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News, Notes, and Items of Interest
Almost Black Friday special of the week
50% off yearly unlimited accounts - $45/yr  Posted on Nov 10, 2017 12:00 UTC

Our second special for the month is a doozy. We’re offering our yearly unlimited account at 50% off. Yep, a full year of unlimited access for $45. That averages out to $3.75/mo! To top it off, the price is locked in for the lifetime of the account.

Coupon code 50FridayYear

Gimme a year for 50% off!

First (of four) shades of Black Friday
50% off block accounts - $10 for 500G  Posted on Nov 3, 2017 12:00 -0400

In the spirit of the Black Friday, we’ll be running specials each Friday in November. This week we’re offering our block accounts at 50% off. Offer is over on 11/9/2017.

Coupon code 50FridayBlock

Grab one now!

Local retention expanded again. Expect ~90 days.
Woot! Let it grow.  Posted on Sep 20, 2017 12:00 -0400
We just finished installing additional spool capacity, taking our local retention up to ~90 days. The space is filling, so we’ll have to watch to see where exactly it lands. We estimate around 90 days at this point. Additional upgrades are planned, so check back for future updates.
Local retention expanded to 45 days.
The more the merrier!  Posted on Aug 15, 2017 12:00 -0400

Hello everyone. We’ve expanded our local retention to 45 days! With this upgrade we’ll be servicing around 60% of the articles you read “on-net”. The remaining older articles we’ll pull from our partners.

Changed default SSL cipher
AES128 is preferred as the default cipher  Posted on Apr 20, 2017 12:18 -0400

Shortly after we started offering service we had a few customers comment that our SSL speeds were a bit slower than their last provider. After researching the cause we noticed that a lot of providers default for much lower encryption (RC4-MD5) than we were using (AES256). Most people would agree that AES256 is a bit overkill for NNTPS, so we decided to lower our default cipher to AES128. After a few changes to our front-end server code we added the ability to offer the available ciphers by preference.

Current cipher list in order of preference:

TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384

As you can see, we still fully support AES256. Changing the default cipher will speed up our SSL connections and customers wanting AES256 can still select that by configuring their usenet client to request the stronger cipher. Should be a win/win for everyone!