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INTRODUCTION Usenet is one of the oldest Computer Network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980 following experiments the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public was admitted to the Internet . It was originally conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET ," employing UUCP to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed News Software . This system, developed at University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill and Duke University , was called USENET to emphasize its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation (Daniel ''et al'', 1980). Today, almost all Usenet traffic is carried over the Internet. The Current format and transmission of Usenet articles is very similar to that of Internet Email messages. However, whereas email is usually used for one-to-one communication, Usenet is a one-to-many medium. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called . When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the News Client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server, however, talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and (if all goes well) eventually reaches every server in the network. The later Peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle; but for Usenet it is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Some have noted that this seems a monstrously inefficient protocol in the era of abundant high-speed network access. Usenet was designed for a time when networks were much slower, and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. Usenet is of significant cultural importance in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as " FAQ " and " Spam ". Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Mailing Lists and Weblogs . The difference from Mailing Lists , though, is that Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned (subscription is necessary only to keep track of which articles one has already read, and that information need not be stored on a remote server), that archives are always available, and that reading the messages requires no mail client, but a news client (included in most modern e-mail clients). ISPS, NEWS SERVERS, AND NEWSFEEDS Most Internet Service Provider s, and many other Internet sites, operate News Server s for their users to access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. Usually the ISP will get a kickback for referring the customer to the Usenet provider. In early news implementations, the server and newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate newsreader client software—a program that resembles an email client (and is often integrated with one) but accesses Usenet servers instead. Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer well because of the sheer amount of data involved. Some ISPs outsource news operation to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP ran the server itself. Many sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and the alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software and Erotica and, in the 21st century, accounts for over 99 percent of the article data. For those who have access to the Internet, but do not have access to a news server, . Though this or other "news-to-Web gateways" are not always as easy to use as specialized newsreader software—especially when threads get long—they are often much easier to search. Users who lack access to an ISP news server can use Google Groups to access the alt.free.newsservers newsgroup, which has information about open news servers. There are also Usenet providers that specialize in offering service to users whose ISPs do not carry news, or that carry a restricted feed. One list of such providers is available at Jeremy Nixon's list of Usenet providers . See also News Server Operation for an overview of how news systems are implemented. Newsreader clients Newsgroups are typically accessed with special client software that connects to a news server. With the rise of the World Wide Web , web Front-end s have sometimes been used to access newsgroups via the aforementioned news-to-web gateways. However, these gateways often provide limited features, and for that reason using a local client is still regarded as the best way to access newsgroups. Newsreader Clients are available for all major operating systems and come in all shapes and sizes. Mail clients or "communication suites" also now commonly have an integrated newsreader. Often, however, these integrated clients are of low quality, e.g. incorrectly implementing Usenet protocols, standards and conventions. Many of these integrated clients, for example the one in Microsoft 's Outlook Express , are disliked by purists because of their misbehavior. Moderated and unmoderated newsgroups A minority of newsgroups are moderated. That means that messages submitted by readers are not distributed to USENET, but instead are emailed to the '''moderators''' of the newsgroup, for approval. Moderated newsgroups have rules called '''charters'''. Moderators are persons whose job is to ensure that messages that the readers see in newsgroups conform to the charter of the newsgroup. Typically, moderators are appointed in the proposal for the newsgroup, and changes of moderators follow a succession plan. The job of the moderator is to receive submitted articles, review them, and inject approved articles so that they can be properly propagated worldwide. Such articles must bear the Approved: header line. Unmoderated newsgroups form the majority of USENET newsgroups, and messages submitted by readers for unmoderated newsgroups are immediately propagated for everyone to see. Creation of moderated newsgroups often becomes a hot subject of controversy, raising issues regarding censorship and the desire of a subset of users to form an Intentional Community . Technical details Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among a readership which is potentially widely distributed. These protocols most commonly use a Flooding Algorithm which propagates copies throughout a network of participating servers. Whenever a message reaches a server, that server forwards the message to all its network neighbors that haven't yet seen the article. Only one copy of a message is stored per server, and each server makes it available on demand to the (typically local) readers able to access that server. Usenet was thus one of the first Peer-to-peer applications, although in this case the "peers" are themselves servers that the users then access, rather than the users themselves being peers on the network. One difference between Usenet and newer Peer-to-peer applications is that one can request the automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled. Copyright holders may still request the manual deletion of infringing material using the provisions of World Intellectual Property Organization treaty implementations, such as the U.S. Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act . Organization The major set of worldwide newsgroups is contained within eight hierarchies, operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current "Big Eight" are:
(Note: the asterisks are used as Wildmat patterns, examples follow in parentheses) See also Great Renaming .
Binary content Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7- Bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute Binary content. Binary posts, due to their size and dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow the traffic. The oldest widely used encoding method is Uuencode , from the Unix Uucp package. In the late 1980s Usenet articles were often limited to 60,000 characters, and larger hard limits exist today. Files are therefore commonly split into sections that require reassembly by the reader. With the header extensions and the Base64 and Quoted-Printable MIME encodings, there was a new generation of binary transport. In practice, MIME has seen increased adoption in text messages, but it is avoided for most binary attachments. Some operating systems with Metadata attached to files use specialized encoding formats. For Mac OS, both Binhex and special MIME types are used. Other lesser known encoding systems that may have been used at one time were BTOA , XX Encoding , BOO , and USR Encoding . In an attempt to reduce file transfer times, an informal file encoding known as YEnc was introduced in 2001. It achieves about a 30% reduction in data transferred by assuming that most 8-bit characters can safely be transferred across the network without first encoding into the 7-bit ASCII space. HISTORY |