If you’re familiar with Usenet, you’ll be well aware that the newsreading platform is, well, not longer about newsreading. In fact, most Usenet providers are, by necessity, experienced data storage providers. That being said, Golden Frog has just announced DumpTruck, a WebDAV file-sharing resource that, in the wrong hands, could end up a SOPA target.

The service lets you store data in the cloud. It’s free for holders of “Diamond” Giganews Usenet accounts and costs $99 for a full terabyte of monthly storage. DumpTruck promises anonymous, worry-free storage with, interestingly, no data reduplication. This means DumpTruck won’t compare your files with other files and save only one copy. Your folder is your folder, no matter how full.

The service also offers full 256-bit encryption and single provider storage, a must if you’re, well, serious about security?

This is an interesting move for Golden Frog, for obvious reasons. Although Usenet is still a popular news service, the real value is what not a lot of people talk about: the file sharing system built into the protocol. Usenet providers could, in the future, face a fairly big backlash and they need to be ready, which leads them to the prospect of secure, inexpensive storage based on servers they already own.

The service is live now and you get 5GB free with any Giganews account.

Product Page

Oh dear, another Usenet post. Quickly now, as we don’t want to draw too much to the last interesting place left on the Internet. Giganews recently hit 900 days of retention, and they’ve announced that they expect to his 1,000 days of rentention—just think about that for a second—on May 2. To celebrate, they’re having a bit of a contest.

What can the good people of Usenet-land expect? Well, the grand prize is a 5TB Drobo unit. Clever prize, that. Smaller prizes include an iPad 2, PS3, Xbox 360, and the always-present-in-these-types-of-things branded t-shirt.

They’ve gone all social media this time around. You can enter by being a Diamond member of the service, but you can also tweet about the fact that we’re approaching 1,000 days of retention, “like” the company on Facebook, and so forth.

You can also the good old fashioned way by signing up with your e-mail address.

And now we return to Usenet radio-silence.

Uh, oh: the second Usenet story of the day, this time from Newsdemon. Someone check to see if the planets are still in their orbits, or whether or not that second sun has popped up yet. They’re running a contest over there that I thought I’d point out for a minute. The prize? A couple of free games up for grabs. Nothing wrong with that.

The four games up for grabs are Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360), Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3), Just Dance (Wii), and Civilization V (PC, pictured above).

Say goodbye to your free time if you win Civilization V!

The best part is that you don’t have to be a Newsdemon subscriber to enter. You merely fill out the contest form (one entry per day, folks), sit back and wait. The winner will be announced “no later than” February 5.

I hereby impose a temporary moratorium on Usenet stories here on CG. We’re a secret society, you know.

Look at that: Giganews now has 900 days of binary retention. And to think I actually remember a time when my ISP-supplied news server had a whopping two days of retention time! It sure made things tricky way back when.

Giganews says that interest in Usenet has pretty much exploded in the past two years—where were you people before?—with postings going from 5TB per day in January, 2009 to just shy 9TB per day in January, 2011.

Adding hard drives is the quick and dirty solution, of course, but Giganews says it’s developed software that ensures postings posted 900 days ago download as fast as postings posted yesterday.

In the interest of “the first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet” I will shut up now.

Giganews, the biggest Usenet provider around, has a new feature for Diamond members that’s certainly worth mentioning here. They’ve teamed up with Golden Frog—yes, the same people who developed Giganews’ VyperVPN service—to create a brand new Usenet browser. It’s called Mimo Usenet Browser, and could be an easy way to get acquainted with the many wonders of Usenet, which is still, to this day, the best part of the Internet.

First thing’s first: the browser works for both Windows and Mac. Whew, right?

With that out of the way…

What is it? It’s a Usenet browser, built “from the ground up” to take advantage of Giganews’ long retention times and robust file integrity.

You use it to, yes, browse around Usenet. Not only can you use it to read the actual discussions on Usenet—I still read some of the game groups in the comp.* hierarchy—but you can use it to browse binary groups.

View inline photos and the like… like this!

What’s better than fractals?

And perhaps most important: you can use it to search across all binary groups.

So, if you search for something it’ll pop up right there in the browser.

Granted, I wouldn’t be surprised if many Giganews users, particularly Diamond members, have already moved onto something like SABnzbd, an automated daemon that makes downloading from Usenet absolutely painless, but there’s nothing wrong with having an extra option.

Particularly free options.

“[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.” And thus did the Archive Team set out to save the entirety of Geocities.

The team, which has been working for past year on downloading old Geocities Web sites, is in the process of putting together a torrent that will contain the entire Geocities archive. Well, “entire.” The team tried its best to save what it could, but Yahoo, which bought Geocities in 1999, certainly didn’t make it easy on the team. Pre-Yahoo Web sites were particularly difficult to track down.

The torrent will be huge, estimated to come in around 900GB.

But considering how cheap hard drives are, I’d be shocked if more than a few Internet history buffs don’t download the entire archive.

What should happen is that someone upload the archive to Usenet. Can’t get any more rock-solid than that. It’s probably a little more stable than a public torrent, too.

Above, of course, is how CrunchGear would look if it were created by a teen, possibly me, in the Geocities era.

How did I miss this? Giganews, the biggest Usenet provider out there by some margin, now has 800 days of binary retention. A year and a half ago I wrote a similar story, but the number was 365 days of retention. Man, I remember the days when I had two days of retention! Granted, it was an ISP-provided feed, but it worked just fine.

Giganews says that it’s “not stopping,” and that 800 days of retention—as ridiculous as that is—isn’t an artificial endpoint or anything.

They also note that the data from 800 days ago is stored on the same class of server as the data from today, so speed and data integrity won’t be an issue.

Well that didn’t take long. Newzbin.com has shut down, just about six weeks after the High Court in the UK ruled against the Usenet indexing site. You had to see this coming.

The immediate reason for the closure was administration, which is sorta like bankruptcy here in the U.S. The court case against the Motion Picture Association drained the Web site dry, especially after being forced to pay the MPA’s court fees. resulting in the friendly “Newzbin Closed” message on the site today.

The site didn’t keep any logs to speak of, so if you were a member there’s no reason to freak out. I had a subscription once upon a time, and I’m not worried in the least.

There’s some sort of mystery regarding what happened to the site’s source code. Did someone steal it? Did a monster eat it?

There are, of course, plenty of other Usenet indexing sites out there, but Newzbin was sorta the elder statesman of the crowd. I mean, the .nzb files that people use to download from Usenet do stand for .NewZBin…

Even if all these indexing sites go under, I look forward to reading Usenet the old fashioned way: one group at a time, manually.

Thus begins the countdown to the Death of Usenet. It’s capitalized because it’s important. The High Court in the UK has ruled against famous Usenet index site Newzbin, saying that the site can be held liable for the copyright infringement of its users. Hear that? That’s the sound of the world’s Usenet users screaming “OH DEAR GOD NO!” You knew this day was coming.

For the unfamiliar, Newzbin and sites like it store NZB files, small text files that point the location of actual files. These sites are easily searchable, so you can look for “the wire s01″ and all of The Wire’s first season episodes would pop up. You can sorta think of NZB files as torrent files: there’s nothing in the NZB file itself other than directions of where to get actual files.

Doesn’t matter, says the High Court, that constitutes copyright infringement.

No details of the court’s ruling have been publicly released just yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Newzbin will be forced to shut down till it no longer offers offending files. Since that’s pretty much the raison d’être of sites like Newzbin…

Incidentally, when I spoke to a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation at CES last January, he said Usenet as we know (knew?) it had two years to go before lawsuits would kill it. This Newzbin ruling looks to be step one in that slow death.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Photo

Sorry for beating the Newsdemon horse, but I just noticed they had a few deals for bloggers, students, and other animals. Usenet is really nice.

Bloggers get free months when someone buys a sub through them (we don’t partake in the deal) and students can get 25% off with a .EDU account. While we don’t condone the use of Usenet, it’s nice to know it’s there, like a nice old sweater.

As a corollary to Biggs’ “cable companies are doomed” article from earlier today, I thought I’d demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish what he was threatening. That is, live a happy and successful life without having to pay $100+ a month to Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, or whomever. (Note: I’m neither happy nor successful, so this advice is spurious at best.) Here, I’ll teach you a pretty basic method of automatically downloading things like TV shows, and movies, and whatnot from Usenet. Yes, this breaks the first rule of Usenet; sorry.

What? Today we’ll be setting up our Usenet software to look at an RSS feed. (You can also accomplish pretty much the same thing using BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is so plebeian.) This RSS feed will carry NZB files that, magically, point your Usenet software to the actual files you’ll be viewing in VLC or MPlayer or whatever. In English, that means when you come home from work or class you’ll have the latest episode of The Ultimate Fighter all ready to be watched.

You’ll need:

• A Usenet provider. The big ones, off the top of my head, are Giganews, Newsdemon, Astraweb, and Supernews. You’ll be spending around $10-$20 a month for access, but that gives you access to all the riches that Usenet provides. In my experience all these services are more or less the same, so feel free to shop around. I have no favorites.

• Usenet software. The easiest to use for our purposes here today, once you’ve set it up, is SABnzbd+. It’s free as in freedom and free as in beer.

• An NZB site that provides an RSS feed. I’ll be using Newzleech.com as my example, but pretty much every NZB site out there should do this. Maybe, I don’t know.

• No qualms with any of this. Yeah, Americans can go to Hulu to watch some shows, but my overseas friends aren’t so lucky. Maybe if Hollywood got its act together we wouldn’t have to resort to this. (Incidentally, I’m right now removing the copy protection of a bunch of DVDs I bought in the UK this past week. All I want to do is see Top Gear! Is that a crime?)

OK!

1. With your Usenet account in hand, go ahead and download and set up SABnzbd+. It’s not hard, but I’m not about to hold your hand here. It basically involves launching the application, putting in your Usenet account info, then pointing the application to a few folders. If you can’t figure this out then the rest is probably too much for you to handle anyway.

2. Set up the RSS feed! I’ll be using the TV show The Ultimate Fighter as an example. For newzleech.com, the RSS feed you make looks like this:

http://www.newzleech.com/rss/php?n=50&g=alt.binaries.multimedia&s=the+ultimate+fighter+s10

That’s your RSS feed. What that does is comb the Usenet group alt.binaries.multimedia (that’s the “g” in the URL) for the last 50 posts (that’s the “n”) containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” (for season 10 episodes; that’s the “s”). The RSS feed is updated every 20 minutes.

3. Go to SABnzbd+’s settings (Config:RSS) and input that URL. Then set the RSS checking interval (Config:RSS checking interval) to something reasonable, like once every 60 minutes. Under no circumstances should you set it for anything more frequent than every 20 minutes, since that’s considered uncouth, and your IP address is likely to be banned by Newzleech. You don’t want that.

That’s pretty much it.

Now what you’d do, I guess, is launch SABnzbd+ Wednesday morning before you leave your house. If it’s set up like we set it up here, SABnzbd+ will check alt.binaries.multimedia for news posts containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” via the Newzleech RSS feed. When SABnzbd+ finds the new posts, it’ll download the appropriate NZB file, then start doing its magic.

In other words, as soon as the latest episode hits Usenet, it’ll automatically be downloaded to your computer, Internet connection speed notwithstanding.

Of course, you can add as many RSS feeds as you want, with whatever parameters you want. Maybe you like 30 Rock, or want to see Louis CK on Parks and Recreation? Or maybe you like Curb Your Enthusiasm? To quote that Nas song, the world is yours.

The purpose of this here article was strictly educational blah blah.

Now I’m off to rip the copy protection off a DVD I BOUGHT FROM HMV WITH MY OWN MONEY! What a pain.

Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.

And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.

Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can “find things” on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!

So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current retention.

Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and NewsDemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.

First up, Giganews. Verizon users get 50 percent off the Diamond Plan for three months. (The regular price is $29.95 per month.) The Diamond Plan includes 50 simultaneous connections, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and SSL encryption. Or, if you don’t want Diamond, you can have any other Plan for three months at 20 percent off. There’s also a 14-day free trial for you to test the waters. All Plans come with 391 days of retention, which is plenty. Giganews is working toward 400 days of retention.

Next we have NewsDemon, which I use. It’s giving Verizon customers 20 percent off its service, which includes unlimited bandwidth and 20 connections. The top price for NewsDemon is $22.99 per month.

Then there’s always Astraweb, which is $15 per month for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections, and no download rate limit. (The popular $10 per month service limits you to 1 Mbit/s.) I’ve never used Astraweb, so I can’t speak to it reliability. That said, I hear good things on various message boards.

So, plenty of options for Verizon folks. Happy trails.

Jealous of the likes of CNET and Scobilizer getting to play with Microsoft Office 2010? Well don’t be! You, too, can edit spreadsheets and send e-mail if you’re willing to fire up your newsreader or BitTorrent client.

Right, so the file you’re looking for is “MICROSOFT.OFFICE.2010.v14.0.4302.1000.BETA.1.VOLUME.X86-64.ENGLISH-WZT.” I see that it’s on at least one popular, private BitTorrent site that I’ve mentioned in the past.

Or, if you use Usenet, you can find the file on your favorite NZB download site.

Direct links, of course, are out of the question. It’s already probably in bad taste to note the exact file name, but such things really don’t concern me.

The file’s about 1.58GB. It’s a beta, so I wouldn’t switch over to it full-time just yet.

Never has typing business letters been so fun.

Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.

The Diamond Plan, which includes 20 connections (plus SSL, which is sorta unnecessary, but whatever) and unlimited monthly bandwidth. That’s usually $30 per month.

Giganews is sorta the Ric Flair of Usenet access, which is sorta weird since it’s only 11 years old. (Usenet itself predates the Bronze Age.)

For the record, I use Newdemon. I pretty much live in alt.binaries.hdtv.x264. True story!

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

The court case, in the Southern District of New York, found usenet.com guilty of “direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement.” And perhaps more worrying is that usenet.com cannot defend itself using the ol’ Sony Betamax decision. In a nutshell that says that so long as there is a significant, non-infringing use of a device/service you can’t sue it into oblivion.

For those not in the know, Usenet, which is as old as the dinosaurs, can be described, in a very dumbed-down way, as a big, decentralized message board, but one where you can attach files. I’ll leave it at that.

Of course, this is “only” a district court’s opinion, so make of it what you will. And it’s worth stressing, of course, that usenet.com != Usenet. (For the record, I use newsdemon.com, and my brother uses giganews.com. They’re pretty comparable based on our unscientific “let’s see how long it takes to download SomeFile” tests.)

The second rule of Usenet…

via Slashdot

Panic, the maker of shockingly good Mac software, is having itself a nice little sale that you may want to take advantage of. From now until 11:59 PM PDT on May 29 (so, a little over a day) you can buy Transmist, Coda, Candy Bar and Unison for 50 percent off.

So, you’d be paying $14.50 for Transmit, $49.50 for Coda, $14.50 for Candy Bar, and $12 for Unison.

I used Transmist a lot in the days of Xbox1, when I would transfer files between my iMac and Xbox1—it was good.

And Unison, as I’ve said in the past, is a fine Usenet newsreader. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth—it doesn’t show the total download speed in the dock icon, for example—but it’s still pretty great. Hopefully Panic will invest some of this new money into updating its slew of applications, because, really, the ones I’ve used are pretty terrific.

Heads up, Usenet users. We just got word that Giganews is in the process of upgrading its server retention capacity to 365 days. An entire year of binary group goodness, right in your newsreader! (That’s a screen shot of Panic’s Unison, one of the better Mac newsreaders.) Starting next week there will be a little counter on their Web site showing the race to 365. Keep in mind that it’ll take a few months for the Giganews crew to get all that data in order, though. Look for the fun to start by July. And if you can’t wait till summer to troll all that Usenet has to offer, Giganews is running a limited time special offer!

Yup, for a limited time now you can grab the top tier of Giganews access, Diamond, for $15 per month for the first three months of your subscription. So, a cool 50 percent off for a little while. Not too bad. This gets you the current max of 240 days of retention, unlimited bandwidth and 20 simultaneous connections. (It also has SSL, but that may slow down your download speed, and, eh, is bordering on the superfluous, but it’s there if you want it.)

I think one of these days I’ll do a big GUIDE TO USENET chart, listing all the big providers, retention times, max connections, price, etc.

How do you get the goods? Roll over to NewsDemon and sign up for a monthly service with the coupon “CRUNCHGEARRULES.” As long as you keep re-upping, you’ll get the discount for a year.

What can you do with Usenet? Well, besides the obvious hax0ring, Usenet is one of the largest worldwide forums in existence. There are plenty of groups for every prediliction and folks like Newsdemon are working on bringing the service into the 21st century to compete – and work with – with social networks and smaller forums. We’ll have a primer up soon but until then, give it a whirl.