Step By Step Guide to Easynews and Usenet

What Can You Do With EasyNews?

First off, congratulations for joining the Easy News Guide community. I sincerely hope the information provided here is useful. (If it isn't, or is too technical, feel free to clue me in).

Easynews provides access to one of the best and accurate news servers on the internet. So what? So, buying an account will allow you to download movies, music, software, and pictures (make sure you adhere to copyright laws...) in addition to giving you access to thousands of various discussions on thousands of different topics. Best thing of all, Easynews is anonymous, or as anonymous as one can get on the internet. They do not log downloads or any other information regarding their users. All they know is who to bill and how each month. They do not keep logs of server activity.

Easynews can be accessed with a web based interface as well as with a Newsreader program. Because it is web based, it can be used with any web accessible device including your pocket pc or palm with an internet connection. I routinely use my pocket pc to browse the offerings and listen to music, watch movies and so on.

How big is EasyNews/Usenet, my P2P file sharing program has millions of users and millions of files?

Well, you're in luck, millions of users post millions of files to Usenet. AND, they are retained there for a certain period of time, usually up to 40 days. That means you do not have to worry about someone disconnecting before you finish downloading a file AND, it means that you are only limited speedwise by what your connection is. I download from Easynews at over 2MB/s every time. No more 10KB/s downloads off of a P2P program for me.

How fast is that?

Well, a movie on a P2P network would usually take about 8-9 hours to download, on Easynews, I'm downloading my selections in under an hour.

Easynews provides functionality and no fluff. The web interface is simple, uncluttered and graphicless, but it works amazingly well. You're going to love it.

I'm going to use screen captures from my pc for this tutorial, and eventually I'll get around to doing the same for the pocket pc in a different tutorial, but if you can use your pc to do this, you can use your pocket pc just as easily. The steps are the same.

Getting Started: Download and install the following software:

You're going to need at least the first two things listed here, maybe a couple of the others:

You have some options here, but if you want to use the same software I do, here is the list:

1. A web browser: Make the switch to Firefox if you haven't already. Besides being leaner and more secure than Internet Explorer, I find it just plain works better. I don't know all the technical ins and outs of why you should, I just know it is a better option. If you need some convincing, do a search for firefox and see for yourself. It's free by the way.

2. A download manager: Because it is a web interface, file sizes greater than 255MB could potentially get messed up in transit. It is imperative to use a download manager to ensure they don't and a good download manager will also allow you to resume downloads should something happen. (maybe your computer crashes a lot, I don't know). It will also speed up your download as it takes the big file, divides into pieces and then downloads the pieces at the same time. So, if you have one big file and it is divided into six pieces, you can download it 6 times as fast. The download manager I use is Star Downloader. There is a free version or one you can pay for. The free version works good for me.

3. Optional: You may need additional software depending on what you are downloading. Fortunately for you, I've created, or will be creating, tutorials for the following topics as well. Pick your poison:

• Movies
• Games
• Music
• Software

4. Optional: If you are planning on using easynews from an actual newsreader and not via the web interface, you will need a newsreader. Forte Agent is an excellent choice and they have a free version you can use in addition to their paid version.

Next: Logging In

You're Ready - Time to Find the Goodies

Now that you have everything you need to download whatever you want, let's get to it:

1. Go to the login page.

2. On that page you will notice the login box. It requires your easynews name and password. Put them in the boxes and hit login. You will be taken to the following screen:

Two things you can take away from this screen:

1. How many Gigabytes you have downloaded and how many you have left, before you have to buy some more.

2. The top link: Main Members Page - that is where you want to go next. Clicking on it brings you to this page:

All of the files are located within news groups. So, first you have to find a news group which relates to the type of file you want to download and then search within that group to find your file. Halfway down the page, the Easynews crew has made it fairly easy to find the most popular news groups by putting links to mpegs and avis (movies), Mp3s (music) and Jpegs (pictures). We'll explore two ways of finding things now:

First, we'll use their nice little links, so let's attempt to find a movie. Click on the mpegs and avis link and you'll be presented with this:

When you scroll down the page you will see a listing of all the potential newsgroups that hold movie files. This is the format you see:

(70320) alt.binaries.multimedia | old-style index | up-to-the minute

The number on the left is the number of files in the newsgroup. To the right of that is the news group name which will give you some idea of what is in there. The "old-style index" link will give you a listing of images listed by who posted them and will give you a link to view them and their thumbnails. The "up to the minute" link will give a listing of the most recently posted files in the group. The link you want to hit is the name of the newsgroup itself - in this case alt.binaries.movies.divx

Clicking that link brings you to yet another list, but this list is the motherload. When I wrote this tutorial, here is the screenshot of the movies available:

The thing about news groups is that big files are posted in smaller chunks to make it easy to post them. So, your movie is going to be listed as a group of files, not just one which you are probably use to with a P2P program like Kazaa. These files are also encoded. Posting is something I'll cover later, but for now, let's figure out how to download this thing.

Easynews provides an awesome utility on their website to make everything nice and easy. It is the Zip manager. So, we need to select the files we want, put them in the zip manager, and it will put them all together and spit out a nice file for us to download.

So, scroll through your list and find a movie of interest to you. Notice how they are grouped under an email address. You will have an email address followed by a dozen files, sometimes more, sometimes less. You will need to check every box to the left of every file under that email address to ensure you get your whole movie. Once you do that, scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the following:

Hitting the little arrow on the right of default will bring up a drop down list. Select Next Empty. This will put all the files into the next empty queue. You'll see what I mean on the next page. Once that is selected hit ZIP and the zip manager will do its thing and you'll be presented with this page:

Alright, on this page you have the following columns:

Queue - simply the queue number. You can put up to 10 actions in the zip manager at one time. After that you will have to start clearing the queue in order to add more.

Manage - Clear or Edit/View - self explanatory, you either clear the queue with clear or view and edit what you have in the queue with edit/view.

Info - tells you how many files and the total size of them in the queue

Download - Gives you the link to download.

From here, it's easy (as if it hasn't been so far), you simply hit the download link on the same line choosing either just download or download on port 81. Sometimes ISPs like to limit traffic on port 80, so by picking port 81 you bypass that and ensure you get the best possible speed. I've clicked on both and haven't really noticed a difference either way.

At any rate, click the link and it should start up your download manager. Assuming you've installed Star Downloader like I did, you'll get a dialogue asking you to confirm the name you want to call it and where you want to download it to. You may also be asked for a username and password - this is your easynews username and password. Hit start and it is on its way.

Look at how fast it is: 214.4KB/sec on a DSL connection (basic High Speed here in Canada). I've never had speeds like this on a P2P network.

Once it is done downloading, you can repeat the whole process for another one or browse to the location you downloaded, unzip and enjoy.

Please download responsibly. :)

NOTE: This tutorial is a work in progress, will get better, more detailed and easier to look at, but until then, if you have any questions at all, ask away. Glad to have you here.