Version 13 of Usenet

Updated 2006-04-18 01:56:30

Usenet: A very loosely organized series of hundreds of thousands of computers which exchange messages in a anarchical broadcast methodology. Usenet discussions are organized in a manner known as Usenet group or newsgroup. There is, in general, no one in charge, nor any one site which is home to Usenet discussions. There are exceptions to this - a Usenet moderated group is a group which has one or more people or software agents which must approve a posting before others see them. A Usenet gateway group is a way to mirror a mailing list discussion into the Usenet medium.

At times, people ask where to read USENET newsgroups. There is no one place to read USENET. USENET, as mentioned above, is a broadcast medium. So what one has to do is to find some place that either provides NNTP access to some subset of newsgroups, or one finds a web site with such access which provides http access to the data. Here on the Wiki one can find a simple news posting program and you may very well locate a news reading program as well.

LV There are news readers and posting programs in Netscape [L1 ] and probably other browsers. There is a relatively crude news reader and poster in http://lynx.browser.org/ . I myself prefer http://trn.sf.net/ .

For example, Google now provides a level of access to USENET (both current and historical postings) via http://groups.google.com/ .


Also:

"Subject: ANNOUNCE: Free Access News Server Date: 21 Feb 2001 23:20:51 -0800 From: Scott Reilly <[email protected]> Organization: PrimeTime Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl.announce,comp.lang.tcl Followup-To: comp.lang.tcl

ANNOUNCE: UTCorp Free Access News Server (FANS)

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Unified Technologies Corp. is pleased to announce the UTCorp Free Access News Server (FANS) -- a public, freely accessible news server which will mirror select USENET newsgroups. At the moment, it mirrors comp.lang.tcl and comp.lang.tcl.announce.

The news server runs using TclNNTPD (http://www.utcorp.net/opensource/tclnntpd/ ), a newly released, open-source, TCL-only coded NNTP news server.

With the recent demise of Deja.com, it is quite fortunate that we were already prepared to release the news server code. And since we have the capabilities, and seeing a suggestion by Laurent Duperval, we decided to host a news server to mirror the TCL newsgroups. We are considering mirroring other newsgroups and likely some on a per request basis, but we aren't taking requests just yet.

The news server is still in its alpha stage and should be used as such. Though we don't believe you'll encounter any errors, if you do we'd appreciate if you let us know: [email protected].

WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?

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You can view the homepage for that package here: http://www.utcorp.net/opensource/freeusenet/

HOW DO I ACCESS IT?

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The following information is all that is necessary to connect to the news server:

HOST: mirror.utcorp.net PORT: 119

If you need help, visit the FANS homepage for more information on connecting to the news server.

WHY IS IT FREE?

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UTCorp believes in the free availability of information. The USENET postings are public discussions and can be of great importance and convenience. Deja.com had been a major USENET portal for many and its demise made us realize how much, at least for ourselves, we had come to depend on the services it offered. Since we had already developed our own news server (TclNNTPD -- http://www.utcorp.net/opensource/tclnntpd/ ) and possess the resources and capabilities, we decided to host a free access news server. With the help of the open source community of developers we hope to expand this first step into an significant open source service/project that can fill the void left by Deja.com and more.

We would greatly appreciate any and all feedback! Email us concerning this project at: [email protected]"


A correspondent described http://www.cis.dfn.de/ as this sort of NNTPSERVER: "free service ... fairly fast, never ... down, near-perfect."

As 2005, www.cis.dfn.de might have moved to http://news.individual.net/


Yet another perspective on NetNews appears here [L2 ] or maybe here [L3 ].


http://www.usenetlive.com Search engine for the alt.binaries newsgroups


http://www.newzleech.com Free usenet binaries search


Category Internet