judge, Justice Kitchin, what Usenet is, what Newzbin is, what NZB files are, how they compare to hyperlinks [at great pains to try and convince him they are technically different], some accusations about our header fetching backend code [it's apparently designed to go looking for copyrighted stuff on Usenet specifically].

Our opening argument was blissfully short by comparison and stated only that we dispute nearly everything they say and we’ll cover it in the evidence to come.

The second part of the day consisted of witnesses for the claimants, which for the most part were pretty insignificant – a couple of FACT agents who didn’t have much to say under cross-examination apart from they did a half-assed job analysing our site.. Some junior lawyers who confirmed they had harvested data from our listings but didn’t bother to check how much of it was actually under any form of copyright.

Their star of the show, an expert witness was cross-examined for the last hour, covering topics including the dangers of auto-opening NZB files [he admitted a malicious NZB file might be a virus and auto-opening it in a browser could lead to a user being infected by a virus], discussing the various reasons that binary headers and text-digest headers are treated separately in the backend [performance reasons, and they're handled differently until repors are created at the final step, at which point the two types of reports converge into one common database again].

Thankfully the Judge Justice Kitchin is remarkably on the ball and switched on – if nothing else this will be a very fair trial and already the opposing barrister has been pulled up on several points of contention – this Judge certainly won’t blindly eat everything he’s told by the MPA. on the other hand it doesn’t mean he’ll accept our arguments easily either.

Court adjourned at 4:30pm. The trial continues..

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Day 2 – Feb. 3rd

Today’s update is very brief – cross examination of the MPA’s witnesses has now finished. Questioning of Newzbin witnesses has started; Freaky first followed by Caesium. We can’t say any more at this time due to witness rules. More information hopefully tomorrow.

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Day 3 – Feb. 6th

There have been bizarre side issues which have emerged. To be fair to the MPA (god, we never thought we’d ever say that!) it was out of their control and down to internal Newzbin issues. Combined with Caesium falling ill during cross-examination by the opposing barrister, this has caused a delay and things are a bit of a shambles at the moment.

Quite what happens next week when the trial restarts is unclear and there may be more delays. Times are getting interesting: in a Chinese sense.

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Day 4 – Feb. 9th

A refreshed Caesium finished cross examination today.

There have been/are huge procedural complications caused by Newzbin’s internal issues and this may cause delays in the case being concluded this week.

It would be fair to say that the picture painted in court of Newzbin has not been an entirely positive one. Whilst it is hard to double guess Mr Justice Kitchin, Newzbin may have some difficulties in the near future. Caesium was accused of lying massively and repeatedly under oath and ‘concocting’ a phoney defence: ‘Bollocks’ we said, a technical latin legal expression, but nonetheless a problematic accusation.

We may be being paranoid, but at the moment our hunch is that things are looking less positive for us than last week. We hope we are wrong.

Newzbin Legal

[Update1: for clarification 'internal issues' does not refer to dissent within the company between people: everyone gets on just fine]

[Update 2: MPAA are now even attempting to use these news updates against us in court!]

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Day 5 – Feb. 10

[Brief update for obvious reasons. We feel it is important to keep users up to date with events in court even if the MPA do try to use the news & user comments against us.]

The MPA resisted Newzbin’s application for an adjournment so we could hire extra lawyers. They failed: the case has been adjourned for a couple of weeks while we instruct fresh counsel. We expect closing submissions in very early March.

20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd – Trial Finished

The trial restarted on the Tuesday the 2nd March and finished yesterday the third. It’s always difficult trying to guess what a judge is thinking as his questions and comments, where probing of either parties submissions, may be no more than professionally required scepticism. Nonetheless, here is our guess.

Our hunch is that they will fail on some of their assertions but will probably win on others. They may not be able to prove damage or loss from copying, but they may convince the court we have facilitated others in obtaining their works.

If they win then, as we said in a previous news story, Newzbin will not be shut down. In all probability there will be ‘enquiry as to damages’ (the legal expression) and a new mini-trial over the terms of an injunction compelling us to block material of the Claimants. For example we may be required to develop filter mechanisms. At the moment we remain unfiltered and we would fight for the current notice and take down system that we already use. Again this is just our best guess and we may be well wide of the mark.

The second point is user privacy. One thing the Claimants did complain about was that Newzbin “deliberately arranged it’s systems so that no user details were available: even if we got an Anton Pillar there would be nothing to seize as no logs were kept”. They were correct on that. No user needs worry about their privacy being violated by logs. Equally, since the site has lawful non-infringing use (our hunch is that the judge accepted our arguments on this: he seemed receptive to our submission that GPL, Creative Commons & non-copyright works were on the Indexes) a mere membership of Newzbin proves nothing against any user: the Claimants didn’t contend this anyway.

We do’t know when judgement will be handed down but our guess is very shortly before or after Easter. We will let you know.

Stay tuned for more updates.

You may not be familiar with NANOG but their contributions are important to us all.  Rather than fumble through an explanation of the groups mission we’ll give you the scoop directly from the NANOG site:

NANOG is an educational and operational forum for the coordination and dissemination of technical information related to backbone/enterprise networking technologies and operational practices.

NANOG meetings are held three times each year, and include presentations, tutorials, and BOFs. The meetings are informal, and membership is open. Conference participants typically include senior engineering staff from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. Participating researchers present short summaries of their work for operator feedback.

The meeting will include senior engineers, researchers and operators from companies like Giganews, Data Foundry, Highwinds Network Group, Google, Akamai, Comcast, TW Telecom and many more.

In a related Giganews post Phillip Molter, CTO for Giganews explains:

“Giganews’ involvement in NANOG48 is a direct extension of our absolute commitment to providing the highest level of connectivity, throughput and security for our customers.  We’ve chosen to host this meeting, because, as a major network traffic source for tens of millions of people, we want to foster the continued growth of the Internet as an open—unlimited platform.”

Several Usenet providers are expected to be in attendance for NANOG48.  The list includes Giganews, Supernews, Power Usenet, Easynews, Newshosting and UseNetServer.  For more information or to sign up for NANOG48 visit http://www.nanog.org.