My ISP (Telus) doesn’t appear to have very good newsgroup retention. So is using another ISP’s newsgroup service illegal/not allowed? If it is legal, but sometimes not allowed, where could I find a list of the ISP’s which do allow it?
Well, it’s probably not possible, regardless of its legality. Most of the ISPs I’ve ever had only allowed access to their newsgroups from an IP they themselves generate. In other words, if you had AOL and I tried to access my Earthlink news server from your AOL account, it would be rejected because the request is not coming from an Earthlink IP.
Legally, yes - it’s theft of service, since you are using the other ISPs storage and bandwith without paying them for it.
Lastly, if you want a decent news provider, try someone like Giganews. Yes it costs money. But their retention rate on binary newsgroups (this is what you’re after, right?) is 30+ days on most groups and I average 350-450kbps downstream from them. Oh, and header downloads don’t count against your limits.
Rex Fenestrarum
SMDB’s Resident Computer “Jack of All Trades”
Thanks! Those rates look pretty good.
Not unless you’re using a stolen login/password. If they are allowing uncredentialed access, it’s okay. And there are numerous free newsservers on the net, but of course none of them are very good.
Actually, Earthlink will now let you access their newsgroup server using an IP not issued by Earthlink, as long as you log in with your Earthlink userid (which I believe is now your entire email addy) and password.
My DSL is from Verizon with which I have miserable performance probs w/their news servers; being able to snag from Earthlink instead is wonderful.
(Hogwasher makes it particularly nice — I can pull down headers from both simultaneously and then snag the actual postings from whichever location it can get them first/fastest)