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If you use the Giganews® Usenet service, or if you keep up with Usenet news, you've probably heard about the Giganews Accelerator. The Giganews Accelerator is a Windows® operating system based software application which was custom built by our very own engineering team to improve the security and speed of the Usenet experience.

This post was written to give you an inside look at the security and compression advantages that set the Giganews Accelerator apart.

What does the Giganews Accelerator Do?

• Compresses headers for up to 10 times faster header downloads
• Enables secure login, whether or not you have SSL service
• Real-time reporting on your in/out traffic
• Allows rate-limiting even if your news reader doesn't
• Allows SSL connections even if your news reader doesn't

Compression Technology

The Giganews Accelerator sets itself apart from other Usenet compression technologies because the Accelerator's compression is done at the protocol level rather than the network level. By compressing at the protocol level, we can selectively compress the parts of the data stream where compression makes sense, and leave alone parts that do not benefit from compression.

Most binary article data is already compressed when it's uploaded, so compressing it for download doesn't actually save users any network traffic. Similarly, very small content, such as response messages, also get very little benefit out of compression because of their already small size.

Compression also requires CPU and time. CPU time is required on the server end to compress the data and on the client end, to decompress the data.

By selectively compressing only the compressible content, a user's CPU can be used for downloading instead of needless decompression work.

Other Usenet compression technologies essentially compress the entire network stream, using software like Stunnel, which compresses all data in and out. With that method, every bit of traffic requires more CPU to decompress, CPU that could be better spent on getting more traffic or decoding already downloaded data.

Differences Between Stunnel and the Giganews Accelerator



Secure Logins

With the Giganews Accelerator, all of your logins are secured via SSL, even if you do not have 256-bit SSL encryption added to your Giganews account. With the Accelerator, we do authentication under SSL and then the Accelerator renegotiates an unencrypted connection for continued use. Your login and password are private, even if you don't pay for the full privacy that an SSL account offers.

Of course, if you do have an SSL account, the Accelerator will fully utilize it, even if your news reader software doesn't support SSL. On the server end, our SSL is built directly into our custom written server software. We write all of our software in-house with an eye towards maximizing per-stream performance. By hooking SSL capabilities directly into our server software without proxy servers or processes, we can read and write SSL data as efficiently as possible!

Real-Time Reporting

With the Accelerator's real-time reporting function, you can see how many actual connections you have open, what commands are being issued, and what state they are in.



Rate-Limiting

The Giganews Accelerator lets you rate-limit your streams as one entire group. This lets you optimize your bandwidth usage if you share an Internet connection or if you just need to do some other things while downloading data. With the Accelerator's rate-limiting feature, you can ratchet your connection speed down to control the flow of bandwidth for other purposes, even if your news reader software doesn't support rate-limits.



In Conclusion

We encourage you to check out all of these features for yourself. The Giganews Accelerator is a free program and we really think that it improves the Giganews Usenet experience. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. You can also check out our Usenet University™ tutorial page about the Giganews Accelerator. There is a cool little video, featuring screen shots and instructions about configuring the Accelerator and your news reader, all done with a soothing British voice over.

Similar to the special Giganews is running for Time Warner Usenet subscribers, Giganews is offering a special introductory rate for Verizon and Sprint customers.

Verizon customers are going to be losing access to the alt.* newsgroup hierarchy on June 24th 2008, and Sprint customers are expected to lose access to the same hierarchy sometime thereafter.

This special is only available to members who have a valid Sprint or Verizon email address and have not been a Giganews member since June 18th, 2008.

Current Sprint and Verizon subscribers can visit Giganews' Sprint and Verizon Usenet special web page for more information.

Giganews is currently running a limited time offer for Time Warner Usenet subscribers who will be loosing Usenet access on June 23, 2008. This special is only available to members who have a valid Time Warner / Road Runner email address and have not been a Giganews member since June 16th, 2008.

Current Time Warner / Road Runner subscribers can visit Giganews' Time Warner Usenet special web page for more information.

As you may have seen, Giganews is now supporting custom usernames for members with Giganews® personal Usenet accounts.

Previously, Giganews members were assigned a random username when signing up for service. The username would start with "gn" and would be followed by a series of numbers (example: gn1234).

Members were then emailed their username, which they would use to configure a news client or log on to the Giganews member control panel.

The problem that so many of us had was that we couldn't always remember our Giganews username. This can be especially frustrating when setting up a new computer or logging on to the control panel. You would have to dig up the email with your Giganews username or look at the configuration settings of your news client.

This frustration is what helped us decide to push custom usernames to the front of our development cycle. Giganews' engineering group worked very hard to make this feature available and we hope if helps make your Giganews experience that much better.

If you have any comments or suggestions on this feature or any other feature please feel free to post a comment.

Giganews would like to thank all our loyal members, webmasters, and well wishers who joined us on 10 May 2008 for Giganews' 10th year anniversary party in Paris!

It was great getting to meet so many people from the Usenet world, and it was inspiring to watch everyone connect and get to know each other.

Our staff and friends had a wonderful time and are very thankful to everyone who attended.

Without the support of members and webmasters, Usenet would be a much less interesting place.

We hope you enjoy the pictures. We'll have the videos up soon :)

Soviet Union Prank

Wired magazine has an interesting article featuring their picks for the 10 best April Fool's gags in the digital era.

One that might be very familiar to truly old-school Usenet veterans is the launch of "kremvax", the Soviet Union's very own Usenet server, in 1984.

Of course, it was all a joke, but at the height of the Cold War, users across the globe bought right into the deception — a sure sign of a great April Fool's Day prank.

You can read a transcription of the original article as well as some reactions once the ruse was up at http://www.godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html.

Ironically, a few years later, a legitimate Usenet server actually did come online in Moscow, and many readers were skeptical that posts coming from the server weren't actually more pranks. Eventually, the server's administrators took the joke to heart and had their gateway renamed to kremvax.

Birth of SPAM

April 1 also marks another momentous event for Usenet. Unfortunately, this one has little to do with humor and much to do with the universal annoyance we call spam, and why we even call it 'spam' in the first place.

On March 31, 1993, a program called ARMM (Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation), which was designed to streamline and automate the process of sending cancel messages for abusive posts, experienced a catastrophic bug. ARMM began posting follow-ups to its own messages, causing a recursive 'feedback loop' and flooding the news.admin.policy newsgroup with useless posts.

Joel Furr, then of considerable Usenet fame, described the flood of messages as 'spam' and the name simply stuck. Furr's usage of the term came from a popular Monty Python sketch in which Spam was the only item on a restaurant's menu, but no customers wanted. Accounts are varied, but most agree that Furr was the first to use the term to describe Usenet messages, and his usage of the term eventually migrated to unsolicited email.

Check out the Wikipedia article about spam for more history of the term.

We ran across this picture in the newsgroup giganews.contest and thought we'd share it on our blog. This is an entry in a contest for tickets to our 10th year anniversary party in Paris.












If you'd like to attend our 10th year anniversary party, don't forget to submit your entry ASAP as the contest ends soon.

You can find instructions on how to enter the contest on this page.

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About the Event:

Paris, France
10 May 2008
~20:30 - 02:00

Giganews is proud to host our customers, website publishers, technology press, Usenet members, and Giganews' founders, staff and friends for our 10th year anniversary party.

The event will be held at an amazing club in central Paris. We have hired a DJ and will be providing plenty of food and alcohol.

We are looking forward to you joining us for this exciting chance to meet, exchange ideas, and network with some of the brightest stars of the Usenet world.

For members attending the party from outside Paris, we have secured a discounted hotel rate at a nice hotel near the venue.

Selected winners will be placed on a guest list which will be checked at the door. The only thing the winner needs to bring to the party is government issues photo identification (example: passport).

We are excited about getting to meet so many interesting people from the technology and Usenet worlds in one place. For many years we have known these people only through the other side of an email, newsgroup posting,or forum thread. Having the opportunity to interact in person is something we are eagerly looking forward to.
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Submit your entry now!