David Braue02 May 2008, 8:22 AM
Internode has given its broadband customers a free ticket to warez, porn, pirate TV shows and movie downloads.
If virus-laden warez, circular porn links, mislabelled movie screeners and the lingering threat of legal action have taken the fun out of your online hedonism, take heart. With its Premium Usenet service, ISP Internode has given its users a free ticket to a place where piracy, pornmongering and the marketing of penis enlargement products are much simpler endeavours.
Close to rounding out its third decade in existence, Usenet still remains popular today because its simple, hierarchical way of organising plain-text messages facilitates communication between people with niche interests. Messages posted in any of more than 30,000 newsgroups – simple public notice boards – serve like giant town meetings, uniting like-minded individuals into global communities of interest.
From comp.os.linux.advocacy to alt.religion.scientology to alt.locksmithing and more, if you’re into it, Usenet probably is too. Just like online support forums but without the registration and advertising bloat, Usenet offers thousands of forums dedicated to technical support issues, driver compatibility problems, and the like; many users swear by it as the first place to go when they have trouble with just about anything.
Yet despite its social value, the alt.sex and alt.binaries newsgroups have become Ground Zero for the no-strings exchange of all manner of depravity and copyright infringement. Better yet – if you’re into that kind of thing – it’s completely anonymous to download from -- your PC doesn't get involved with sharing the data to other users. This point is, rather creepily, reinforced by the availability of encryption services from ‘premium’ aggregators like Giganews, which claims to retain 200 days’ worth of binaries and 5 years of textual Usenet postings – although there’s no indication as to whether this includes the spam that plagues many newsgroups.
Parking so much content on servers avoids the Usenet’s biggest problem: the sheer volume of messages means posts are flushed out after a set time to avoid message overload. Free Usenet services, like Google Groups (groups.google.com) or most ISPs’ typically smaller news servers, offer little to counter this. That’s why Internode is so excited about Premium Usenet, which provides its users with free access to a Giganews service that normally costs up to US$24.99 a month. Also freely available to Internode subscribers is Astraweb, a smaller Usenet provider claiming around four months’ retention.
Put them together and you get what Internode calls a “full, USA grade, premium Usenet news service” at no extra charge. Downloads, however, still count against customers’ normal usage limits.
Internode had previously introduced a premium news service with Supernews in the US in 2006. A year later, it discontinued it, citing costs that were unexpectedly high, due to few customers' file requests being served by a local cache being run by Internode. Internode CEO Simon Hackett told Whirlpool that most customers were accessing different files. This latest reintroduction of a premium news service comes almost a year later.
Drop by Internode’s Usenet page for more information.