Usenet

usenetreviewz.com – a quick video review of newshosting’s USENET service

Best Usenet Server

The best Usenet service for any individual will generally depend on how they intend to use the service. If one intends to do a lot of file downloading, for instance, they will likely need a pay service that offers long archive times and access to any and every file uploaded. If a user only wishes to participate in discussions, they may be able to get away with using a free service provided by a university or other non-profit institution. If a user only needs technical information, there are corporate options available that can cater to these needs.

The best Usenet service for those who wish to download files is one which keeps their posts available for a long interval after they’ve been added to the newsgroup. Obviously, not every user is going to log on every day and they may miss out on a file they very much wanted if their server deletes it too quickly. Newsgroup servers operated by ISPs oftentimes have short storage intervals and, for these users, subscribing to a third-party service is usually the best bet. There are many such services available online and most of them are very affordable.

For users who like to chat, the best Usenet service need not have attachments or long archive times among its services. Universities offer such services for free to anyone. These are excellent for those who love a spirited debate with intelligent individuals. There will generally be no binaries available on these services as the bandwidth requirements would make it impossible for the institution to keep the service alive and available. However, because Usenet users can be very helpful to one another, there’s a good chance anyone on these newsgroups will be more than willing to either exchange files by other means or to point a lost user in the right direction.

Corporate newsgroup servers are among the best Usenet service options for technicians and for those who simply have an expansive interest in technology. These servers usually store their posts for a very long time making even older information for technology and products that are past their prime easily-accessible. These services are free, in most cases, and can be accessed by any newsreader software. Some of them do include binaries among their content, particularly patches and fixes for software which is discussed within the various newsgroups.

One’s Internet Service Provider may offer access to newsgroups but this may well not be the best Usenet service for many users. These services are oftentimes offered as something of an auxiliary service and not maintained as well as the servers offered by companies that offer newsgroup access as their main service. There may be problems with incompletes and the message archive time is sometimes very short. For very dedicated users, it’s usually best to pay a bit for a service which is reliable and whose services are tailored to enthusiasts. The amount of files that may be downloaded usually offsets the price in short order.

Question by Brian: What is a good free usenet server?

Best answer:

Answer by tellmeplease
Usenet is a vast resource of information and entertainment. Usenet itself is made up of thousands of individual computers called news servers. Each news server may contain up to tens of thousands of discussion topics called newsgroups. Within each newsgroup are hundreds of people discussing a particular topic.

Finding what you want among these thousands of servers, newsgroups and messages can be difficult. The purpose of NewsServers.net is to help make sense of usenet through tutorials, free news server databases, community forums and much more. If you find you have questions please feel free to stop by our message forums or send email to webmaster@newsservers.net.

What do you think? Answer below!

Finding Free Usenet Servers

Newsgroup access is generally provided by one’s ISP but, in some cases, this will entail an extra charge. There are paid services online that offer access to newsgroups but, if one’s needs don’t include downloading binaries, there are a host of free Usenet servers available on the Internet that offer at least text downloads from the various groups. These services may be available for a variety of reasons including corporate-sponsorship of free servers that promote their products, university sponsorship of a free server to foster free speech and lively debates or simply bad network administration practices.

Free Usenet servers are sometimes maintained by corporations. Those corporations that provide these services do so for both their own and their customer’s benefit. While there are newsgroups for just about every type of technology and software, the length of time an article may be archived is determined by the company providing the access. The corporate servers allow the companies to keep useful articles alive indefinitely and, thus, allow technicians and end-users to access information which may help them solve any problems they have with the products. Of course, this is also good advertising for the company, a large part of the reason these servers are offered.

Universities offer free Usenet servers to anyone and everyone in the interest of keeping debate alive on the Internet. The good aspects of this service, aside from not paying a dime, is the fact that there will be a diversity of opinions and interests expressed on the server and that anyone can participate. On the downside, these servers generally don’t allow for the exchange of binary files. Exchanging binaries consumes large amounts of bandwidth and allowing this service at no charge would make the maintenance of the server unfeasible for almost any agency.

In some cases, free Usenet servers may be the result of the administrator of the server simply failing to provide adequate security. These servers, in most instances, will allow users full-access to the technology’s power, including the downloading and uploading of binaries. Of course, all this activity will soon catch the attention of the administrator and result in the security hole being patched, usually within a day or so. For that reason, these servers are usually not a reliable means of obtaining access to newsgroups. There are various sites that keep lists of such servers and the entries usually change by the day.

Free Usenet servers are excellent for technicians and for those who have no real interest in using the binary exchange functionality of the various groups. Between a university server and a corporate server, most users will easily be able to find all the information they need regarding any subject, albeit only in text form. Those free servers that do allow binary exchange may be fleeting in their existence, but are a useful option for those who don’t require consistent access to the service and who don’t want to add an extra charge to their monthly Internet access bill.

NewsDemon.com Newsgroups Now Offers Free Two Weeks of Usenet Access
GREENVILLE, S.C., Aug. 26 /PRNewswire/ — NewsDemon.com Newsgroups has announced a new addition to its feature-rich service by providing new customers an additional 14 days of service on all monthly subscription accounts at the end of the first month. The way it works: In order to activate this special, members who sign up and remain an active monthly Usenet subscriber to NewsDemon.com …
Read more on redOrbit

NewsDemon.com Newsgroups Now Offers Free Two Weeks of Usenet Access
NewsDemon.com Newsgroups has announced a new addition to its feature-rich service by providing new customers an additional 14 days of service on all monthly subscription accounts at the end of the first month.
Read more on PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance

UsenetServer Launches New Website
ASHBURN, Va., Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — USENETSERVER.COM, the recognized leader in affordable Usenet access, is pleased to announce the launch of its new internationalized website. The new UsenetServer.com website launch is part of UsenetServer’s commitment to bring premium, affordable Usenet to end-users throughout the world. In addition to more streamlined content and other tools, such as the …
Read more on redOrbit

Technical Operational Details of Free Usenet Servers and Message Transmission

Basically, Usenet is only a set of protocols that generate, store and retrieve news ‘messages’ and ‘articles’ so that they are exchanged as free Usenet reading materials with a wide distribution for a large readership. As such, such free Usenet protocols use special flooding algorithm techniques for propagating copies to the entire network of free Usenet servers. When a message reaches one server, it is immediately transmitted to all the Usenet servers in the network neighborhood that have not received the article. If a particular Usenet server had received a message once, it retains only one copy and that message is available on demand to all the readers who have access to that server. Hence, the Usenet server network possesses a peer-to-peer characteristic by sharing the resources through instant exchange process for free Usenet access.

The first formal messages exchange specification of the Usenet servers was RFC 850, which was upgraded to RFC 1036. The Usenet servers have the necessary support to remove any positing that can be termed as unsuitable. When this option is exercised and the message is cancelled, it is removed from the entire Usenet free network. Unfortunately, this facility is normally disabled due to the difficult process of evaluating such contents as suitable or unsuitable. However, it is possible for copyright holders to request manual deletion of the postings if there had been a copyright infringement. Such request can be made under the express provisions of the treaty implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organization. One such treaty is the US Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act. The Usenet free messages and articles are transmitted through the Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP on TCP Port 119. This port is for unprotected and standard connections. The SSL encrypted connections use TCP port 563 but only a handful of websites uses this port.

There are nine hierarchies for the major set of newsgroups operating on a worldwide basis. Out of the nine hierarchies, eight are operated under voluntary consensual guidelines. These guidelines govern their naming and administration. The eight hierarchies, known as the big eight are

­  comp.* for computer related discussions. Examples are comp.software and comp.sys.amiga

­  humanities.* for literature, philosophy, and fine arts, such as humanities.design.misc. and humanities.classics

­  misc.* for various miscellaneous topics, like misc.kids, misc.forsale, and misc.education

­  news.* for announcements and discussions on news that pertain to Usenet and not current news. Examples are news.admin and news.groups

­  rec.* for recreation and entertainment, like rec.arts.movies and rec.music

­  sci.* for discussions related to science, such as sci.research and sci.psychology

­  soc.* for general social discussions. Examples are soc.culture.african and soc.college.org

­  talk.* for talking about all types of controversial topics, such as talk.origins, talk.politics, and talk.religion

The ninth hierarchy is alt.* hierarchy, which is not controlled by the procedures and guidelines of the big eight. Hence, alt.* is loosely organized. Since binaries are posted in alt.binaries.*, it is the largest of all the free Usenet hierarchies. Apart from these nine, regional hierarchies and language-specific hierarchies also exist to serve specific regions or language groups. For example, japan.*, ne.*, and malta.* Usenet servers cater specifically to Japan, New England, and Malta, respectively. The Usenet download of such hierarchies from free Usenet servers is quite easy. Even though some users like to refer to the big eight by the term ‘Usenet’, others include alt.* also in that terminology. For the entire Usenet free newsgroups medium that includes all the privately organized news systems, the term ‘netnews’ is used.

The Usenet messages are distributed as binary files by using programs that can encode 8-bit values into standard ASCII. Normally, the files are split into sections that have to be reassembled at the reader’s end. The Usenet free binary content is uploaded to the Usenet servers by archiving the files first into RAR archives and then creating Parchive files. For recreating any missing data, parity files are used. The appearance of Base64 and MIME encodings, binary transportation received a technological boost. MIME had been increasingly adopted for transmission of text messages but is avoided for majority of binary attachments. Other encoding systems like XX encoding, USR encoding, BTOA, and BOO had been used at times but they are not in vogue very much now.

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