What is Uncensored Usenet?
Usenet is older than the internet itself. Originally set up to allow academics and others
in specialized fields to engage in group discussions with their peers across the globe, it
has since evolved into an uncensored system of exchanging virtually anything that can be
transmitted between computers.
Usenet functions a lot like email. Except that instead of addressing messages to an
individual, they are addressed to a group. And anyone wishing to read or post messages in
a particular group, does so by connecting to a Usenet server across an internet
connection. A newsreader (i.e. Outlook Express) is needed on the user’s computer to
read articles and download attached files. You “subscribe” to a group by telling
the software in your own computer to check the messages in a particular group. (Don’t
be frightened by the term “subscribe.” Nowhere is there ever a subscriber list.
The term “subscribe” is used in reference to how you set up your computer and
software. Only you and your computer know which groups you have “subscribed”
to.)
There is no “central” Usenet server. Rather there are thousands of servers
chained and crosslinked together in order to exchange articles between them, and to keep
the articles available for their own users to read for a period of time ranging from hours
to weeks. (It is this lack of centralization that has protected Usenet from the legal
attacks such as that which destroyed Napster.) Join worldusenet.com
today and instantly tap into uncensored USENET, the World's Largest Online Community and
Communicate with more than 25 million regular usenet newsgroup users and thousands
Uncensored Usenet newsgroups!! USENET HISTORY
The idea of network (
Usenet ) news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis,
thought of using UUCP to connect machines for the purpose of information exchange among
users. They set up a small network of three machines in North Carolina.
Initially, traffic was handled by a number
of shell scripts (later rewritten in C), but they were never released to the public. They
were quickly replaced by ``A'' news, the first public release of news software.
``A'' news was not designed to handle more
than a few articles per group and day. When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten
by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the ``B'' release (a.k.a. Bnews). The
first public release of Bnews was version-2.1 in 1982. It was expanded continuously, with
several new features being added. Its current version is Bnews-2.11. It is slowly becoming
obsolete, with its last official maintainer having switched to INN.
Another rewrite was done and released in
1987 by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer; this is release ``C'', or C-News. In the time
following there have been a number of patches to C-News, the most prominent being the
C-News Performance Release. On sites that carry a large number of groups, the overhead
involved in frequently invoking relaynews, which is responsible for dispatching incoming
articles to other hosts, is significant. The Performance Release adds an option to
relaynews that allows to run it in daemon mode, in which the program puts itself
in the background.
The Performance Release is the C-News
version currently included in most releases.
All news releases up to ``C'' are primarily
targeted for UUCP networks, although they may be used in other environments as well.
Efficient news transfer over networks like TCP/IP, DECNet, or related requires a new
scheme. This was the reason why, in 1986, the ``Network News Transfer Protocol'', NNTP,
was introduced. It is based on network connections, and specifies a number of commands to
interactively transfer and retrieve articles.
There are a number of NNTP-based
applications available from the Net. One of them is the nntpd package by Brian Barber and
Phil Lapsley, which you can use, among other things, to provides newsreading service to a
number of hosts inside a local network. nntpd was designed to complement news packages
such as Bnews or C-News to give them NNTP features.
A different NNTP package is INN, or
Internet News. It is not merely a front end, but a news system by its own right. It
comprises a sophisticated news relay daemon that is capable of maintaining several
concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is therefore the news server of choice for many
Internet sites.
Today, Usenet connects tens of thousands of
sites around the world, from mainframes to PC's. With thousands of newsgroups and untold
thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world's largest computer network.
Glossary of Usenet Terms
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