Giganews

The World's Best Usenet Provider

GIGANEWS BLOG

VyprVPN – Including OpenVPN and NAT Firewall – Now Available to all Giganews Members

Today, we are pleased to announce that every Giganews customer, from Diamond on down, can add Golden Frog’s full suite of VyprVPN personal VPN services to their Giganews account, including OpenVPN and NAT Firewall.

In March 2010, we announced our partnership with Golden Frog and introduced Diamond members to VyprVPN using PPTP – an older, basic VPN protocol. On February 9th, 2011, we added VyprVPN’s L2TP/IPsec protocol to the Diamond Account at no additional cost.

Over the past year, Diamond members have enjoyed VyprVPN’s increased security. Many Diamond members have asked for the full suite of Golden Frog’s privacy tools and we listened. Today, Giganews Diamond members can purchase the following VPN options:

  • OpenVPN: $5/month
  • NAT Firewall: $5/month

In addition, all other Giganews accounts can add VyprVPN’s personal VPN service to their service. VyprVPN PPTP and L2TP/IPsec will continue to be included at no additional cost with our premium Diamond account. Other accounts can purchase the following VPN options:

  • PPTP + L2TP/IPsec: $10/month
  • PPTP + L2TP/IPSec + OpenVPN: $15/month
  • NAT Firewall: $5/month (requires a VPN protocol option)

All current members can manage their VyprVPN services through the Giganews Control Panel. New customers can sign up for a Giganews Usenet account to get started. A Usenet account is required to add VyprVPN and NAT Firewall.

What is OpenVPN?
OpenVPN is the premier VPN protocol designed for modern broadband networks, providing the best speed and stability.

Highlights:

  • SSL/TLS encryption standard – the same standard used by secure e-commerce sites
  • 256-bit encryption – same strength used by financial institutions
  • Consistent speeds over long-distance networks between countries and continents
  • Extremely stable and fast over wireless networks, including Wi-Fi, cellular and wireless ISPs
  • More easily passes through NAT configurations (e.g. wireless routers) and corporate firewalls
  • Less CPU usage resulting in faster speeds and less latency.

What is NAT Firewall?
NAT Firewall is a packet filter that prevents third parties from exploiting security vulnerabilities. You must add a VyprVPN VPN option to purchase NAT Firewall.

Highlights:

  • Prevents inbound connections from accessing your device
  • Mimics the behavior of a wireless router to maintain protection against outside threats
  • Blocks malware and malicious hackers from probing your device for network vulnerabilities

Major Mimo Update: v0.2.0 – “The New Core”

Giganews and Golden Frog are proud to release Mimo Usenet Browser v0.2.0. This update completely overhauls Mimo’s core downloading engine, resulting in faster speeds, fewer lockups, and better download management.

If you’ve tried Mimo in the past but put it aside because of download problems, you should try this release. Many customer bug reports have been addressed with this release.

Here’s an overview:

  • Mimo will now download the highest priority item in your queue first. When you have multiple items in your download queue, you’ll get your first item sooner.
  • Try out “PAR in Parallel” with this update. PAR verification now runs in parallel as each file is downloading without pausing the download. We’ve seen resulting download speeds increase by 100%!
  • Mimo will now pause and resume downloads properly.
  • Pending downloads will now resume when you restart Mimo.
  • New Feature: You can now change the priority on download jobs. Right-click on a job in the Downloads tab, and select one of the “move” options. You can also pause jobs and the next download will begin automatically.

Beyond Mimo v0.2.0 Beta: What’s Next?

This release sets the stage for continued improvements and new features. The next major change will be a complete user interface overhaul. Mimo currently resembles other Usenet clients available on the market – raw and unpolished. With the core download engine improved, Golden Frog is ready to focus its attention on the user interface and user experience.

Please remember that Mimo is still in Beta, so Golden Frog continues to need your feedback. Please submit bugs, request new features and receive updates from the Golden Frog Dev team in our newsgroup at giganews.mimo.

If you’re a Diamond customer, download Mimo now. Otherwise, upgrade your account or signup today!

VyprVPN Using L2TP/IPsec Added to the Diamond Account

We are excited to announce the addition of the newer, more secure, Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP/IPsec) protocol to VyprVPN for Giganews Diamond members. VyprVPN using L2TP/IPsec, is exclusive to the Diamond account and is available today – at no additional cost.

In March 2010, we introduced all Diamond members to VyprVPN using PPTP – an older, basic VPN protocol. Over the past months, we have been pleased to see a large percentage of our Diamond members around the world using VyprVPN to secure not just their NNTP traffic, but their entire Internet connection, including HTTP, email, and mobile traffic. The additional security and privacy for all of your Internet use comes without sacrificing speed.

Clearly, Diamond members choosing VyprVPN recognize that online privacy is under attack. The ongoing Balkanization of the Internet is accelerating as governments and ISPs around the world try to control and limit what their residents and customers can access. Connection speeds are throttled, e-mails are scanned, social networks are blocked or monitored and citizens are prevented from looking at messages and content from other countries. Giganews’ partnership with Golden Frog to deliver VyprVPN is our answer to this ongoing invasion of our members’ privacy throughout the interactive world.

VyprVPN tackles these problems in three ways:

  1. Privacy
    Privacy is often confused with anonymity. VyprVPN cannot ensure that you are anonymous. Instead, VyprVPN allows you to “close the shades” over the windows at your house and prevent strangers from looking into your house and invading your privacy. You now control “the shades” to your online home with VyprVPN.
  2. Security
    Whether connected on a public Wi-Fi at an airport, coffee shop or hotel, or sending emails on your mobile device, you are unknowingly sacrificing security for convenience by not encrypting via VyprVPN. Use VyprVPN to encrypt your entire Internet connection, not just Usenet, wherever you travel in the world – without sacrificing speed.
  3. Freedom
    The recent events for Facebook users in Tunisia and Internet users in Egypt highlight the censoring of the open, end-to-end Internet by governments. Tighter content restrictions demonstrate the ongoing Balkanization of the open Internet into broadband, walled gardens. ISP deep packet inspection (DPI) threatens to erase any expectation of privacy and freedom for Internet participants. VyprVPN shields a Giganews member from DPI and ensures the right to privacy is firmly in the hands of our Giganews members.

After we provided VyprVPN using PPTP, some customers asked for even greater security. We listened. This member concern was relayed to Golden Frog and we partnered with them to provide the L2TP/IPsec protocol to provide a stronger level of encryption.

We realize that the different VPN protocols can seem like an alphabet soup of acronyms, so we would like to give a basic overview of how L2TP/IPsec functions. At its core, L2TP/IPsec is a “package within a package.” Similar to PPTP, L2TP sets up a private Internet connection (a “tunnel”). Unlike PPTP, L2TP/IPsec encrypts the tunnel with the standard IPsec protocol. IPsec provides the secure encryption, and L2TP provides the tunnel.

After the secure connection has been created with IPsec, L2TP packets between your device and VyprVPN are encapsulated by IPsec. The L2TP packet is hidden within the IPsec packet and information about the internal private network cannot be read. Only you or VyprVPN can encrypt and decrypt the traffic, and no one in between can read the data.

Why Should You Use L2TP/IPsec?

  • 256-bit encryption – same strength used by financial institutions
  • Simple Setup – no third party software required; supported by most operating systems, including mobile devices
  • Greater compatibility with wireless routers and corporate firewalls
  • Protects against modification of data from the sender to the recipient, ensuring data integrity (not just data confidentiality)
  • Prevents “man-in-the middle” attacks by hackers that attempt to capture data by posing as the VPN server
  • Authenticates that the sender of the data actually sent the data

Giganews members’ access to a variety of VPN protocols simply means that you can connect to VyprVPN when, where, and how, you want with even greater protection than ever before. This is part of our continued commitment to providing the absolute best Usenet service for our members, along with the Giganews commitment to continue development of more useful Internet tools.

Setup VyprVPN using L2TP/IPsec now.

Giganews Retention Grows to 900 Days – And We Aren’t Stopping

Giganews today became the first Usenet provider in the world to reach 900 days of newsgroups retention! Just two years ago, the best provider had 240 days of retention. That provider was Giganews.

Increasing retention by over 350% isn’t easy, but we enjoy the technical challenge. More people than ever before are posting more discussions, photos, and other content to Usenet. Over the past two years, the Usenet feed has grown from 5 TB/day to 9 TB/day. A graph of the Usenet feed is below:

Usenet Newsgroups Feed Growth

The simple solution is to add more hard disks, and we certainly added thousands of those. Giganews also heavily invests in developing our software to handle such high retention levels. We want the fastest Usenet service, so we’ve designed our Usenet clusters to treat all retention equally. When you download from Giganews, the day-900 article downloads just as fast as yesterday’s article. Our software makes this possible by spreading our newsgroup articles around and finding the fastest, best-performing source on our worldwide cluster. While some might try to match our retention, none matches our speed or reliability.

So please, enjoy the 900 days (and growing) of newsgroups retention we offer. As Usenet continues to grow, we’ll continue to focus on providing the best access available.

We’ve extended the Diamond lock-in pricing until March 31st, 2011

Due to overwhelming response, we’re pleased to announce that we are extending the special $29.99 lock-in price for Diamond accounts until March 31st, 2011! After March 31st, the price of the Diamond account will increase to $34.99.

For existing Diamond customers, your price will NOT be raised. Whether you have been a customer for 10 years or one month, if you are a Diamond customer on or before March 31st, 2010 your Diamond price will remain $29.99.

Every Diamond account bundles the Mimo Usenet Browser + Search at no additional cost. By extending the Diamond lock-in pricing, we wanted to allow people time to experience some major improvements to Mimo over the next four months. The Golden Frog Dev team has planned the following updates to Mimo:

  • Significant functional and stability improvements to Mimo’s engine
  • Major User Interface upgrades – a complete overhaul is planned for 2011
  • Advanced download queue prioritization and management
  • Much, much more

We are very excited about these improvements and hope everyone takes advantage of the special $29.99 lock-in price before March 31st, 2011, by signing up or logging into the control panel to upgrade now.

Again, current Diamond customers’ price will NOT be raised if you are a Diamond customer on or before March 31st, 2010.

Referring Friends to Giganews is Even Easier!

Refer-A-FriendWe revamped our referral program, giving you simpler ways to refer friends to Giganews. As always, you get an embeddable badge and special URL. We’ve added options to e-mail your friends, post to Facebook, or tweet your personal referral link!
Send referrals right from your control panel:

  • Click the Facebook or Twitter button to instantly post to social networks
  • Fill out a form and we’ll send e-mails to your friends for you
  • Embed your html badge on your website
  • Copy and paste your link into e-mails, Usenet posts and more

Referring has changed, but the rules are the same:

  • Your Giganews account is credited the value of your friend’s membership – up to $29.99!
  • Credit is given when a friend signs up through your special link and stays with us for a month

Start getting free Giganews!
Credits are unlimited, so refer as many friends as you’d like. Start referring now!

Mimo + Search now free with Diamond Account!

Back in July, we partnered with Golden Frog to deliver a new Usenet experience. We invited our most loyal Diamond members to an early access tech preview of Mimo Usenet Browser and Golden Frog Usenet Search. It was a simple choice to invite enthusiastic Giganews members to help develop the best Usenet browser and search platform.

Now, after 4 months in an exclusive tech preview, Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are in beta and available for all Diamond Giganews members. With this release, Mimo comes with:

  • faster speeds
  • integrated thumbnail viewing
  • a search engine that dynamically indexes Giganews’ growing retention
  • auto unRAR and PAR handling
  • text, binary, and image filters

Participants reported bugs and requested features to improve Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search. From initial development to the technology preview and into beta, Golden Frog has added or fixed nearly 450 different features in response to member feedback.

One of the most requested features has been bandwidth throttling. Today, the new Mimo version has the option to control how much of your Internet connection is used by the browser. Member input also helped improve Mimo’s multi-language support, which currently covers six languages.

Golden Frog created Mimo and its integrated Usenet search to accommodate Giganews’ full and increasing retention. This is the world’s only cross-platform Usenet browser with integrated search indexing all 800+ days of Giganews’ retention. As Giganews’ retention continues growing, Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are designed to dynamically keep up.

Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet search are in continuous active development. You can request features or report bugs by e-mailing Giganews Support or posting in giganews.mimo. We work closely with the Golden Frog development team to incorporate all member feedback. Expect continued improvements to Mimo’s resiliency, performance and ease of use.

Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are free with all Giganews Diamond memberships today. Join the ongoing development. Download Mimo or become a Diamond member now.

Giganews first to 800 days retention — and not stopping!

Leading the Retention MarathonA little over a year and a half ago, we announced that we were going to be the first Usenet provider with a year’s retention. We got to that year, and then just kept going. We hit two years a little while ago, and still kept going. Today, we’ve hit 800 days of binary Usenet retention — and we’re still going.

800 days is just a number, though. None of that retention matters if we don’t also have good quality. For all 800 days, we have over 99% of the articles. On top of that, when we lose servers or disks, you don’t see random articles disappear temporarily. In fact, most customers don’t notice anything at all. Finally, our oldest, 800-day-old articles are stored on the same servers as our newest articles. If you want to fetch posts from 800 days ago, they’ll download just as fast as posts that arrived today.

Our software and systems were designed years ago to handle this level of retention. Today, we hit 800 days of retention, but we’re already ready for the next 800 days and beyond. Please enjoy the retention, and keep an eye out for new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months.