[fastforward]

The newnews.pl was never intended to be executed from the browser. As per section 2 of the instructions:

Upload the newnews.pl script into any directory and chmod 0755 to make it executable. It is recommended that this directory be outside your wwwroot. This script is not designed to be executed as a cgi. It should be executed periodically via cron. Next, upload the usenet.php file into the admin directory of your vB installation. This is the control panel page.

And then towards the bottom under the heading 'Running':

To collect all the historical news on the server you will need to set the 'keep orphan replies' option to an artificially high number to prevent losing posts. Once you have collected all the news, reset the number to somewhere between 2 and 5 days.

Don't worry if when you run it the first few times you see a lot of messages on the screen saying message 'Not Available'. This is because most newservers are inaccurate in their reporting of the first and last article they have available. Just keep running it and you will see articles start to collect eventually. This is only an issue during the initial historical pull.

Once you have the history, you can set up a cron job to run the script every 20 minutes or so.

But that aside... most ISP news accounts authenticate you using an IP address (the IP address of your home PC). Unless the web host has a news server you can use, you will probably need to get a seperate feed.

As for running the newnews.pl from the browser; I believe it has been done successfully, but I have not tested newer versions using this method and make no guarantees that there won't be problems.

NOTE to everyone waiting for the next release:
I've been so so so so busy I haven't made much progress with the binary attachments so the up-coming version will only have the x-noarchive addition plus a few bug fixes. I was able to reproduce the quote color problems. It was a syntax problem that sonehow crept in between versions. Probably a slip on the keyboard