Your Source of Free Software and Media

Let's just admit it: Usenet, or "News," had its heyday in the nineties before the age of web-based discussion boards and forums. There's certainly still a huge user group using Usenet for debates, however, probably because discussion boards are many and distributed rather randomly throughout the Internet while the Usenet groups are kept at a reasonably small number accessible from just one place: your news server. Directories of discussion boards that all users agree to use have yet to surface.

Google has supported Usenet searches and posting for a long time under the name "Google Groups," which is an excellent source of information since many mailing lists publish their activity in Usenet groups that are picked up by Google. If you don't find your information using the vanilla Google, try and click "Groups," and your luck is almost guaranteed to increase, especially on technical issues.

Other web services also provide access to newsgroups, often with little concern for legality or content. Easynews is one such service. The service does require its users to abide by the law, but also seems very concerned about its users' privacy, taking great care not to disclose anything that might point others towards the identity of a user. Easynews is basically a news server, but that's not its main feature.


Easynews provides a web front end to newsgroups, but unlike most news readers you install on your own computer, Easynews decodes the multi-part messages usually found in the so-called binary newsgroups and combines them into single files. For example, a 50 MByte file is often split into hundreds of individual articles when it is posted to a newsgroup, and not all news readers are readily capable of combining the messages and decoding the file. By combining and decoding for you, Easynews avoids having to shown hundreds of individual newsgroup articles, and instead shows you just the decoded file.

Many people that send files to newsgroups add "parity" files with redundant information used to recreate the files if some of the potentially tens of thousands of individual articles comprising the files are lost or damaged, as often happens when news servers across the world exchange information. Easynews locates parity files and automatically recreates damaged files for you so you don't have to mess with the parity files yourself.

The front-end is simple, and each newsgroup can be searched for your desired files. Your front page includes your favorite newsgroups, or the option to view newsgroups with video, audio, or images.

Each newsgroup list is essentially just a list of author names, subjects, and files. You can add a checkmark or a range of checkmarks to the files, and then "queue" them for convenient download later. The download area allows you to download your selected files combined into a .zip file, or as a .nzb file so that you can download the files from any news server via Newsbin or compatible products.

An Easynews subscription will cost you $10 per month, which will give you 20 GBytes of transfer, plus 1 GByte for each year of membership, per month. If you exceed your download limit, you can instantly buy another 20 GBytes.

So to summarize, you have a news server that combines files for you, ready to download as video, audio, images, or any other file format you may desire. You can download 20 GBytes per ten bucks, and Easynews hides your identity, also if you chose to use Easynews to post files to your preferred newsgroups.

In other words, welcome to Easynews, pirates. Newsgroups are a very popular sharing place for illegal copies of anything that can be represented electronically. Books, expensive applications, audio, early releases of DVDs in original quality, you name it. They're found in the "binary" newsgroups, and although Easynews has policies for removing content that violates copyright, and states explicitly in the terms of service that illegal file transfer is prohibited, in practice Easynews does not appear to perform any significant filtering to prevent users from illegally downloading or uploading content.