Re: Canuck
iguana said:
Even though I'm in the IT biz, I have no idea about Usenet... give us a start.
The USENET has sometimes been called "the other half of the Internet". It's structured like the old BBS bulletin boards that we all dialed before the web sites. You access it through servers like NNTP, by running the "Mail/News" option of your browser or the Mail/News interface applications like MS-Outlook. The usenet is organized by newsgroups. Currently there are about 23,000 regular newsgroups running. Each newsgroup contains an index of messages. Messages can have attachments - such as jpegs or mpegs or executables. But be careful:
- More viruses encapsulated in .exe or .com files circulate through newsgroups than the worst email worms.
- Also - it's easier to post to Newsgroups anonymously than to bulletin boards, so often the content will be racier (way more illegal) than what you find in websites.
- To preserve anonymity people use dialups from office and public access phones. Dialups are slow so some contributers fragment the larger files (mpegs) and deliver them in hundreds modules that can later be assembled using special software.
- Often users will post links to their websites. Be careful. Some of these sites are full of illegal material that your provider and/or the authorities can trace to you if you browse there. Other links take you to an endless array of blind links and popups that can only be escaped by rebooting.