The MPA (Motion Picture Association) accomplished a lot when they successfully forced the original Newzbin offline. One of the best indexing sites for Usenet content was eliminated - it was the newsgroup equivalent of losing The Pirate Bay. But in a remarkable change of events, Newzbin returned, thanks to a mysterious group of individuals know as Team R Dogs.

The process of rebuilding Newzbin, or Newzbin2, has been a test of patience and sanity, at least from what we can gather from our June interview and the frequent blog posts on Newzbin.com. The biggest challenge is learning and understanding the code leftover from the original Newzbin. Doing that is much like learning a new language, since coding tends to become personalized. But progress is being made, although many problems still remain.

One of the more frequently reported problems occurs when trying to top off an account or logging into Newzxxx.com. The error causes a time out between the secure server and browser, although the problem is limited to Chrome and Explorer users (FireFox chugs along unabated).

"1. We recently upgraded the software on our secure server and the newer protocols are causing timeouts with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. We do have people looking into correcting the problem but, currently, that would require decreasing the level of security on the server (which is a bad thing).

"Firefox, on the other hand, seems to connect without a problem. While only an interim solution, and an inconvenient one at that, it is about the best response until this matter is resolved."

Although there are setbacks, progress is being made in other areas; this includes restoring user features. One item to make a return is the "Watchdog" feature, which alerts a Newzbin user via email when a desired article is posted.

"MrBlack has just restored Watchdog functionality. It may take a time to churn through the backlog."

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Date: 2010-07-14 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=2000