Just a quick one today to talk about a service that many of you may not have heard of – Usenet.

What the hell is Usenet I hear you cry? Well, back in the good old days when the word ‘internet’ wasn’t even recognized by most, a service was created called Usenet. Usenet was essentially the earliest bulletin board system on the internet, with one difference – no one central server hosted it. Instead, messages were broadcast to multiple servers and each server kept a copy of the message for a certain period of time.

Today, Usenet is still widely used as both a communication medium and as a file distribution platform. Files can be encrypted and compressed into individual text files, transferred through Usenet, and recompiled on the other side. Since Usenet “messages” are stored on thousands of servers across the internet, multiple connections can be made to give insanely fast file download speeds.

So what’s the catch you ask? There isn’t one, except that access to Usenet requires a monthly fee from one of many providers. Each provider has their own perks, but my personal favourite is Newsdemon. They store data on their servers (also known as retention) for over 600 days! Not only is this one of the best retention rates available, but they offer incredibly cheap packages. Starting from £4.76 for 15GB monthly data transfer, to £9.53 for UNLIMITED monthly data transfer.

So once you have Usenet access, how do you use it? Well there are various Usenet readers available for almost all operating systems. On Windows I like to use Newsleecher, on Mac OS X I love Unison.

I’ve been a member of Newsdemon since 2007, and I can honestly say the service they provide is second to none! Oh, and they sent me this cool Tee… nuff said!