USENET?

[cpghost]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 11:39:43AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > news/pan seems to work OK, if you want a GUI. But be aware that nowadays, 
> > you'll probably have to pay a monthly fee for usenet. ISPs don't seem to 
> > routinely offer it as part of the deal anymore like they
> > used to.
> 
> at least in Poland there are free. and for my clients i have nntpcache'd 
> news from Gda?sk University.

Actually, in most parts of the world, news are still freely available
with many ISPs (you may have to ask them explicitly), except for
alt.binaries.* which are quite bandwidth intensive.

Your typical small ISP would rather save the bandwidth it takes to
transfer all articles, esp. if only a fraction of them are accessed
by their customers. It simply doesn't make sense for them to host
binaries, unlike dedicated news providers which have enough customers
to justify the expenses.

-cpghost.

-- 
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/