Use
Xnews because it is simple yet powerful. |
Step
2 has the following sections:
See Figure 1 which is referred to
throughout this tutorial.
|
Anonymity
Many
of the commercial news servers above will also provide you with
anonymity in terms of "header" information that is included in your
posts. The kiddie porn hustlers (please report these muther f**ckers
when you see their posts) like this and so do the warez kidz. Actually,
most people would probably choose anonymity given the choice between
that and exposure to Big Brother's oversight, spam, crackpots, hackers,
etc. Anyways, this is what makes the Usenet so hard to police and
control. It really is the wild wild west of the internet.
|
|
Introduction
To Binary Usnet Access Top - Table
of Contents
In
order to get to the binary Usenet you need access to the Usenet. The
Usenet is accessible through your ISP just like your email and WWW
access.
- Newsgroups are on a news server
- E-mail is on a mail server (POP and
SMTP)
- Websites are on web servers
Your
Internet Service Provider (ISP) will likely have all three types of
service and grant you free access to them. Therefore, if you already
have internet access, you also likely have access to your ISP's
newservers.
- Your ISP
will give the information necessary to access their news server.
- There
may be some disadvantages with your ISP's access.
- Often
ISP have caps or limits on downloads and uploads
Your
ISP
|
Does
your ISP's news server have poor content and retention?
|
|
Affiliate goes here
|
|
|
may not provide much storage space so the binary material may be
limited in quantity and because of the way news servers work, the
binary posts may be fragmented or corrupt. As new material comes onto
an ISP's news server, the older material gets pushed out, sometimes in
a matter of hours. In
order to avoid these issues you may want to buy Usenet access from Affiliate goes here,
a popular news service provider who dedicates huge storage space for
binary posts so that they are complete and available for a long time.
There
are public news servers which are free but these are intended for text
messages only so don't count on them for binary posts.
Enter
Your News Server Address
Top
- Table
of Contents
Regardless
of where you get your newsgroup access from, you'll need to know how to
tell your newsreader to go to your ISP's news server or to the
Newsgroup Service Providers news server. Your ISP's support website
should have the correct address and the Newsgroup Service Provider will
provide this to you when you register.
- You need to get the NNTP news
server address to use in the setup of your newsreader software in STEP 3 - Viewing Newsgroup
news.telus.net
OR
newserver
- You need to find out if you can log
on to the news server anonymously or if you need to use a User ID and
Password. These should be the same as your User ID and Password for
accessing the internet.
Download/Upload
Caps and Limits Top - Table
of Contents
Because
of the large size of the some of the binary files that you will
download, and perhaps upload, to the Usenet, you will be consuming lots
of bandwidth. The high-speed ISPs do not like this, so they will
penalize you if you exceed a specified limit.
Often
this limits are called "caps". They restrict the amount of material you
can download/upload in a given period of time. It seems that 6 GB per
month is an average cap. If this seems like a lot, it is only 2 - 5
movies, depending on the quality.
There
is no denying that the small percentage of Usenet users
downloading and uploading lots of binary material costs the ISP a
disproportionate amount. However, it seems fairly obvious that this
also represents an opportunity for the ISP to offer more bandwidth at a
premium price .. I'd pay more to have 20 GB worth of bandwidth each
month.
Buy
Newsgroup Access From Newsgroup Service Providers
Top
- Table
of Contents
You
can buy Usenet access from Affiliate goes here,
a popular news service provider.
The
difference between Affiliate goes here and your ISP is that a Newsgroup Service Providers'
entire business is dedicated to ensuring you have access to the largest
amount of binary content, for as long as possible. This means they have
tons of hard disk storage, fast servers and high speed internet
connections.
Note
that because you will still be using your ISP's bandwidth to access
these Newsgroup Service Providers, you are still subject to your ISP's
monthly bandwidth cap. However, come out way ahead, because instead of
the fragmented junk on your ISP's news servers you will be downloading
complete files from a much larger selection of material available on
the Newsgroup Service Providers' new servers.
Public Newsgroup Access Top - Table
of Contents
There
are a number of NNTP servers that can be accessed free of charge. These
are most likely provided by local community organizations. However,
often publishing the address of an accessible site seems to result in
such a load increase that public access is shut off. As a result they
aren't widely published. Look in your yellow pages or go to your local
library bulletin board to find a free net near you.
Sometimes
an ISP will block certain newsgroups. Some Internet sites offer free
NNTP service and their servers are referred to as Public NNTP servers.
Many of the public servers cater to different sets of newsgroups.
Unfortunately, they can be unreliable and because of the higher cost to
host binary usenet groups (storage and bandwidth costs), they will
likely only provide text posts.
Bottom
line, don't count on using public Usenet access to use the binary
usenet groups.
|
How
Much Time Does it Take to Download Binary Files?
If
you don't have broadband cable or DSL internet access your ability to
participate in the activities described in this tutorial are limited
simply because dial-up connections are too slow to download 600 MB
videos or 750 MB CD volumes. However, a 56 K dial-up connection is
sufficient for downloading pictures and MP3's.I suppose there are
people downloading entire movies (600 MB to 1.5 GB) but this will be a
weekend project. With broadband internet access it is an hour or two at
the most.
To
give you an idea of the differences in speed, here are some comparisons
of the transfer rate for a 10 MB file:
- 9.6 kb/s telephone
modem - 2.3 hours
- 4.4 kb/s telephone
modem - 1.5 hours
- 28.8 kb/s telephone
modem - 46 minutes
- 56 kb/s telephone
modem - 24 minutes
- 128 kb/s ISDN modem -
10 minutes
- 1.54 Mb/s T-1
connection - 52 seconds
- 4 Mb/s cable modem - 20
seconds
- 10 Mb/s cable modem - 8
seconds
Source:
Cablelabs
It
is worthwhile noting that the speed with which you can upload/download
to/from a commercial news service provider is limited to the speed of
your ISP's web servers. This will likely be about 75% less than the
speed you get from their news servers because you have a direct pipe to
their news servers on their proprietary network (ie cable lines or
telephone lines). The internet is in all likelihood slower than this
unless you have connected to big pipes.
|
|
|
