Usenet antidates the Internet by quite a few years. It pretty much started out with university servers and expanded to almost everywhere. They used UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy) to send the messages from server to server. Servers would automatically dial each other up in the wee hours of the night relaying messages back and forth. It was surprisingly effective. Took about a week for almost every server in the world that was connected that way to get all the messages. In fact newsservers still work that way only they now use the internet so it is much faster (1 day to propagate around the world).
Unfortunately the millions of messages a day gives spammers a gold mind of e-mail addresses. You can of course use a fake e-mail address but it keeps people for responding to you directly. I have to admit this current worm has me rethinking the need for people to directly address me.
Although I think this worm is on list members systems and mining their address books. BTW the attachment seems to be 143KB and will fill up ones disk quota at their ISP rather quickly.
I also think I have figured out why I am getting so much of this stuff all of a sudden. My ISP Charter Cable has started using MSN as their web server. Everyone knows about MSN and attacks. I was just looking through my options over there and there is no way that I can see for me to set my mail account to bounce messages with large attackments which would be the easy way to handle it.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
A lot of people still do. There have to be over 1,000 discussion groups -- someone else can also fill you in better than I on how many there are. Maybe 5,000.
You need a special newsgroup reader, though Netscape will do it as well. They operate similarly to this mailing list, except they do not come to your mailbox -- a usenet server is used. Different ISPs pick up different newsgroups, most ISPs (which have their own newsservers) do not pick up all of them. You go to the group (with a newsreader the newsserver is transparent, its like reading a web page bulletin board or discussion group), read, post responses, and they have threads like this mailing list (different discussion topics). They can be moderated or not, but most are not moderated.
I've "belonged" to two for years -- the discussions get just as involved and/or off topic as they do here. Sometimes more so.
They cover all topics, there are several on photography. I've found help with Access -- one can find a newsgroup on a particular application program like Access. I've found the photography ones to be of limited value, this list is better. But they have one just for buying and selling old camera equipment.
I love usenet.
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com
