Usenet blog

A blog about the world of Usenet: free servers, news services, clients reviews.

Friday, January 27, 2006

GUBA Announces 20,000+ Usenet Videos for Sony Playstation Portable

Today GUBA announced the immediate availability of more than 20,000 videos in Sony Playstation Portable Format. GUBA, a multimedia search service of Usenet videos, offers to its subscribers the ability to browse and download thousands of videos and more general multimedia content, retrieved from Usenet newsgroups. These videos are automatically optimized for Apple iPod/iTunes format, Flash and now, PSP, as well as stored in their originally uploaded format.
According to the press release:
"GUBA has once again demonstrated why it is the market-leader in providing content to all platforms," said Thomas McInerney, CEO of GUBA. "Our technical leadership has enabled us to further extend the GUBA experience onto a new platform that has proven to be one of the hottest sources of portable entertainment."

This service complements with the recently-announced RSS subscription feature that enable clients to subscribe to RSS feeds using keywords that match particular interests.

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Sunday, January 08, 2006

Internode starts beta of a premium Usenet feed

According to this news, the Australian ISP Iternode has begun a public beta test of its new premium Usenet feed, allowing its customers to retrieve files and discussion with fewer missing parts. This service was started to provide a better Usenet access within Australia, avoiding the purchase of expensive accounts with US Usenet services.
According to the news:
Internode is attempting to tackle this by peering directly with wholesale Usenet provider Supernews in the US. By only retrieving articles that customers request and caching them in Australia, Internode CEO Simon Hackett believes the cost of the hardware can be offset with savings in bandwidth, so customers won't have to pay. "That is the theory, but in practice, well, we'll find out", he said.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

GUBA Announces First RSS Newsfeed Capability for Usenet Videos

Yesterday GUBA, the Usenet provider specialized in binaries and multimedia content, has announced the ability for GUBA subscribers to receive RSS (Really Simple Syndication) newsfeeds, which summarize new video content that has been posted to Usenet in virtual real-time.
According to the company press release:

This free enhancement to GUBA allows users to subscribe to RSS feeds with keywords matching their particular interests - when new videos are posted to Usenet matching these user-defined parameters, the user is instantly notified via RSS with the ability to download the video directly into iTunes. GUBA automatically uses the indexed keywords of the file's description to provide RSS feeds.

The company also announced that:
In addition, GUBA also announced that it has enabled and prominently displayed QuickTime download links throughout its search, content and other portions of its site, in testimony to GUBA's strong support for the high-quality and cross-platform support offered by the QuickTime media format.
Something similar is already available for textual newsgroups through Google Groups, that allows to create email alerts for usenet messages based on keyword(s) matching.

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Yottanews free server up and running

Although the status page still states that "The free server is offline until after the memory upgrades", Yottanews free server is now up and running. The newsgroups I'm subscribed to appear full of messages and many multipart messages appears complete too. I hope that the problems that affected the Usenet provider are over and this valuable free server could be used again.

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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Yottanews Usenet Servers status Updates

The Yottanews Saga continues.
As discussed in alt.free.newsservers newsgroup, some of the connection problems of the whole Yottanews servers came simply from the domain expiration due to 31/12/2005! The domain name is now active, as shown by a whois query:
Registrar:     INTERCOSMOS MEDIA GROUP,
INC. D/B/A DIRECTNIC.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Dates: Created 31-dec-2001 Updated 01-jan-2006
Expires 31-dec-2006
Although the domain name is now resolved, the free server is still not available for a generic memory upgrade activity. Will it be available anytime?

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Monday, January 02, 2006

Yottanews Usenet Servers is Down Again.

If you try to connect to Yottanews free Usenet Server, you'll receive a Host Name not found error. Trying to check the status of the server through the status page you may notice that the whole yottanews.com domain is unreachable: there is no route to host. Is this a DNS problem or the Usenet provider has some really severe problem? More news to come.

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