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 newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, [news:sci.math sci.math] and [news:sci.physics 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 have been 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.
Today, Usenet has lost importance compared 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).
Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer well, because of the complexity and data throughput 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% of the article data.
For those who have access to the Internet, but do not have access to a news server, Google Groups () 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 Jeremy Nixon's list of Usenet providers.
See also News server operation for an overview of how news systems are implemented.
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 often shunned because of their misbehavior.
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.
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.
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 that 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.*, 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.* and ne.* serve specific regions such as Japan 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.
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 know 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.
UUCP/USENET Logical Map - June 1, 1981 / mods by S. McGeady 11/19/81+=+===================================+==+ | | | | | | wivax | | | | | | | | | microsoft| uiucdcs | | | | genradbo | | | | | | (Tektronix) | | | | | | | purdue | | | decvax+===+=+====+=+=+ | | | | | | | | | | | pur-phy | | tekmdp | | | | | | | | | | | +@@@@@@cca | | | | | | | | | | | | | +=pur-ee=+=+=====+===+ | | | csin | | | | | | | | +==o===+===================+==+========+=======+====teklabs=+ | | | | | | | pdp phs grumpy wolfvax | | | | | | | | | | | cincy unc=+===+======+========+ | | | | bio | | | | | (Misc) | | (Misc) | | | | sii reed | dukgeri duke34 utzoo | | | | | | | | | | | | +====+=+=+==+====++======+==++===duke=+===+=======+==+=========+ | | | | | | | | | | | u1100s | bmd70 ucf-cs ucf | andiron | | | | | | | | | | | | | red | | | | | pyuxh | | | | zeppo | | | | | psupdp---psuvax | | | | | | | | | | | alice | whuxlb | utah-cs | | houxf | allegra | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +--chico---+ | +===+=mhtsa====research | /=+=======harpo=+==+ | | | | | | | | / | | | | hocsr | | +=+=============+=/ cbosg---+ | | | ucbopt | | | | | esquire | | : | | | cbosgd | | | : | | | | | | ucbcory | | eagle==+=====+=====+=====+=====+ | | | : | | | | | | | | | +-uwvax--+ | : | | | mhuxa mhuxh mhuxj mhuxm mhuxv | | | : | | | | | | : | | | +----------------------------o--+ | : | | | | | | ucbcad | | | ihpss mh135a | | : | | | | | | | : \\--o--o------ihnss----vax135----cornell | | : | | | | | +=+==ucbvax==========+===+==+=+======+=======+=+========+=========+
(ucbvax): | | | |
(UCB) : | | | | (Silicon Valley)
ucbarpa cmevax | | menlo70--hao| ucsfcgl |
ucbonyx | | | sri-unixLegend: | | sytek====+========+
| | |
| | | | - | / \\ + = Uucp sdcsvax=+=======+=+======+ intelqa zehntel<br><h1>"Bus" | | | o jumps sdcarl phonlab sdcattb
UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and 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 the 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. 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. 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, obsoleting 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 at the University of Toronto, was comparable to B News in features but offered considerably faster processing. In the early 1990s, InterNetNews 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 , Marc Andreesen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag , which revolutionized the WWW by turning it into a graphical medium. On the more nefarious side, it was also the first place to suffer from spam, with the infamous Canter & Siegel lawyers (aka the Green Card Lawyers) spamming Usenet and drawing the ire of Internet users everywhere.
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.
Over time, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased. A small sampling of the growth follows: <table border"1" cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2>
Usenet can be a tool boosting an individual's ability to communicate, free from governmental and other organizational restraints. Seven major features that stand out are:
To some, these features are indications of what societies could become, or would likely become, when interactive information networks such as Usenet and the Internet become the dominant means of communication.
These analogies of the social aspect of Usenet are not necessarily compatible with each other. Anarchism tends to emphasize individual freedom, community values, mutual ties and cooperation. Democracy usually requires a binding 'majority rules' decision, running counter to anarchic principle, as some would argue.
There exist various indications that those analogies are either one-sided or wrong. The reality of how Usenet is used might be not as simple as some might imagine from the above descriptions. However, others claim that what functions online can also work offline. If democracy is not compatible with the anarchistic nature of Usenet or Internet in general, then it is bad for democracy.
Communication on Usenet may be perceived by some (critics or users) as not very constructive, or worse yet, undesirable. In certain newsgroups it is frequently excessively aggressive, as some people engage in flame wars. The discussion might seem unproductive, with endless disputes. It may contain offensive language and very objectionable opinions on sensitive issues related to Racism, Gender role, etc. The non-offensive messages might be "spam," or unsolicited off-topic postings such as advertisements for pornography sites. A group may be flooded with messages by a very limited number of participants, being not very open and friendly to newcomers. In addition, the most active parts of the Usenet include exchange of pornographic files (especially pictures) and music files (especially in MP3 format). Newsgroups with more mature audiences, however, tend to avoid nasty exchanges, focussing on discussing more productive things, such as the newsgroup topic.
In addition, the said freedom in the alt hierarchy is limited in that unless a newly created newsgroup meets certain conditions and goes through certain procedures, it will not be carried by many news servers, potentially resulting in a wasted effort. In general, the seemingly anarchic system is indeed not without some administrative-level controls. These carriers exert influence on newsgroups' birth and survival as well. Nevertheless, if a Critical Mass of users requests that their server administrators allow for the creation of a new newsgroup, the creation process is more likely to succeed.
It is also noticeable that there is an obvious hierarchy in the way newsgroups are organized. While some of the other interfaces for online communication support much less hierarchical organization of information, such as the World Wide Web, Usenet is not one of them.
The more general criticisms that apply to Usenet and many other kinds of online communication include the statement that Usenet is mostly a text-based medium, empowering the literate and articulate, while being less accessible to others. The counterpoint to this argument is that being text-based makes Usenet more accessible to visually impaired computer users who use text-reading software to navigate through the Internet. The issue of the Digital divide, namely that some people simply do not have access to the Internet, is another reason one might point out that Usenet is not entirely democratic or open.
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