Introduction to Usenet: Clients, news servers and more.

Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post e-mail-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their ISP or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other. Usenet has been described as system of online collaboration and interaction similar to today's Web 2.0. It has also been pointed out that its decentralized structure makes it more democratic than Web 2.0.

Introduction

Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access 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).

The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within the sci hierarchy, for science. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read.

In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles which can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread. Most modern newsreaders display the articles arranged into threads and subthreads, making it easy to follow a single discussion in a high-volume newsgroup.

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 has 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, 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, Usenet articles are posted for general consumption; any usenet user has access to all newsgroups, unlike email, which requires a list of known recipients.

Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to mailing lists, web forums and weblogs. The difference, though, is that Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned, that information need not be stored on a remote server, that archives are always available, and that reading the messages requires not a mail or web client, but a news client (included in many modern e-mail clients).

ISPs, news servers, and newsfeeds

Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers 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. Most commonly, these accounts are through Supernews, Giganews and Usenet.com. 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 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 large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet services such as email and web access), and a disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles that are not the ISP's fault). 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, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data.

For those who have access to the Internet, but do not have access to a news server, Google Groups ([3]) allows reading and posting of text news groups via the World Wide Web. 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 UsenetProviders' list of Usenet providers (Germany) or Jeremy Nixon's list of (paid) 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-ends 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.

RFC 850 was the first formal specification of the messages exchanged by Usenet servers. It was superseded by RFC 1036.

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.

On the Internet, Usenet is typically on TCP Port 119.

Organization

The major set of worldwide newsgroups is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current "Big Eight" are:

* comp.*: computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
* misc.*: Miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
* news.*: Discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
* rec.*: Recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
* sci.*: Science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
* soc.*: Social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
* talk.*: Talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)
* humanities.*: Fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)

(Note: the asterisks are used as wildmat patterns, examples follow in parentheses)

See also Great Renaming.

The alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the procedures controlling groups in the Big Eight, and it is as a result less organized. However, groups in the alt.* hierarchy tend to be more specialized or specific—for example, there might be a newsgroup under the Big Eight which contains discussions about children's books, but a group in the alt hierarchy may be dedicated to one specific author of children's books. Binaries are posted in alt.binaries.*, making it the largest of all the hierarchies.

Many other hierarchies of newsgroups are distributed alongside these. Regional and language-specific hierarchies such as japan.*, malta.* and ne.* serve specific regions such as Japan, Malta and New England. Companies such as Microsoft administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support. Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include alt as well. The more general term "netnews" incorporates the entire medium, including private organizational news systems.

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 files 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.

The standard method of uploading binary content to Usenet is to first archive the files into RAR archives (for large files usually in 20 MB or 50 MB parts) then create Parchive files. Parity files are used to recreate missing data. This is needed often, as not every part of the files reach a server. These are all then encoded into yEnc and uploaded to the selected binary groups.

History

Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott.

UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984.

As the mesh of UUCP hosts rapidly expanded, it became desirable to distinguish the Usenet subset from the overall network. A vote was taken at the 1982 USENIX conference to choose a new name. The name Usenet was retained, but it was established that it only applied to news.[5] The name UUCPNET became the common name for the overall network.

In addition to UUCP, early Usenet traffic was also exchanged with Fidonet and other dial-up BBS networks. Widespread use of Usenet by the BBS community was facilitated by the introduction of UUCP feeds made possible by MS-DOS implementations of UUCP such as UFGATE (UUCP to FidoNet Gateway), FSUUCP and UUPC. The Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, was introduced in 1985 to distribute Usenet articles over TCP/IP as a more flexible alternative to informal Internet transfers of UUCP traffic. Since the Internet boom of the 1990s, almost all Usenet distribution is over NNTP, rendering obsolete the earlier dictum that "Usenet is not the Internet."

Early versions of Usenet used Duke's A News software. At Berkeley an improved version called B News was produced by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton. With a message format that offered compatibility with Internet mail and improved performance, it became the dominant server software. C News, developed by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, was comparable to B News in features but offered considerably faster processing. In the early 1990s, InterNetNews by Rich Salz was developed to take advantage of the continuous message flow made possible by NNTP versus the batched store-and-forward design of UUCP. Since that time INN development has continued, and other news server software has also been developed.

Usenet was the initial Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial Internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web,[6] and Marc Andreesen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag,[7] which revolutionized the World Wide Web by turning it into a graphical medium.

Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database. In 2001, this database was acquired by Google.

AOL announced that it would discontinue its integrated Usenet service in early 2005, citing the growing popularity of weblogs, chat forums and on-line conferencing. The AOL community had a tremendous role in popularizing the Usenet some 11 years earlier, with all of its positive and negative aspects. This change marked the end of the legendary Eternal September. Others, however, feel that Google Groups, especially with its new user interface, has picked up the torch that AOL has dropped—and that Eternal September has yet to end.

Over time, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased. It is important to note, however, that much of this traffic increase reflects not an increase in discrete users or newsgroup discussions, but instead the combination of massive automated spamming and an increase in the use of .binaries newsgroups in which large files (frequently pornography or pirated media) are often posted publicly.

Archives and Web interfaces

Google Groups / DejaNews

Google Groups hosts an archive of Usenet posts dating back to May 1981. The archive was originally started by a company called DejaNews (later only Deja), purchased by Google in February 2001. A Usenet Timeline is provided in the Help section. Already during the DejaNews era the archive had become a popular constant in Usenet culture, and remains so today.

However, there are two main issues people have with Google Groups and similar services:

1. Fear of loss of privacy. An archive simplifies ways to profile people. This has partly been countered with the introduction of the non-standard X-No-Archive: Yes header, which is itself seen as controversial.
2. The web interface. (See the following section.)

Note that there are two distinct types of "Google Groups", namely traditional Usenet groups and Google internal groups that can only be accessed from Google. The Google user interface and documentation does not make the distinction clear, which is probably deliberate. To many people a "Google Group" is just a group accessible (only) via Google.

The syntax to view an article available on Google Groups by its Message-ID can be simplified to http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=without-angle-brackets@example.org
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4zCix009Cv2acya@bionic35.bionic.zer.de
or to view the entire thread, use threadm= instead of selm=
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=4zCix009Cv2acya@bionic35.bionic.zer.de

Web interfaces

With the rising popularity of the World Wide Web, so have arisen many Web-to-Usenet gateways. These interfaces are seen as controversial by some Usenet users. Google Groups is usually cited as a prime example of what can go wrong with Web-to-Usenet gateways, since it is the most popular and largest such service. However, the criticism also applies to many other such gateways in principle.

Since February 2001 Google Groups has provided a web interface to Usenet newsgroups. It also allows the creation of mailing lists like Yahoo! Groups. In early 2007 Google Groups moved to a new "Web 2.0" interface with more icons, larger type and an America On-Line type interface. While seemingly deployed to improve the accessiblity of USENET the new interface has been widely (indeed nearly universally) disparaged for both its reduced usability and its utility.

One of many concerns that have been expressed about the Google interface is that novices may have difficulty realising that they are participating in a Usenet newsgroup rather than in a web forum hosted by Google. Google Groups is not very outspoken about the fact and doesn't make it very clear in the web interface that some of the groups at Google Groups are Usenet groups, while others are local Google-only groups.

Other concerns are:

* Web-to-Usenet gateways provide a service for e-mail spammers, since a spammer's web spider can now also extract e-mail addresses from Usenet postings without any additional effort. Before such gateways, an e-mail spammer would have to use a separate tool to gain access to a news feed (as Usenet spammers do). Since 2005, Google Groups tries to prevent e-mail address harvesting by scrambling the display of e-mail addresses on their web pages.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways often hide the fact from users that they are actually on Usenet, and that it would be a good idea to learn and follow Usenet customs and established rules. They further hide the fact that Usenet is still at its core a decentralized store-and-forward system and, therefore, articles do not simply appear "everywhere" once they have been posted. This typically leads to multiple posts with the same contents and/or expressed dissatisfaction about why there are no answers within minutes and/or why there are multiple answers which essentially say the same thing.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways often cut away or hide "overhead" information (e.g. header information like message IDs) or, even worse, signatures. This leaves Web-users puzzled about what people are talking about when they write things like "See my sig" or "See msgid ...".

* Web-to-Usenet gateways typically provide fewer features than conventional News Reader software. For example, the ability to filter (users, subject lines, etc.), to sort threads in multiple ways, draft articles, etc., is typically missing.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways are often very badly policed. Post 2006, this is typical not only of such gateways, but also many feed providers. Abusive behavior from the Web-to-Usenet gateway users in some newsgroups is now legendary, and the operators have not yet mustered the will and/or resources to effectively keep a lid on abusive users. Automated complaint systems seldom result in any action.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways enable less technically savvy people to enter Usenet. These people tend to be less familiar with the Usenet system and Usenet etiquette, and can cause annoyance for other users.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways lower the entry barrier to Usenet. The slightly higher entry requirements, and the degree of obscurity Usenet possesses required users to have a higher level of knowledge and capability and as such tended to exclude those who were not at least mildly computer savvy, which in turn had the effect of tending to guarantee at least a minimum level of education, which in turn, overall, tended to ensure at least a minimum level of decency in behaviour. This is not an iron rule of course, but merely a tendency overall, which of course when applied to millions of people, had a profound effect on the overall culture of Usenet.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways often offer a searchable archive. One of the advantages of Usenet was that posters knew their material was only being read by the readership of their group and would, in a week or two, have disappeared forever. This particular type of semi-public, semi-private conversation was unusual and very useful.

On the positive side:

* Web-to-Usenet gateways lower the entry barrier to Usenet, making it easier for non-technical people to become involved.

* Web-to-Usenet gateways often offer a searchable archive, making the vast amount of knowledge in Usenet more easily accessible.

References

* Stephen Daniel, James Ellis, and Tom Truscott (1980). USENET - A General Access UNIX® Network. (inside archive as usenet/uprop.n)
* Bruce Jones, archiver (1997). USENET History mailing list archive covering 1990-1997.

Source: WIkiPedia

Email and Newsgroup Etiquette

Email Etiquette In order to effeciently communicate on the
Internet it is critical to understand the unwritten rules of
email communication. Please use these tips as a guideline to
online email communication.

1.) Unless you are using encryption, Internet E-mail is not
secure.
2.) Do not use all capitals in email exchanges, it is
considered SHOUTING and is considered rude.
3.) Keep in mind
that the Internet is international, words and humor can be
perceived differently by different cultures.
4.) When replying
to messages be aware of "cc:" field. Recipients listed in the
"cc:" field will receive a copy of the post. (The "bcc:" field
sends messages blind, meaning recipients don't know that someone
else has received a copy of the email or been carbon copied)
5.)
Use emoticons :-) or to indicate expression.
6.) When
forwarding email be sure not to create a loop in the system. In
addition, be sure not to setup auto-responders to reply to every
email, or endless loops will be created.
7.) There can be costs
associated with Internet connectivity and downloading emails. Do
not send attachments that take a long time to download, without
the recipients consent.
8.) Include in the "subject" line a
heading that relates to the message body.
9.) Use 4-6 lines for
your signature line, this is an opportunity to highlight your
business or company information, but don't be ostentatious..

Mailing Lists & Newsgroup Etiquette In order to participate in
news groups, you must have an understanding of newsgroup
etiquette.

1.) Be familiar with lists/newsgroups prior to posting, read
posting.
2.) Keep in mind that newsgroups and mailing lists are
frequently archived and that posts will be preserved.
3.) If you
are replying to a message be sure to include the text of the
original message which you are replying to. Use ">" indicators
if your mail program does not do this for you.
4.) Don't get
involved in flame wars (or material which is personal and
unproductive).
5.) Keep in mind that the Internet is
international, words and humor can be perceived differently by
different cultures.
6.) Use 4-6 lines for your signature line,
this is an opportunity to highlight your business or company
information, but don't be ostentatious..
7.) When responding to
a post, keep the subject line the same, so that it will appear
in the same thread.
8.) Cross posting to multiple lists is often
prohibited. Read posting guidelines.
9.) Expect delays in
moderated forums, each posting must be approved.
10.) Anonymous
posts are unaccepted in many newsgroups.
11.) Be aware that some
people use aliases when posting to Usenet groups to avoid SPAM
(unsolicited email). Also keep in mind that anything goes on
unmoderated Usenet.
12.) Most lists don't allow for binary
attachments.

Resources - Library of Emoticons -
http://www.instant-messaging-software.com/instant-messaging-emoti
cons.htm
Library of Email Acronyms -
http://www.email-software.org/email-acronyms.htm
Email Client Software -
http://www.messaging-software.net/e-mail-client-software.htm

Is The Internet Censored?

When most people think about Internet censorship, the usual
suspects immediately come to mind : Communist China and
repressive Islamic countries. Unfortunately, Westerners have an
embarrassment all their own : Australia's net censorship law,
established in 2000.

Freedom House, a non-profit U.S. organization dedicated to
spreading human rights and freedom, undertakes regular surveys
on press freedom and censorship. Last year's survey found that
out of 186 countries, 69 had a free press, 51 had a partly-free
press, and 66 countries had no press freedom. Freedom House
suggested that only 21% of the world's population enjoy access
to a truly free press.

Some nations control Internet access through government servers
that censor incoming news and information, and in China "cyber
dissidents" have been imprisoned. Censorship is justified by
claims that Western democratic practices are disruptive to the
social values propagated by the local regime, or that society
must be protected from corruption by outside influences. One
Saudi spokesman for business interests commented that Saudi
Arabia's limited opening to the Internet was delayed until
technology was available to prevent access to information
contrary to Islamic values and "dangerous to our society".
Almost all Internet users in China and the Middle East are
blocked from accessing political Web sites that criticize the
government of their country.

However, Arab and Communist societies have a long history of
suppressing freedom of speech, so internet censorship in these
nations comes as no surprise. However, at the time Australia
first proposed its own form of internet censorship, it was still
considered a country with a completely free press. Freedom House
described the new Internet legislation as a measure that is
"onerous, privacy-intrusive, and will chill freedom of speech".

The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999,
the Australian Internet censorship legislation, came into effect
on January 1, 2000. Under this legislation, broad categories of
Internet content were prohibited. Australians are forbidden from
seeing online any material which could be inappropriate for
children, which includes any material classified RC or X by the
Classification Board. Such content includes material containing
detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use; child
pornography; bestiality; excessively violent or sexually violent
material; real or implied depictions of sexual activity; and
material which deals with issues or contains depictions which
require an adult perspective. Enforcement of the regulation of
the Internet is complaint-driven. Individuals, organizations, or
the Commonwealth, a State or Territory can make a complaint to
the ABA. If the ABA determines that the "prohibited content" is
hosted in Australia, it will direct the local ISP to remove it.

If the "prohibited content" is hosted outside Australia, the ABA
will notify the suppliers of approved filters of the content in
accordance with the Internet Industry Association's code of
practice. The Australian Internet Industry has a list of 16
approved filters. The criteria for selecting these filters
include ease of installation, ease of use, configurability,
ability for updates in respect of content to be filtered, and
availability of support. Effectiveness is not included in the
selection criteria. The filtering software is offered to
consumers, but is not compulsory.

Testing by Computer Choice (September/October 2000) found that
inocuous content, such as medical sites, were often blocked
while some adult content passed through the filter. For example,
iFilter blocked several Biblical sites, a family and child
mediation service approved by the Australian Federal
Attorney-General, the Institute of Australasian Psychiatrists,
and information about Catholics helping street kids. Apparently
technology is no substitution for parental supervision.

Aside from costing Australians 2.7 million Australian dollars
per year and making their country the laughingstock of the free
world, the legislation has had minimal effect. Despite the
multitude of pornography sites on the internet, there was no
pent-up demand to shut them down; within six months of
introducing of the legislation, the ABA received only 201
complaints about Internet content. By the end of June 2000, 197
investigations had been concluded. Of these, 37 were terminated
due to lack of information (for example, the details provided
with the complaint were insufficient to locate the content). Of
the remaining 160 completed investigations, 93 resulted in the
location of prohibited or potentially prohibited content, while
67 were found not to contain prohibited content. Around one
third of complaints related to content hosted in Australia.

The prohibited content included content hosted in Usenet
newsgroups, which is treated as content hosted in Australia if
the complainant has accessed the content from his or her ISP's
newsgroup server. The ABA issued final take-down notices for 62
postings of Internet content and referred 94 items to the makers
of approved filters. Of the 62 items of Internet content that
were the subject of take-down notices, at least 17 were later
moved to ISPs outside Australia. (ABA Annual Report 2000-2001).
So approximately one-third of the offensive websites were simply
relocated to servers outside of Australia.

In summary, filtering software products are ineffective, and
Australia cannot control websites hosted outside its borders.
The government won the approval of a few moralists who were
happy that "something has been done" about online smut, whether
or not the measures had any real effect.

However, a dangerous precedent has been set, and it is entirely
possible that the categories of prohibited Internet content will
be expanded in the future to ban political websites which
threaten "Australian values".

Incidents of this nature occured almost immediately after the
introduction of the censorship legislation. In a 2001 case,
Victoria anarchist Matthew Tayor was prosecuted by the
Australian Federal police at the behest of the FBI after posting
threatening statements inspired by Jim Bell's "Assassination
Politics" on websites in Ohio and California.

In 2002, NSW Police Minister Michael Costa wrote to the
Australian Communications Minister, Richard Alston, and Justice
Minister, Chris Ellison, requesting that 3 anti-WTO websites
(including Melbourne Indymedia) be shut down or that access to
them be restricted. Costa claimed the sites were providing
information "designed to aid the violent disruption of the
forthcoming WTO meeting in Sydney in November". Alston labelled
the sites "insidious, anti-democratic and interested in causing
violence, mayhem and anarchy".

Alston referred the matter to the Australian Broadcasting
Authority, which cleared Melbourne IndyMedia and Sydney anti-WTO
s11.org website of any wrongdoing. The ABA concluded that
grassroots news and activist websites were operating within the
law and that their rhetoric did not reach a "threshold" of
inciting violence. Costa then declared "we will be doing
everything we can to pursue it internationally". However,
Indymedia is a large network of independently-hosted
international sites, so further action proved impossible.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), an online civil liberties
organization, has described the Federal Government's online
censorship legislation as a failure, and recommended that
Internet censorship legislation "...be repealed and the costly
and failed Internet regulatory apparatus be dismantled."

Using Employment Newsgroups in Your Job Search

Newsgroups are online, message-based communities of people with
common interests. Each newsgroup is dedicated to a topic, and
you may write, search, read and reply to messages about that
topic. Several newsgroups are job and career related.

Some groups are dedicated to employment advertising, while
others are dedicated to resume submissions, job wanted messages,
or general discussions about employment and careers. The Usenet
Employment Newsgroups are a very productive source of job
posting. Thousands of jobs are posted to the various Newsgroups
each day and these opportunities are often overlooked by most
online job seekers. Many Employers, Recruiters, and Job Sites
automatically post their positions to the Newsgroups, and the
groups serve as a Meta Job Search Engine. Unfortunately, since
these are all free postings and anyone can post to newsgroups
the groups are filled with off topic posts, scams, and other
worthless junk.



Tips for Your Job Search

Most online job seekers do not use the employment newsgroups.
Most job seekers concentrate their efforts on the large
commercial job sites and the employment newsgroups require some
time and effort to investigate and use efficiently. Use the
JobMetaSeek Newsgroup Directory to determine if any of the
employment groups could be useful in your job search. Look for
employment newsgroups serving your industry, occupation or
locations of interest.

If you decide to incorporate one or more of the newsgroups into
your job search, you will want to use a program specifically
designed for newsgroups. Web site interfaces, such as Google or
the newsgroup function in Outlook Express are not the best
methods to access this material. One of the best Newsreader
available is Agent. It is available free of charge or can be
upgraded for a small fee. The program comes with complete
installation instructions and it includes excellent filtering
tools. Once you configure the software, the process of
retrieving and reading the messages of interest is more or less
automatic.

What are Newsreaders? Bringing the News Directly to You

People need to be in the know. That is why the news was probably
invented. Human being need to be updated of what is happening
around them, at least, or what is going on around the world. It
is remarkable to see how news has developed throughout the
history of human civilization. Back in the ancient times, people
would only hear pages announce the latest goings-on with the
king or the emperor's realm.

In the modern times, the newspaper emerged as a more powerful
and widespread medium for information dissemination. The 20th

century gave way to theinvention of the radio and television as

yet other potent channels for spreading the latest tidbits. The
90s gave way to the boom of the Internet, which is not
continuing to be fastest growing means of getting updated. One
of the offshoots of the wonder that is the Internet are
newsreaders, bring the news directly to people.

What Newsreaders Are

Newsreaders are basically programs that let people gain access
to the world of news. In a way, newsreaders retrieve the news
that people prefer to read so that they would not have to
manually retrieve them from their original sources. There are
two kinds of newsreaders.

During the early times of the internet, which means just a
decade ago, the term newsreader particularly referred to

software that let users read newsgroups and UseNet' which are

somewhat like online bulletins that keep people posted regarding
what is happening with a particular area of interest whether it
is about the wars in the middle east or Madonna's latest album.

Nowadays, the term is also used to refer to news feed readers or
aggregators, which in turn are programs that retrieve particular
content called feeds. With news feed readers, people would just
subscribe to a particular site or a particular section of the
site, and the newsreader would automatically retrieve the
updates.

What is the difference between the two?

The old newsreaders get news from a newsgroup. As said,
newsgroups are like online bulletin boards where people send
messages to be seen publicly. People subscribe to newsgroups to
discuss a particular topic which could be either general

politics, science, music, business, or specific Republicans,

Mariah Carey, or Fortune 500 Companies. With newsgroups, the
members themselves send the news to the server. When they learn
of something new regarding the particular topic of interest,
they can update the newsgroup members by posting a message.

On the other hand, news aggregators collect updates from any web
content, be it a web site, a blog, or a podcast, that publishes
web feeds. Users that like particular web content and would like
to keep track of that content's updates may just subscribe to it
using their newsreader. Whenever something new happens to that
content, the newsreader is automatically updated, letting the
subscriber gain immediate access to the update. The beauty of
news aggregators is that people may subscribe to just a
particular part of the entire web content they like, thus they
may choose to only get updates to that particular portion. This
is like having a particular column delivered to them regularly,
instead of receiving the whole newspaper all the time.

What Makes Newsreaders Great

Newsreaders are great tools for those who want to be in the know
but find it tedious to keep on checking for information.
Newsreaders reduce the need for people to manually go to
separate websites and forums just to see if something new has
happened. This allows people to know about all the things they
are interested in using just one program, making news retrieval
not only convenient, but easy and fast as well.

Where to Find Newsreaders

There are many newsreaders available throughout the Internet. To
know which ones are available to gain access to newsgroups and

Usenet, one may simple visit a website that provides information

about newsreaders, giving recommendations as to which ones are
good for getting updated using newsgroups.

Newsreaders are definitely great tools to keep people in the
know. The convenience and efficiency they provide make it appear
as if news is delivered directly to you.