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We recently announced our plans to bring an online, secure, personal storage service to Giganews members. Today, we are opening up registration for early access to Dump Truck online storage by Golden Frog. There are a limited number of spots available to try Dump Truck, so please register today.

What is Dump Truck?

Dump Truck is a personal online storage service created by Golden Frog and will be available for Giganews customers in the coming months. Dump Truck allows you to move your bits and bytes massively and freely while ensuring your files are secure.

Dump Truck early features include:

• Intuitive web interface with drag and drop upload
• Simple and secure file structure
• 256-bit SSL encryption for uploads and downloads
• Files are encrypted on-disk with 256-bit AES encryption
• Access to your files anywhere in the world

Visit the Dump Truck registration page for the opportunity to be the first to try the service! There are a limited number of spots, so signup today!

Don’t forget to Subscribe to our blog and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to receive the latest updates about early access to Dump Truck.

We’ve told you why we think we’re the best Usenet provider in the world. We work 24/7/365 to maintain redundant, worldwide Usenet clusters. We’ve written custom software from the ground up to ensure you always have the fastest possible Usenet connection. We’ve made the investments to build the largest and highest quality Usenet retention on the planet with 100% completion and full speed across every day of retention regardless of the age of the article.

We obviously think we do a pretty good job; but you shouldn’t take our word for it. We recently concluded our 1000 Days of Retention Prize Giveaway in which we asked our members to tell us what they like about our service. We received over 4,400 Salutes. We’ve read every salute, categorized them, and put the best ones up on our site.

So, don’t take our word for it:

See what our members say about the Giganews service!

On May 2nd, we will become the first Usenet provider in the world to store 1000 days of binary Usenet retention. To celebrate this milestone, we announced the Giganews 1000 Days Prize Giveaway last week.

As part of the 1000 Days celebration, we asked customers to “Salute Giganews” by telling us what they like about our service or why they think we are the best.

To be candid, the customer response has exceeded our expectations. We have received thousands of “Salutes” since we announced the 1000 Days celebration less than a week ago. Over the last week, everyone here at Giganews has enjoyed reading all of the Salutes. Some Salutes praise our service, some praise the additional features we have added over the past year, and some are downright funny. We have enjoyed them all. We are extremely focused on the providing the best Usenet in the world and it is gratifying to see that our customers understand and appreciate our focus.

We thought that customers would like to read the Salutes and enjoy them as much as we have. Customers can view the Salutes and vote for the best Salutes with our Giganews Salute Voting Game.

Vote as many times as you like as you help us narrow down the best Salutes to the Top 50 Salutes. On April 26th, we will select the ten best Salutes. The ten best Salutes will be awarded 50 entries in the 1000 Days Prize Giveaway and a Giganews T-shirt. We’ll be announcing the winners on this blog on May 2nd. Check back here to see if you’ve won.

Below, we’ve listed a few of our favorite Salutes thus far:

If hipsters were actually cool, they’d just use Giganews.

I’ve been a member for almost 11 years. The only thing I’ve done longer in that time period is being married (20 years) and my current job (14 years). I only stick with the good ones.

Now that Usenet has become a luxury, many providers try to sell access at different costs. Unlike others, Giganews just works, and is worth every cent. No bell and whistles, just plain good results

Get the ship from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” re-christen it “Giganews,” and ride it down the slipway from a clifftop to the sea with a flintlock pistol in one hand and a Wii remote in the other, long hair streaming and an mp3 player in your ears. That’s what the Usenet is like. It’s rowdy, rough-and-tumble and loaded with people you can learn from. If you’re a fool you’ll be chased back to the commercial pap that is the World Wide Web. But if you can soar, you’ll quickly find the wings.

Giganews is the face of professionalism for an e-company in our time.

Giganews – A Diamond in the Digital World. This is the best subscription service available. It has been a part of my internet life for as long as I’ve had a broadband connection. I can’t imagine not having a Giganews subscription. Keep up the amazing work! I also want to say that VyprVPN has been a life saver when traveling. Sometimes it’s been the only way I could get online at some funky WiFi sites. Thanks for all the extras!

After leaving Giganews I found that I was never happy. I tried most of the cheap wanna be’s and in the end I came crawling back to Giganews. I was so glad when they didn’t make me beg for forgiveness, but instead welcomed me back with open arms. Then we had the best make-up session of my life! I promise I will never leave again. I love you Giganews!

I love the retention but the best feature now is the Mimo Usenet Browser – awesome!!

I’ve been using you guys for a while now and while I see others with cheaper prices I also see a lot of people complaining about speed, completion, uptime, and so forth with the other services. I don’t think I’ve ever had any downtime in the years I’ve been a subscriber. About 4 or 5 months ago I upgraded to the Diamond package w/ the Mimo browser and have been impressed with it so far. It’s really easy to use.

No one else offers +1000 day usenet retention, a NAT firewall, PPTP, L2TP, IPsec & OpenVPN. Giganews is reliable and affordable. Giganews Support staff are highly knowledgeable and responsive. Protect your privacy and online identity with a Giganews Diamond Account. There is no substitute.

Giganews doesn’t stop at just providing a great service, they continue to pioneer and create a better experience for customers. They are simply put, AWESOME.

We seem to live in a world of data-caps, bait-and-switch schemes, excessively limited bandwidth, undue censorship, and network reliability issues. Giganews represents the exact opposite of all of those things!! It is a breath of fresh air–and for a reasonable price even.

The internet is a juxtaposition; it’s all of the information in the world, ever. yet fluid and ever chaining like the shoreline on the beach. Usenet is the history book, The unabridged, unadulterated history of everything. A Usenet service boasting anywhere near 1000 days of binary retention is as monumental as the footage of the first moon landing. It should be revered and respected, and furthermore remembered.

Ridiculous speed? Check. 1000 days retention? Check. VyprVpn doesn’t bottleneck my 35/35 connection? Check. Hopefully, they don’t catch on and start charging double. Ehhh… I’d still pay it.

I’ve tried them all. Giganews is the best news service anywhere, period. Take my home, my wife, my kids, my cars, and my stuff, but leave my Giganews alone or there will be hell to pay!

I’d like to start by saying that I work as the technical operations coordinator for a high-speed fiberoptic ISP. We deliver lines up to 400mbit/400mbit using FTTH technology. To our corporate customers we can deliver 1000mbit/1000mbit lines. In april we will be delivering what we think is the world’s fastest line, a 100Gbps uplink, to a LAN event with 5000 visitors. I’ve been invited as staff, and will get a chance to access the uplink when there is little or no traffic on it. In preparing for this trip I started thinking about how much storage space to bring. As much as I can download in the time I’m there, ideally. Normally the bandwidth would give me a good idea of how much I’d be able to get down, but I obviously can’t download 12500MB/s. my harddrive can’t write that fast! And therein lies the biggest testament to the quality of your service; I’m not worried about whether or not Giganews will be able to handle it, I’m worried about my write speed! No other service in the world approaches this. Your service is simply transcendent, and your employees should be proud to work for the best in the world. Thank you for your continuous excellence.

Giganews goes far above and beyond just providing Usenet services. Giganews provides peace of mind for information sharing and social communication. The services offered by Giganews are unattainable by all other Usenet service providers. Many come close, but none provide the simple feeling of knowing that all is covered with Giganews. From being the fastest Usenet service I have ever used to safety in its encryption methods and VPN services for online security to also the best retention on the block, they are the best, period. In the years I have used Giganews, I have had 100% uptime and full speed ahead all the way. I have switched internet services providers from time to time, but I have not switched from Giganews since the first day I joined them. Giganews is the only Usenet service I use. I even dropped my ISP news service for Giganews. They are worth connecting to the internet for.

Giganews is; and always will be the pioneers of Usenet as we know it today! Every time I login to the site they have launched a new great service such as VyprVpn or the new Mimo browser, with the oldest retention and unbeatable customer service why would anyone choose anyone else? I love GigaNews and I have no doubt their other users feel the exact same way! Bow to your God, God of UseNet!

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!

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 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:

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 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!

Giganews recently hosted the latest meeting of NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) in Austin, TX. At Giganews, we’re always looking to stay on the leading edge of Usenet service, so we viewed NANOG as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate our ongoing efforts to provide service to IPv6 networks. During the conference, NANOG48 attendees from all over the world received free access to Giganews’ service via IPv6.

IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol (IP) and allows for an almost limitless supply of IP addresses. Unfortunately the current IPv4 address space is limited to roughly 4 billion addresses, and it is projected to be exhausted in less than two years.

Several US Internet providers (e.g. Comcast) have recently announced plans to move their customers to IPv6 backbones. In Europe, IPv6 deployment is progressing more quickly. By providing native IPv6 service, Giganews customers with IPv6 addresses may access Usenet without their traffic going through IPv6-to-IPv4 translation equipment, which can fail or become a bandwidth chokepoint. With our early adoption of the technology, we can continue providing the premium quality service that our customers depend on us for!

NANOG48 Sponsored by Giganews

NANOG48 is now over, but we’re continuing our efforts to provide our premium Usenet service to native IPv6 networks. Although the service provided to NANOG48 attendees was only a demonstration, it substantiated the core of our IPv6 upgrades. Within the next year, we anticipate providing full retail service via IPv6 to all of our customers.
As Giganews’ IPv6 upgrades near completion, we’ll be sending out announcements to customers. Keep your eyes out for these and other service improvement e-mails in 2010!