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What is Usenet?(A Definitive Article for Usenet Beginners - but who do already use computers and surf the internet)Preamble First in this article I am going to give you an explanation and overview of Usenet, and afterwards provide some links so that you can research more. Those who know the subject better than I do are welcome to write to correct anything or to ask me to add links to their articles. The subject matter here is important, if you don't know about Usenet, because either you are missing a way to fill out your collection of music and other files, or, if you are the discussion-loving type, you are missing out on making friends and alliances as well as counter alliances and enemies from all over the world, taking part in a very interactive educational and even character-forming process. You are missing out being part of a fairly elite community of people who entertain themselves on Usenet so fully, that nothing else going on in cyberspace grabs their attention quite as much, and indeed some of whom even have blurred the distinction between Usenet and Real Life, and have personally got to know the people they talk to in groups, and in some cases - I know three such marriages just from one group I attended - they even find their soulmate that way. Others travel half way around the world to attend meet-ups with people they talk to every day but have never seen, or drive to the other end of America just to stalk an enemy they made in the course of a discussion! Some authors have called Usenet "The Human Encyclopedia", some have termed it "The Hate Machine" (Steve Chaney of alt.bonehead.steve-chaney coined this one) and I have called it in some of my posts "The greatest game there has ever been". Although for many people it is actually the best part of the online world, oddly there are many people with sizable on-line presences who don't use it at all and partly this is due to the fact that many people on here are in no great hurry to increase the number of participants, as they like how it is now, and more participants might actually reduce the freedoms we have in the future, but also because people are not treated with kid gloves by the people with existing Usenet franchises, and a clumsy start is likely to see you getting your head verbally kicked in. In other words, usenet is definitely the right room for an argument, I've told you once.
Usenet is a term that describes the so-called news groups discussion groups that exist pretty much in parallel to the internet, although it looks more like souped up e-mail to a whole group of people at once and uses a different protocol, known as NNTP, has different servers and is older than the internet. There is also, within google, an interface between usenet and the world wide web, and also interfaces between NNTP and various mailing lists, which used to be highly popular but are less controllable than Usenet as you can't decide day by day how much involvement on the reading side you will have, you just get the lot, if you subscribe to one. You could easily be inundated. So you do not need newsreader software to look at Usenet, at least the main groups in the discussive part, but it helps. You will always falter in Usenet unless you are using proper software.
The two parts of Usenet; binary groups and discussion groupsFirst off, I would like to talk for a couple of paragraphs about the binary parts of Usenet, and then get that out of the way.there is also a sizeable chunk of Usenet that is all about sharing so-called binary files. You can tell these groups because they have the term 'binaries' or equivalent in another language, like 'binarios', in their name. It is possible to send binaries to non-binary newsgroups, but this is not appreciated, and some services have ways of blocking it. Binaries means anything that isn't plain text. That's all the other kinds of files you can attach to e-mails, making them of course a lot bigger. People are sharing music, pictures (mainly, regrettably, pornographic pictures) films and games, e-books, software, you name it, all virtually unpoliced. The laws that are being applied to Napster and the other www based file sharing networks have not impacted, as yet, on Usenet, and I don't know of any cases of people who have been in hot water because of file sharing using Usenet. In order to get the best of that half of the Usenet, you need to learn about Y-encoding and get a Y-decoding newsreader software, like Newsbin. Very little discussion takes place in the binary newsgroups, mainly because binary newsreaders aren't really geared up for easy conversation, and the news readers that are geared up for easy conversation just show Y encoded binaries as a string of meaningless code. This is also why there are often separate request groups to the groups where the binaries are posted, and those who like to post their files in response to people's requests look at the request group with non binary newsreaders and then post on the main relevant binary group with their Y encoding software.If you want to know more about why Y encoding is used, there are technical articles you can search for, but in a nutshell it's about preserving bandwidth. It saves about 30% of the space, and therefore the load time. The resulting file after de-coding again takes up the same space as the MIME encoded file which is the main non Y-encoded encoding mechanism that you are automatically using when sending attachments on your e-mails, etc, and which causes the outgoing or incoming mail to be bigger than you expect when you see the attached file on its own in your computer. That's why you can sopmetimes save diskspace by making sure you have opened all the mails with attachments in your mail folders, saved them somewhere else as .xls or whatever it is, and then delete the mail with the attachment in from the inbox or sent items folders. The net gain is from stripping out the MIME encoding. Because newsgroups don't usually let through more than about a kilobyte in a single message, and music files tend to be much larger than that, Y-encoders tend to break their messages into parts. Binary newsreaders find all the parts and treat them as a single set, ignoring the message if not all parts are there, then, if they are, downloading them in sequence, putting them together and decoding them, and saving the file somewhere on your hard disk. These binary files are regularly infected with viruses, spyware and phishing software, and you would be ill-advised to go binary collecting with a machine that doesn't have a good up to date copy of Symantec Antivirus, or similar. You are also not going to have much joy of your binary collecting if you have a dial up connection. You also won't find the binary parts of Usenet on the Google interface. Nobody really knows how many people are downloading files over binary groups, there are few effective controls, and we cannot say whether the users of binary usenet are more numerous than the users of discussion Usenet, and how big the overlap between the two is. So far, it seems to have been a much smaller but more intelligent clientele than the world wide web has. The really addictive and intellectual part of Usenet, however, is the discussive part, and for this you don't need to worry about Y-encoding and your computer probably already has the software it needs to take part. Outlook Express, in the Microsoft package, contains a perfectly acceptable newsreader, and there are others such as Gravity and Forte Agent which are frequently recommended.
Setting up the service and getting started in the discussion groupsWhen you open up one of these pieces of software it will ask you to point it to a news service, of which there are many free services, but also some subscriber ones like newsguy or altopia. I personally use the latter. The software will also ask you to put in a posting identity. You don't need to tell it, for the purposes of usenet as opposed to normal e-mail, a valid e-mail address. If you do, your address will be harvested by machines and you will be inundated with spam. So you enter a phony address, which could be a real address to you which has been altered in some way. Some people write something like "John@REMOVETHISsmith.com", thinking that a harvesting bot will take it at face value, and send the mail into dead space, but any sentient person who wished to talk to john@smith.com will work out how to do that. This is a fairly recommended practice, another is to put a wholly phony address in the header and tell people in the body of the message your adddress but without the tell-tale "@" sign. Eg "john"at"smith.comOnce you are sucessfully subscribed your software will copy the names of all the groups available on your newsserver, and keep a record of them which it will maintain in most cases automatically, once a day adding new groups to the list, but nonetheless you can reset the list from time to time. Of the nearly 100,000 groups on Usenet, about 80% of them are barely used at all. Many groups are set up intended as insults to people, (especially in the alt.flame category) or on some kind of wishful impulse which fades when nobody takes them up on it. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of groups that have a hundred or more participants, and thousands that have between ten and a hundred participants. There is no limit, other than time or any limits a cheap subscription to a paid newsfeed might have, to the number of groups you can subscribe to - subscription merely means going there, and telling your software to keep it handy as you're likely to go there again. Its not like chat rooms or mailing lists where people need to log on or log off, and it always cracks people up when people wander into newsgroups for the first time and politely ask whether they can subscribe or not. That means you can be a usenetter and be relatively low volume, reading the messages of just a few favirite posters in one group and "lurking", which means reading and not writing, or you could be writing 60 postes a day to 6 or 7 different groups. The time on average spent on writing a post could be from a a few seconds to fire off a one-line response to a finely handicrafted essay that it took you the best part of a day to construct. That's the time to stop, by the way, if you still can. You may find that the first groups you select off the list are empty, in which case, keep trying. When you see some interesting diuscussion going on,it's advisable to read first. In particular the Charter for the group and the FAQ for the group. It's perfectly acceptable, if the FAQ or the charter haven't been posted on the group for a while to ask for the FAQ or charter. In your selection of groups it may help to understand what the different parts of the name mean. The first part shows what sort of group it is, and that is determined by what hierarchy it is in. Hierarchy is shown by prefixes like soc.*, alt.*, free.* pl.*, etc. Hierarchies like alt.* and free.* are 'anything goes' hierarchies, where it is quite rare to find any policing going on by moderators, and people can write in whatever language they like. There are lots of sub-hierarchies within the alt.* hierarchy. It is easy to set up groups within the alt.* hierarchy, and so most of the wasted space is here as well as mot of the groups where anything goes and risquee behaviour is the order of the day. The soc.* or social hierarchy, of which the biggest sub-hierarchy is soc.culture.*, can be moderated, but many groups have both moderated and non-moderated versions. Moderation is for thise who do not want to read bad netiquette, but it tends to cause problems with the flow of discussion, so the moderated groups tend to be lower traffic than their non-moderated counterparts. The main language on these groups is English. In national categories, such as the pl.* category, there may be special rules, such as the requirement to post in Polish, the inability to crosspost to other categories, etc. Contrast this to the alt.pl* subhierarchy, where Polish is requested but not required, and where you can crosspost to other groups outside the alt.pl.* sub-hierarchy. Google groups offers a fuller explanation of the hierarchies and also gives you a profile of the group you are thinking of joining, in the Beta section for Google Groups 2. Discretion and anonymityWhen you finally post, you need to remember that more people could read it than you think. Not only could about ten times more people have read it than answer it, which is the assumption I always make, but also it will be archived in Google (unless you make an instruction not to archive, but this is a beginner's article, so I'm not teaching that here) and read for ever at the click of a mouse, so press the send button only when you are ready for many people to see what you have said. You can cancel your own articles, but anyone who has downloaded it in the meantime has it, and they can always then re-post it with their answer, and you won't be able to cancel that.Bearing in mind the loonies that you get on Usenet, of which you dear reader may soon be one, if you are not already, it is advisable not to give out details or trails to your own identity on Usenet. You can create a persona which you can use for years and which becomes your usenet identity, or if it suits you better you can identify yourself. Women, or people with little kids or people who are wooried people could blackmail them over their Usenet use need to cultivate personas, and this demands careful planning. In order to have total anonymity and enjoy free speech even if your views are controversial, you can in the future, but rather not while you are a beginner, learn about anonymous remailers, a chain of mixmaster remailers via the mail to news gateway enables you to post the most controversial material you can think of with virtual impunity, as long as you do not succumb to the temptation to correspond or meet with your readership, one of whom will eventually out you, even if they have to do a Mata hari act to do it, as in the infamous case of Jackie the Tokeman and Allisson Roome-Seiler, played out on the back drop of soc.singles which came to a denoument in the Spring of 2002, after the Tokeman had been posting provocative material for several years prior to that point, and had received numerous death threats. Allisson basically seduced him into meating with her in real life, (although as she pointed out to me in her e-mail of 19th March 2005 asking me to get the facts straight he did contact her first. I am happy to make that amendment) and then she gave out his personal details, which pretty much put paid to his Usenet career, and his freedom of speech. People on soc.singles are still fighting years afterwards about the rights and wrongs of that little case, and it is probably the most classic case study for people interested in internet and usenet anonymity. (According to Allisson's e-mail, Jackie was "looking for a way out of Usenet, and I and Mike were it". A good reason to pay heed before getting too involved in Usenet, as you may need to have a not exactly vanilla-flavoured encounter with someone to help you get out of the situation in which you find yourself. Let the poster beware.)
Coming up in the next part of the articleIn the second part of this article, which I don't have time to write today, I will explain about netiquette, make some further comparisons between Usenet and chatrooms, lists and other form of communication in cyberspace to give an even clearer impression of where Usenet fits in to the cyberpunk's toolbox, provide a short glossary of Usenet terms and profile some groups and some famous participants to look out for, as well as giving links to other more detailed essays on the subjects raised here, and structured links into the Google archive. YOu don't need to know netiquette to read, only to write, so you can already start lurking with the information I have already given you.Uncle Davey 15th January 2005. |
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