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GUBA makes Usenet search easy as Google 253

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bandwidth-hogs dept.
ChipGuy writes "Despite the growing popularity of p2p networks,Usenet is the real treasure trove of multimedia content including vintage cartoons, westerns and popular television shows. Nearly two terabytes of data is added everyday to Usenet. GUBA, a seven year old San Francisco company is making it easier to find the information on Usenet through the browser. Its like " Google for Usenet," says this report."
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GUBA makes Usenet search easy as Google More

GUBA makes Usenet search easy as Google

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  • Google for usenet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by selfabuse ( 681350 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:42PM (#13933015)
    So.. they've invented deja/google groups?

  • SSSHHH!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by TomatoMan ( 93630 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:43PM (#13933028) Homepage Journal
    ontday alktay abouthay usenethay!
    • All we need left in this crazy digital world is for the law & order to find out about it...
      • What makes you think they don't already know about it?
        • Because no one is enduring heavy lawsuits by any large industries due to it.

          Of course that doesn't mean they don't know about it, but maybe not enough of them know enough about it?

          They haven't reached critical lawsuit mass.

          • Re:SSSHHH!!! (Score:2, Informative)

            by gripped ( 830310 )
            We sometimes hear of so called 'scene' topsites that well connected 'pirates' have access to.

            Surely the commercial newsfeeds could in fact be regarded as 'Pay as you go' topsites. How they get left alone to profit from rampant copyright theft is beyond me.

            Not that I care. I download films from my own ISP's newsserver, which is one of the few left in the uk to have a decent binary newsfeed.

            I'm sure the only reason they keep it going is that its cheaper for them to supply as much of their customers
    • Like I always tell people:

      First rule of Usenet: Don't talk about Usenet Second rule of Usenet: DO NOT talk about Usenet
    • Shouldn't that be in ROT13?

      Um, I mean

      Fubhyqa'g gung or va EBG13?
  • At $14.95 a month I don't really see how this place is any different than Easynews or UseNext. Doesn't seem like all that new an idea, and certainly the price doesn't lead me to believe I'm any better off than these other services.

    Is there something that reading the article and checking out the site didn't make obvious?
  • looks like much of the "content" they index is pirated material.

    it also costs money to use their service.

    • Re:won't last (Score:5, Informative)

      by DigitalRaptor ( 815681 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:51PM (#13933112)
      Yeah, because Easynews and the hundreds of companies like them were shut down so fast for the exact same thing.

      Oh, wait. They weren't.

      • Re:won't last (Score:5, Informative)

        by Carraway ( 794372 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:59PM (#13933191)
        Yeah, because Easynews and the hundreds of companies like them were shut down so fast for the exact same thing.

        The difference here is GUBA is shouting from the rooftops that they're hosting copyrighted files. Easynews, Giganews, etc., all kept it relatively obscure, just saying "we index all of Usenet" which was understood by smart users and generally ignored by everyone else. Now all of the basic users who are just now figuring out how Bitorrent works are going to say, "Wha? I can get music and movies on Usenet?" and, frankly, where the basic users go, so goes the RIAA.

        • Re:won't last (Score:5, Interesting)

          by DigitalRaptor ( 815681 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @01:09PM (#13933278)
          The real difference is that P2P has a source, a bottleneck. You can shut down one group or one server and the problem goes away.

          Usenet is almost as distributed as email, and just as old.

          Shutting Usenet down will be like trying to catch a fart in the wind. You may get some of it, but you'll never get all of it, and it won't be easy.

        • Usenet, I think, will still remain the bastion of "smart" users for some time. Downloading files has gotten easier with servies like Newzbin, but there's still more involved than your typical P2P client. You still need to learn to use PAR and RAR files, and for most "basic" users, the concept of rejoining and decoding files is a bit far-fetched. Again, the software packages make it easier, but most people that I teach to use Usenet for file download end up saying, "P2P is much easier".

  • Advert? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:45PM (#13933046)
    GUBA is a pay-for service, yet for some reason the summary neglects to mention this. Call me cynical, but when something as fundamental as that is missed out, I start thinking "advert".
    • Yes, there are a number of stories here where the referenced site would likely have been willing to pay for the story. However, if you look at the pages for actually advertising on /., there is no reference to buying an article.

      My guess is that this is another case where the editor thought it was interesting, so he posted it. Sure, this site is based on user-pays model, but it's not really different from a advertiser-pays site getting plugged when the editor thinks it's interesting.
  • This is interesting. As I am looking at what they seem to have indexed it seems that most of it is all material which holds some sort of Copyright. I have to wonder about the legality of this service. I realize that they are not actually holding the videos and files on their machines, but it still makes you wonder how long they will be around.
    • "I realize that they are not actually holding the videos and files on their machines"

      Actually, they are/i holding them on their machines. They get by with it for the same reason that your ISP gets by with having a router that has a bit of memory to hold a packet queue even though packets in that cue might contain bits of copyrighted works that their customer is downloading. It is also the same reason that Slashdot couldn't get sued (provided they removed it if notified) for a user posting a commen

  • All I need.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by LilGuy ( 150110 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:48PM (#13933082)
    is NewZbin.

    God bless the creators.
    • Newzbin doesnt archive everything posted on usenet, so you might be missing out on a lot of stuff. The only way to achieve a full archive would be through some sort of an automated process, as opposed to human editors newzbin relies on.
      • You're right, the system is far from perfect. But it certainly works well for what is needed.

      • Re:All I need.. (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Acctually, from what i understand, they do have an automated index of all files posted to the binary groups they follow. you can access this by searching for "files" rather then "posts"...

        "posts" are just a listing of the files that logically belong together, and are compiled by the human editors of which you speak...

        by searching for "files" you lose out on the nicely grouped posts, so you have to select the relavent files yourself, but you can find stuff that hasn't been "posted" by the editors yet...

  • Outfuckingstanding (Score:4, Insightful)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:48PM (#13933084)
    So much for flying under the [RI|MP]AA's radar. I just can't wait until they start issuing subpenas and crapflooding the MP3 and multimedia groups.
    • So much for flying under the [RI|MP]AA's radar.

      Sheesh. I guess I was reading too fast, but for a while I was wondering "WTF's RIMPAA?"

      Anyway, back on-topic. Yeah, it's sorta amazin' isn't it. They're archiving and cataloging usenet groups which are self-identified as "gigabytes of copyright violations", and they're trying to make teh big moneez at it. Yup, thanks for screwin' up another network motherlode by stripmining it, ya putzes.

      • Many, many services are already doing this, and the content holders are already well aware of Usenet. Just try posting a text message in a movie group from your DSL or cable line. You'll get a nice letter in a few short weeks warning you that one more such stunt and you're at the mercy of the content holders.

    • Re:Outfuckingstanding (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sancho ( 17056 )
      The content owners know about this already. Two, maybe three years ago, I heard about a massive piracy ring going by the name of SD6 that operated on IRC and USENET. Seems that some of their members started getting C&Ds and other legal threats from the content owners, and they shut down their entire USENET group (knowing full well, of course, that the group itself would not disappear--but they apparently stopped all USENET operations).

      So they know it's there. If they aren't actively working to stop i
      • SD6 was a high-quality TV-capture group that split off from alt.binaries.multimedia, as alt.binaries.multimedia.SD6, when their leader "Silent Bob"'s ego got the better of him. They specialized in posting things like "Alias", "The O.C.", etc. Silent Bob had a temper and a huge ego. They got like ONE C&D and he pulled the plug on the whole newsgroup. Kinda too bad, their captures were real nice.

  • Wow... more advertising on /. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daytona955i ( 448665 ) <flynnguy24@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:49PM (#13933095)
    If you have an internet connection, you probably also already have access to newsgroups. Buy NewsRover and search 'till your heart's content. (And you don't need to pay $14.95/month to do it)

    Since others will probably mention google groups, I'll just mention that google groups doesn't search for binaries whereas this is geared towards a binaries search. If this service was free I would probably use it. But it's not so I'll continue to use my new reader.

  • Worst. Advert. Ever. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:49PM (#13933099)
    GUBA is a commercial porn site that masquerades as a Usenet archive. It's been around for years, and certainly isn't as comprehensive as Google Groups. The linked "report" is just a blog post.

    Any particular reason why this got posted? Did the editor get free membership in return?

  • Been around for a while (Score:5, Interesting)

    by P3NIS_CLEAVER ( 860022 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:51PM (#13933113) Journal
    Is this news? This site has been around for a long time. Why now on /.?
    • Because GUBA is trying to make a splash as being the first to offer porn for the iPod. Apple doesn't sell porn videos in the iTunes store, so GUBA wants to meet the demand. In a reasonably clever marketing move, though, rather than sell them by the video, they'll sell all-you-can-eat access for $15/month, counting on the desire for continuous novelty on the part of porn consumers to keep them coming back. There's a boatload of porn in the Usenet archives, and you will never run out of new stuff to watch.

      Als
  • However.. a cool feature they have is how they transcode all video clips into Flash format.

  • Mod parent down: "Not Newsworthy" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @12:56PM (#13933162)
    It's just one of many commercial USENET-binary services.

    Yawn.

    Mod main story down: Not newsworthy

  • Not Worthwhile (Score:2, Insightful)

    by staticdaze ( 597246 )
    I can't see any worthwhile features offered by this service for the $15 per month that you would pay. All of the major usenet providers (Giganews, Easynews, and Newzbin are just a few that I have experience with) offer similar search services. Not only do they include images and video (which, so far, is all this GUMA service would provide), but also every binary posted to Usenet. Why would you pay an extra $15? For the video conversion features? (which is actually kind of neat, but I'm sure most people
  • Hasn't the idea of promoting a service based on access to a lot of copyright protected material placed on the internet illegally been bashed and trashed soundly in the courts [theregister.co.uk]? I just don't see how a service like GUBA which charges for access can avoid being sued out of existence by *AA. They really cannot claim not to know that much of the material is protected by copyright. Of course, Google can't claim that either, but Google doesn't charge a fee for access and doesn't promote said material as a reason to

  • Free news servers (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here: http://www.disenter.com/ [disenter.com]
  • So, best case scenario - the studios buy an account, find all their stuff posted, let these guys know _and_ find the poster. Which will result in fewer things being posted, causing nobody to want the service... except the studios.

    Why not just try and sell the company to them in the first place and save the wasted time?

  • WTF?! Easynews has 100TB and a better search (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mrgodzilla ( 730416 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @01:04PM (#13933243) Homepage
    What's up with this ad for GUBA??

    Easynews kicks the crap out of GUBA and is cheaper. We have
    a better global search, carry over 100TB, bigger/faster gigE
    pipes, even unrar and thumbnail your svcd's!!

    So I ask, what's up with this ad?

    -- godzilla

  • And there goes Usenet... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Necromancyr ( 602950 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @01:10PM (#13933295)
    Slashdot, is it your JOB to ruin EVERYTHING? Bittorrent, now this.

    I hate you guys. Just shut your dirty mouths.

  • GUBA is "News"?! (Score:2, Informative)

    by webmosher ( 322834 )
    GUBA has been around for a long time by internet standards (1998 according to the WHOIS record). It has also been a pay site for as long as I can remember. I think they popped up about the time independent providers charging for Usenet hosting also appeared.

    Did they change their interface? Is it faster? Why is this new?

    There are other sites for finding recent Usenet binary postings. However, they all link to some level of intrinsically non-public binary information (just like GUBA, or BT for that matter). O
    • The only thing new that I have noticed as of late is that the porn is no longer the top searches displayed and does not show in the box of catagories when you log in. I took this to mean that thier long time focus on being used for gathering the porn of Usenet was switching to other media now. They do not appear to be providing anything new or changing thier service, just changing the aspect of it that they promote.
  • Really, do we really need yet ANOTHER system for searching for porn and warez?

  • Hmmm...

    http://www.newzbin.com/ [newzbin.com] seems to have all this covered and for free.

    I'm writing a tool which will hopefully interface with newzbin - www.donutmonster.com - and run on several OSs.

  • From all the providers I had in the years nobody of them ever had the alt.binary.* groups available. So which provider actually do have them available and how are they surviving in todays times where sharing a little bit of music can get you jail time?
  • Slashdot keeps finding ever more creative ways to get the words Google on its front page. This story really has nothing to do with Google yet they managed to google it up.

    Really makes me wonder just how much Google stock did they buy anyway?? :) ....

    Google
  • BT is efficient. Data starts in one place, then spreads to interested parties, who share the burden of distribution.

    Usenet is wildly inefficient. Data is expanded into an messy ascii encoding, handed to and fro by copying-in-full between thousands of completely uninterested parties, to the order of gigabytes per day. Then the actual interested users download it, taking no part of the burden, quite possibly missing chunks with no way to retrieve them, copy yet again the original from the ascii encoding, log
    • True.

      Of course, your ISP's news server will likely be faster than your torrent. For instance, if I'm downloading ... um ... a DVD-ISO of my favorite Linux distro (that's the ticket!), I mightn't max out my connection on the torrent, depending on how many seeds there are and the size of their pipes, etc. Since your local news server is just that, local, you're pretty much guaranteed to max out your connection (unless your ISP throttles port 119).

      Its incredibly inefficient, but the average end user will fin

    • And that's OK. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bashibazouk ( 582054 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @01:45PM (#13933617) Journal
      Bittorent only works well if the content is popular. Try to download something old or obscure sometime. 5 megs, one seed and no leachers, and I supposed to wait 10 hours for the download? Now that's silly and wildly inefficient.
    • Nowdays, especially for large binary data, it's beyond obsolete - it's silly.

      You're correct, of course, but what's the alternative? If it was scrapped (not that something that has no real center or base of operations can really be scrapped) then whatever beast replaced it certainly wouldn't allow the complete freedom we have right now.

      Usenet's really just "one of those things." It's horribly inefficient, it takes some know-how and a lot of patience to access, but the rewards are worth it.
  • Its (sic) like "Google for Usenet," says this report.

    We already have a Google for Usenet. It was called DejaNews, which was bought by--you guessed it--Google [google.com].
  • Seems like a slashvertisement to me...

    And their site - it ain't no friggin' google :)

    Google is free. Guba is bloody expensive.
  • Advertising themselves as a search engine for all the copyrighted content on Usenet is not the best business plan. Only a matter of time before the MPAA/RIAA/TV Networks come down on them.
  • I'd download, transcode, index, and then *torrentize*, track, and seed the content. that might be worth paying $5-$10 a month for.
  • Can we at least get some props for transcoding all the videos into flash? You can always get the original (even from some other Usenet provider, you cheapskates), but if you just want to see the damn video without having to dork with different codecs or players, you can't beat it.

    Eric...
    (and no.. nobody at Slashdot got a free account for this post... but we'd be happy to hand them out.. ;-))

  • great (Score:2)

    by tadd ( 51292 )
    another "story" thats really a fscking ad... bastards... i already have a newsfeed thankyou, unless this is free whats the point?
  • Who came up with the "2 terabytes uploaded to Usenet every day" figure that the article throws around? Is that one of those astroturf'd numbers? Whose servers are storing 730TB/year for free?!
    • They aren't storing it for a year, it's usually more like a week. And a lot of news servers that have binaries and good retention times are not free.
  • In fact, it has already existed for quite some time, and is just like "Google for Usenet"

    http://groups.google.com/ [google.com]

  • Ah, the pains of non-mac users.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ShyGuy91284 ( 701108 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2005 @03:55PM (#13934833)
    At the risk of sounding like a salesman like the article, Unison on OS X is probably the greatest Newsgroup client by far. I've used clients on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and this is the only one I've found that takes the globs of files for a certain "file", and groups them. So you just see one item to download, and not a few hundred. Although you still have to wait for groups to download, this view is very similar to indexing services like Guba and newzbin in which you get a nzb file that gives a single thing to download a "file". I really don't get why others have not implemented a similar view in their clients.
  • hey, wow it is just like google except you have to pay a hell of a lot for it, oh and it fucking sucks.

    and since your usage will be tracked through your account, you'll probably end up getting sued someday.

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