Anyone tried this Mimo thing from Golden Frog/Giganews?

https://www.goldenfrog.com/mimo

I can't install it yet but just want to hear if anyone else has tested it..?

I think it's a strategic mistake for a major NSP like Giganews to develop a binary search engine. It seems other companies have been moving away from that, and prefering to let users rely on independent indexing sites and search engines for their NZBs.

That's one of the key factors that allowed Rapidsearch to win its lawsuit - the fact that Rapidshare had no built-in search capability and users were therefore dependent on 3rd-party sites that indexed RS links. This allowed Rapidshare to sucessfully shift the blame by arguing that these 3rd-party index sites were the guilty party responsible for copyright infringement.

I expect Giganews/GoldenFrog/Mimo to eventually be forced to implement keyword filters to keep the copyright cops at bay, and this will render the service useless, just like Napster became in 2001.

Recent history has proven that search engines optimized to find copyrighted files are poison. For instance, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, there were numerous MP3 search engines, many run by big-name search engine companies. All of them closed due to the pressure of being sued into the ground.

OK, that's my spiel for today :)

1) They cant sue simple indexing service. Otherwise one could ban google or yahoo.. binsearch\nzbindex and such like are mere index sites the same as google. Read: usenet=internet.Well, so to speak.
U cant ban internet search engines. btw thats why Newzbin lost the case - since they had manually made reports. if newzbin was just a simple yet high-quality search engine they wouldnt get sued in the first place.

2) Ive read a bit about this MIMO and to be honest the whole idea sucks

- its written in Java. God knows ive seen plenty of applications written on Java and i swear i wont ever consider using them . Check out jbinuUp for instance- its so slow

- MIMO client is tied to giganews diamond account only.(maybe later it will be required to have hany giganews account but still) Epic fail.
What? Retention 720+ days? autoPAr? Oh boy, there are some newsreaders (newsbin pro, usenet explorer etc)out there not dependant on giganews with all this and lots of features MIMO could only dream about.

Its just another lame attempt to justify their price policy. We give you VPN, now MIMO.. .you pay us big bucks, yey

I agree that Giganews is losing its focus. Worse yet, instead of developing unique products, they're bundling services that are already widely available in the open market.

Instead of releasing a standard software newsreader (there's probably already enough these days) why couldn't they instead develop a quality online web-access reader/downloader? IMHO that's what every NSP could use. It's too bad the the only existing ones such as NewsGuy only have low retention. There's been many times that I've been visiting someone who wants to download a certain movie but absolutely does not want to install software. (and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to risk screwing up their computer with potentially buggy/crashy/spyware-infested software that won't cleanly uninstall, as I've been there myself) And with an increasing number of people accessing the web using low-power netbooks or iPhones or iPads, the idea of installing a Java Newsreader is just not a feasible option.

Or how about the idea of Giganews developing just a simple online reader for Giganews' 7-year archive of text newsgroups? I hate using Google Groups, which is the only available option for searching old usenet discussions. Since they'd obviously rather bundle more services than cut prices, there are many unique avenues that Giganews could branch into. (How about an online newsreader/grabber for celphones?) But no, it seems Giganews prefers to offer a duplicate of something that you can already get on your own from a dozen different places.

But at least Giganews looks like the first usenet provider offering its own newsreader that doesn't try to stick people for an entire year of service.