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New Payment Options Available From NewsDemon.com Newsgroups
February 8th, 2012
NewsDemon.com Newsgroups is proud to announce new methods to accept payments from our customers. Our new WorldPay payment options now allows users to pay for any of our subscription or block accounts with either the Australian Dollar or South African Rand.
NewsDemon.com Newsgroups has long offered a variety of convenient methods of payment for our customers. Currently, we provide Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover payments as well as those with PayPal and WorldPay.
With the new payment options available, customers in both South African and Australia will no longer have to pay any conversion fees for payment. With the new WorldPay options, their native currency is accepted without any additional conversion or rate exchange charges.
In order to access these new payment options, select of our USENET access subscription based or block account plans and while at checkout, choose our WorldPay option. Once directed through our secure WorldPay payment page, a selection box will allow customers to pay in US Dollar, Euro, Pounds Sterling, Australian Dollar or South African Rand. For subscription subscribers, these options will save for additional payments made for your monthly accounts.
With industry leading features and services provided by NewsDemon.com Newsgroups and now with more flexible payment options than ever before, we hope to make choosing NewsDemon.com Newsgroups your choice as a leading premium USENET access provider.
If you have any questions or require any assistance, take advantage of our 24/7 customer service where one of our trained associates can gladly assist.
Happy Binary Day USENET
November 10th, 2011
Today, 11/01/11 (or 11/1/11 – the choice is yours) is one of a select few dates solely composed of only 0s and 1s. In fact, the year 2011 has 9 binary days, just like every other binary date-capable year.
But enjoy it while it lasts. After November 11, which is perhaps one of the most booked days for weddings ever, you’ll have to wait a whole century before the calendar hits a binary date. (If you can make it until January 1, 2100, we’ll be impressed.)
As some USENET newsgroup subscribers are quick to describe, binary is a numbering scheme in which there are only two possible values for each digit: 0 and 1. The term also refers to any digital encoding/decoding system in which there are exactly two possible states. In digital data memory, storage, processing, and communications, the 0 and 1 values are sometimes called “low” and “high,” respectively.
In any case, the date is a great excuse to play with the code that lies at the core of modern computing. Though the fundamental coding method has been replaced by much more sophisticated and functional coding languages like Java, C++ and Python, that doesn’t mean it’s lost its place in the hearts and minds of nerds everywhere.
We use the decimal system in everyday life because it seems more natural (we have ten fingers and ten toes). For the computer, the binary system is more natural because of its electrical nature (charged versus uncharged).
Speaking of binary, did you know that NewsDemon.com Newsgroups supports over 1,179 days of binary retention on all 107,000 active uncensored newsgroups?
01001000011000010111000001110000011110010010000001000010011010010110111001100001011100100111100100100000010001000110000101111001001000000100011001110010011011110110110100100000010000010110110001101100001000000100111101100110001000000101010101110011001000000100000101110100001000000100111001100101011101110111001101000100011001010110110101101111011011100010111001100011011011110110110100100000010011100110010101110111011100110110011101110010011011110111010101110000
Is Microsoft Manipulating Ratings to Call IE the Safest Browser?
October 18th, 2011
At risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, could Microsoft manipulate browser ratings so that its Internet Explorer always comes out on top? USENET newsgroup subscribers are noting the point in many Microsoft related newsgroups.
“Microsoft has always been fond of paying analysts to say that its products are best,” one USENET post reads, “or having partners release reports showing how their rivals’ products are second-rate, and, now, Web sites that ‘show’ how Internet Explorer (IE) is better than Chrome and Firefox when it comes to security.”
They argue that Microsoft manipulates the important aspects of rating browsers. Explorer was given high marks for including the SmartScreen malware detection program that allows software signed using a trusted certificate will be allowed to run, while Chrome allows unknown dangerous programs to be saved but stored in a sandbox to make it difficult to attack the system. Automatic updates with Chrome keep security at a high level, though. Microsoft does not, yet no points were deducted for this shortcoming.
Just as browsers should take security seriously, so should Usenet providers. If you’re in the market for a Usenet provider, make sure they offer SSL encryption security technology to protect your data and system while you browse and share on Usenet. NewsDemon.com Newsgroups offers SSL security encryption for its subscribers.
New USENET and Online Slang Terms Enter Dictionary
August 24th, 2011
By now everybody knows full well what the USENET born terms like ‘OMG’, ‘LOL’ and ‘FYI’ mean, and this year the Oxford English Dictionary caught up by adding these to the dictionary. Now, newsgroup subscribers report that in the dictionary’s latest update, more words from the Internet age will appear in the well-respected dictionary.
USENET subscribers report that the latest update, which take place four times per year, will include words like ‘retweet’, ‘cyberbullying’, ‘sexting’, ‘woot’ and ‘jeggings’.
In case you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms, to “retweet’ means to forward another Twitter user’s message, while ‘cyberbulling’ means to bully somebody via online means. ‘Sexting’ is to send a sexually explicit text message to another person, and ‘jeggings’ are tight leggings meant to look like jeans. ‘Woot’ is a commonly used term to express excitement. ‘Mankini’ was also added. This is a very revealing male bathing suit similar to what was worn by Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie Borat.
Say what you will about adding these terms to the respected dictionary, but they’re commonly used terms and including them will make the dictionary more helpful to its users unsure of one of these words’ meanings. These terms are commonly found on internet forums and message boards, as well as on Usenet, where many users rely on terms such as these to communicate their ideas and points of view.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first edition of the dictionary, released in 1911 and compiled by Henry and George Fowler. Angus Stevenson of the Oxford University Press noted that they were interested “in setting out new meanings for words. Some of the subjects now as well as then are new technology and slang.”
So it is only fitting that the dictionary continues to adapt to the new slang and new words used in our everyday lives.
Hierarchies on Usenet
July 28th, 2011
What appeals to many users of Usenet is that experts in various fields participate, sharing their expertise and insight with others. Many experts in a variety of fields use Usenet to converse with other experts in their field. With your run-of-the-mill internet forums taking a lot of potential Usenet users, Usenet has become a system of experts to a degree.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean users cannot find some casual discussions in which to participate. Hierarchies compose the organizational system utilized by Usenet and there is a huge variety of newsgroups within the different hierarchies. This means that you’ll find intense discussions among academics and experts, but also some more casual discussions among interested parties.
You may find that the rec. hierarchy is a great way to connect with people discussing ways in which they can relax and unwind. Here you’ll find an array of subjects to pique just about anybody’s interests. Whether collecting stamps is your thing or you get a thrill from riding jet skis, you’re very likely to find others with your same interests in the rec. hierarchy on Usenet.
Hierarchies may overlap at times, too. Video games can be a good way to relax, but many also have an interest in the computer aspect of video games. You’ll probably find more discussions about video games in the rec. hierarchy than in the comp. hierarchy, though.
For some good, old fashioned conversation, try the talk. hierarchy. Here you’ll come across a wide array of newsgroups with users discussing various subjects. Some groups are dedicated to those who would like to talk a little politics—some are more specific than others and others may discuss entire political philosophies.
On Usenet you probably won’t have much trouble coming across a spirited debate in which users discuss links between what’s happening now and what is going to happen in the future. These can be enjoyable newsgroups with open-minded, forward-thinking people who like to peel back the layers of the subject and really get into a deep discussion.
For those who like to combine their learning with entertainment, you’ll find what you’re looking for on Usenet as well. Those who are interested in astronomy should check out the sci. hierarchy where they’ll find conversations pertaining to the subject. Experts will probably be in the newsgroup to answer any questions you may have, but there should also be others who just enjoy deeper discussions with others who enjoy talking about the same kinds of things. It’s easy to see how you can learn from experts who use Usenet, but you can also take a lot of enjoyment and entertainment out of talking about a subject with experts in the field.
How To Add USENET Newsgroups
July 14th, 2011
One question that many users have regarding Usenet is how to add new newsgroups. Depending on the kind of newsgroup you’re looking to make, you may find the process ranges from quite simple to pretty challenging.
The first thing you’ll have to do when adding a newsgroup is determine in which hierarchy you’d like the newsgroup to appear—familiarize yourself with the ‘Big 8′ newsgroups hierarchy when doing this. Next, figure out if the group is going to be moderated or non-moderated. If it’s moderated, the administrator must give the newsgroup regular attention and moderated newsgroups allow only content associated with the newsgroup to be published. Free newsgroups do not have rules regarding adding brand new newsgroups.
NewsDemon.com Newsgroups offers users a simple way of adding newsgroups to our list of over 107,000 newsgroups that are currently accessible. NewsDemon.com Newsgroups only asks that user submit a request for a new newsgroup through our website. Before proceeding, though, consider a few items so that your newsgroup is not taken off of the server:
A newsgroup will exist on the server only if and when customers request it, meaning that if you’re the only one interested in the newsgroup it probably won’t get off the ground.
Make sure that others are also interested in the newsgroup and will use it once it is added. If there is poor support for the newsgroup, it will remain empty and will eventually be erased by the managers of the server.
Go about finding supporters for the newsgroup you’d like to add in whichever manner you please; as long as they request the group after it’s added, you’re newsgroup won’t go anywhere.
Where Did The Google Bing Facebook Twitter And Other Strange Names Come From?
June 27th, 2011
There are a lot of websites and online services on the web today. And although you may frequent them daily, do you really know what they are about? NewsDemon.com Newsgroups researched a few to find out where the names originated from some of the most popular online destinations.
The meaning of Yahoo!?
From search engine newsgroups, we learn:
“The Web site started out as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.” Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang’s student workstation, “Akebono,” while the software was lodged on Filo’s computer, “Konishiki” – both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.”
How did Microsoft come up with Bing?
Combing through Microsoft newsgroups we learn:
No, it doesn’t stand for “big investment, no goals” although it may seem like to some. Nor does it mean “but its not google”. No, the real story is that Steve Balmer was looking to “verb up” a phrase for users when searching. Much like the popularity “Google It” has become, Steve hoped that “Bing” would unambiguously said search.
Why choose the name Twitter for a social network?
Popular newsgroups reveal:
The service’s name morphed from “Status/Stat.us” to “twittr” to Twitter. From the creators, they stated “Twittering is the sound birds make when they communicate with each other—an apt description of the conversations here. As it turns out, because Twitter provides people with real-time public information, it also helps groups of people mimic the effortless way a flock of birds move in unison.”
Where did Mark Zuckerberg come up with the Facebook name?
USENET reveals:
The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by Harvard university administrators to help students get to know each other better.
What does USENET mean?
Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea of USENET in 1979 and it was established in 1980. The name came from the love of UNIX and something that best described its function – The USERS NETWORK.
What does Cisco stand for?
Nothing actually.
The name “Cisco” was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company’s engineers insisted on using the lower case “cisco” in the early days.
What does the Google name mean?
Page and Brin began developing a search engine called “BackRub” as grad students at Stanford in 1996. Google derived its name from the word “googol”, a term coined by then nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. The story goes, Kasner had asked his nephew to invent a name for a very large number – ten to the power of one hundred (the numeral one followed by 100 zeros), and Milton called it a googol. The term was later made popular and in Kasner’s book, Mathematics and the Imagination. After focused brainstorming, they come up with the name “Google”—a derivative of the mathematical term.
How did Steve Jobs come up with Apple
Steve Jobs worked summer jobs at a California apple farm. He also liked the Beatles and their label, Apple Records. When he and Steve Wozniak tried to come up with a company name, they decided that if they couldn’t think of anything better by the end of the day, they’d go with the name “Apple”. And they couldn’t, so they did.
As far as the logo, the Apple newsgroup post the following from the original designer:
“I designed it with a bite for scale, so people get that it was an apple not a cherry. Also it was kind of iconic about taking a bite out of an apple. Something that everyone can experience … It was after I designed it, that my creative director told me: “Well you know, there is a computer term called byte”. And I was like: “You’re kidding!” So, it was like perfect, but it was coincidental that it was also a computer term.”
How did Intel get their name?
When pioneers Moore and Noyce left Fairfield Semiconductors to start their company they were going to call it Moore Noyce but it sounded like More Noise… very unfortunate for a semi-conductor/electronics company. They decided on INT(egrated) EL(ectronics) after trading under NMElectronics for a while but had to buy some rights for Intel as there was a similar sounding hotel chain called INTELCO.
Many USENET Newsreaders Get Updates
May 18th, 2011
Changes are happening to a number of USENET newreaders that may tempt many newsgroup subscribers to break away from the traditional ones they’re used to in order to try out new features.
Just recently, News Rover had rolled out the new version 16, which is available free to NewsDemon.com Newsgroup members. The News Rover newsreader offers a host of changes ranging from performance, additional options and integration with other USENET tools.
NewsBin has been busy with a completely new user interface in version 6 (currently in beta). The newsreader is expected to come out with a solid force of features, including the way it handles and displays headers to other integrated functions to keep everything USENET related centralized within the newsreader. Additionally, NewsBin has dropped their current purchase price down to just $15.00.
NewsLeecher, who had been on version 4 since 2009 is starting to deliver a more polished version 5 which was first released in the beginning of 2011. With each beta release of version 5, the NewsLeecher newsreader has been getting a serious facelift in design and functionality with each release. The movement in each release, now up to Beta 6, has been much more frequent than ever with a better GUI and features, including in their SuperSearch Watchdog functions.
Lastly, Grabit has been rumored to be releasing a new beta, 1.7.2 beta 4, which has been long overdue. Just like NewsLeecher, updates and releases have been few and far in between over the last couple of years. The new release from Grabit should address a number of bug fixes and some minor new features.
The newsreaders arena is starting to see much more action lately, much to delight of hardcore newsgroup subscribers, who have longed for better releases to integrate with newer technologies and functions that come along with accessing USENET newsgroups.
Stay tuned, as NewsDemon.com Newsgroups will soon be updating all of our guides on these new releases for our members.
AT&T Begins Capping USENET Customers
May 3rd, 2011
Attention American USENET newsgroup subscribers: today marks the beginning of AT&T’s limited monthly data allotments for subscribers to its DSL and U-Verse broadband Internet services.
AT&T announced that it would be imposing the data caps last month and becomes the second American telecom company to do so after Comcast launched its own metering policy nearly three years ago. This comes on the heels of Virgin Media imposing bandwidth caps in the UK as well.
U-Verse — AT&T’s high-speed broadband, television and telephone network — now limits customers to 250 gigabytes of Internet usage each month. DSL users are capped at 150 GB. Customers who exceed the limits will have to pay $10 for each additional 50 GB.
Though typical broadband users don’t come close to approaching the caps now, the increase in average video consumption will undoubtedly cause a greater number of users to exceed their limits in the coming years. That could force broadband providers to raise their caps in the future if customers begin to complain.
To head off a backlash, AT&T is sending customers alerts when they reached 65%, 90% and 100% of their data allotment each month. The company is also giving customers an undefined grace period before it charges them for another 50 GB. AT&T also is allowing customers to check their data usage online.
AT&T is making a bandwidth meter available to all of its customers to track monthly usage at Myusage.att.com. There are numerous reports of customers, who haven’t been able to access the meter yet, but others have been more successful, and customer representatives have reportedly said the meter should be available to everyone by today. Once it’s available, it will also display usage from previous months, giving customers an idea of what’s in store for them.
Comcast had come under fire in 2007 for cutting off service to customers who consumed a large amount of bandwidth but refusing to provide those customers with information on how much bandwidth they were able to use. That led to accusations of Comcast cutting off access to certain services including USENET, an FCC enforcement action, and a net neutrality debate that continues today.
That year, Time Warner Cable also experimented with bandwidth caps, but a public backlash prompted the provider to scrap the test in April 2009. Time Warner took some heat because its caps were relatively low – between 5GB and 40GB. The company eventually announced it would also offer a 100GB “super tier” and unlimited service for $150 per month, but by then, Congress was already up in arms and interest groups were circulating online petitions against the caps.
Some Internet companies fed up with the state of American broadband are taking matters into their own hands. Google, for instance, is deploying a 1-gigabit-per-second network in Kansas City, Kansas, without any bandwidth cap or limiting access to any services such as USENET newsgroups.
ESRB Changes Ratings For Download Games
April 18th, 2011
Reported on gaming newsgroups, the ESRB won’t look at downloadable games until after release, following a change in its the rating procedure.
Gaming newsgroups report that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) which is responsible for rating all of the games released and judging which age group is appropriate for the content of each game has been flooded by the availability of new downloadable games available each week. The system, up to now, has relied on ESRB employees personally rating each game before release. The flood of downloadable video games being created every week has become too much for the ESRB and in an attempt to streamline the ratings process a computer program will now be used to decide a game’s rating.
Previously, every game was vetted by a independent panel, and a report would then be written detailing exactly why a game received a rating. Now, publishers will be given much more power, as they will have to fill out a digital questionnaire which will then be used to determine the rating the game receives.
The computer then analyzes the readings and awards the game a rating based on the answers that were given. At the moment, only games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network will be scrutinized by the computer. The system is designed to have no human beings to help out with the rating process.
For now, mobile, Facebook and all other types of games will continue to undergo the traditional rating process, which involves completion of a more open-ended questionnaire and review of a content DVD by a minimum of three raters who reach consensus on the appropriate rating.
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