news.individual.net goes $$$$

Via isotopp: news.individual.net now costs 10 EURO/year.
I registered ca. 7 years ago and still use the account as a backup for my providers newsserver (although mostly for lurking).
Now the alternatives are: a) Pay 10 Euros b) VPN or Tunnel to my universities news server c) news.arcor.de (I have not found out where to register for free access) d) Usenet is dead.

7 thoughts on “news.individual.net goes $$$$”

  2. Unfortunately the Aconet Newsserver is one of the worst newsservers i know, (although it is running on FreeBSD IIRC). Diskspace is usually low, which results to some articles being unavailable after two or three days.
    I don’t need binaries, and I only need the hierarchies comp.*, de*, at* and sometimes luebeck*

  3. How about http://news.cis.dfn.de/? I had a quick look at the page. Looks as if they are still open and free.
    Btw: Usenet advanced to the new filesharing heaven in the last two years. Pushing 1.5TB of new data per day is nothing unusual and as a matter of fact I do enjoy it 🙂

  4. news.cis.dfn.de is the old name of news.individual.net. news.cis.dfn.de now is only free for customers of DFN (e.g. German universities).
    Well, I never understood the concept of binaries in newsgroups. (But i don’t understand the concept of modern p2p-filesharing like Kazaa, edonkey or bittorrent either)

  5. An annual charge of �10 isn’t $$$$, it looks like an administrative fee for bandwidth etc.

  6. IIRC it was next to the T-Online newsserver the largest newsserver in de.* and a piece of german Usenet culture, so this definately has impact (oh wow, it was submitted to /.)
    Heiko, Vera & Co are definetly nice people, as they did not terminate my account a few years ago, when due to a suck misconfiguration my server tried to post several 10.000 articles of my private arved.* hierarchy.

  7. The ACOnet newsserver you are using at the TU Wien does not run on FreeBSD.

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