Returning To Usenet

With Usage Based Billing (UBB) of wholesale ISPs starting in less than three months, I have already started looking at ways to reduce my usage. BitTorrent is out since it requires uploading. I'm considering returning to Usenet for downloads.

I last use Usenet seriously back in the mid 90s when getting large video files was problematic because retention for binary groups wasn't very long, so parts of the split encoded files often went missing. But that changed in the late 90s with paid Usenet services, like Giganews and Easynews, that had much longer retention on binary groups. My friend Paul has been using Easynews to download TV shows since around 1998 after a spat with the Rogers Cable billing department. Since then there have seen other improvements, such as parchive and nzb files. While these additions are great, it is clear that a basic newsreader like tin or slrn, isn't going to be enough anymore.

hellanzb looks promising. It has a command line interface and can run as a daemon, so it meets my basic requirements for something I can run on a server. I'll need to play with it some more before I can give final verdict, so I'll leave that for another post.