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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.

That's right. In the past, whenever I needed a webhost to host yet another one of my domains, I'd research carefully all the various options and features provided by the webhosts, including storage, monthly bandwidth, number of virtual hosts, email addresses, aliases, ftp accounts, file managing features, databases, etc., trying to have as much as possible for the lowest price.

That's probably a reasonable approach, especially because in reality none of the webhosts have actually provided me with what I always needed.

Until now, that is. One of my friends happened to discover Servage.net, which may not be the least expensive of the thousands of options, but they provide an unparallelled storage. Starting at 360 GBytes, most people could upload their entire harddisk and, well, if they were like me, they'd probably replace the contents with Linux and hope someone at Servage was a jerk and accidentally installed the entire thing onto his own computer. Okay, I didn't actually go that far; besides, I had already ditched Windows and installed Ubuntu two years ago.

I did sign up for Servage.net, though, and Servage.net provides all of the features, I'm used to looking for. This time, however, I'm using virtually none of them. I don't need an infinite number of email or FTP accounts, virtual hosts, and what not, which ironically Servage.net does provide. I'd like to have unlimited bandwidth, and while 3,600 GBytes of bandwidth per month is infinite for all practical purposes, I'd actually have preferred more. It's the huge amount of web storage, and it's all mine, just mine.

In fact, it's so much mine that I won't even share it with anyone. I could put thousands of images, movie clips, and audio files up there and have them accessible from anywhere and--within reason--for anyone.

Instead, I'm using the web storage for backups. With that much storage, backup is a mere problem of upload bandwidth, and at about 1024 Kbps, most backups can be completed within an acceptable time frame.

That's right. I'm be uploading until my network cable catches fire and my Internet service provider sends his goons out to persuade me to put a lid on my network usage, and no one will ever see the files I'm uploading. Including me, hopefully.


Oh, and while you're signing up, remember to use coupon code CUST39765. That's mine, of course, and if you use that one, both you and I will have another 25 GBytes added to our accounts. And once you've signed up, watch your storage limit grow, because Servage.net adds several megabytes of storage to your account each day.