Ok, here is the lowdown... first of all, sign up for Teranews. You can get a "free" account for $3.95 one-time fee, and 50MB/day fairly fast. To get bigger limits, you have to pay monthly, but Teranews is a great "backup plan," better than random free servers. Next, Easynews rocks. Easynews is web based and all the binaries are already decoded!!! So using IE or whatever browser you go there and see only the files or pictures you want (it hides everything but the binaries (files) so you can concentrate on downloading those (they are what you want, right?)... also, at Easynews you can search multiple newsgroups (they are beta testing a glogal search), then check up to 500 files, zip them up and download the zip = awesome! Nothing else like it - highly recommended. Easynews is like $8.95/month or 6 gigs whatever comes first. Also, you can personally do a network trace and select which of their providers you route through, like AT&T GiGE connections, OC12, etc which is nice when one is having a problem. Retention on Easynews is 30 DAYS!!! Example: let's say you "accidently" clicked on alt.binaries....playboy (oops!) ... you would see, for each of 30 days, about 20,000 thumbnails ready to download. Of course, you would never want that smut on your computer, so you would quickly go back to the original alt.binaries.religious-texts newsgroup you had originally been looking for. I believe that Giganews or newsfeeds.com are the biggest and best regular usenet providers (many, many other services use a pipe to newsfeeds, not to burst anyone's bubble) but they get REAL expensive monthly for good speed and limits. Sorry about the pimpage but I am very pleased with the above services
Teranews Claims:
No censorship
No logging of your reading
No throttling of your download speed
No connection limits
Anonymous posting
Firewall counter measures
UNLIMITED POSTING!
Easynews claims:
EasyNews® automatically decodes and indexes the binary files found in UseNet. If a binary file is posted to any newsgroup, EasyNews® will catalog it into an easy-to-navigate thumbnail index. We browse through ALL the newsgroups to bring you the newsgroups that contain binary files such as AVI's, MPEG's, MP3's, ZIP's and JPEG's