Free USENET for all.

[itchystiches]

Appreciate it seattle. I have been having a few problems with astranews lately though you know. It sometimes says probable account sharing and doesn't let me connect. Not sharing my account with anyone either. Anyone else get that?

[Crow]

Try using one of their other servers... If you're using their EU server, try the US one... or try another USENET reader.

Also try changing the port number. If you're using 119, then try using 23 (or 1818, or 8080). If you're using SSL (try 443 or 563).

If you're using 20 connections, try dialing it down a bit.

Maybe your ISP is refreshing your IP address, and the server thinks that you're connected from multiple IPs?

I would suggest submitting a support ticket on their site if none of the above works for you.

[sgreger1]

USENET started out as a message board. We didn't have forums back in those days. If you wanted to have a discussion with people around the world you started your own newsgroup.

If tom wanted to talk about Nazis and UFOs he could start his own newsgroup alt.ufo.nazi.conspiracy and post messages and hope other people would post to that group and join in on the discussion. Joe could start his own group alt.fan.keith.olbermann and post messages.

If you found a group you liked you subscribed to it and then usually once a day you downloaded all the new message headers. This was back in the days of dialup so you didn't want to spend all day downloading message bodies of things you weren't interested in. You went through your group and marked the message headers that you wanted the message bodies for. If something interested you then you would respond to the message with your own message. It was an all text based system.

Then somewhere along the way someone got the bright idea of taking porn pics, warez programs, video games , mp3 files and chopping up the file into pieces and posting them as text messages. You couldn't post the whole file because your text messages couldn't be bigger than 60,000 characters. So what you did was take your file and chop it up into 60,000 character chunks and then uploaded all the chunks as text messages. Those groups were called binary groups because they consist of only binary files.

The USENET is still technically a text based message board. Anybody that has a subscription to one of the boards can read the messages. In practical terms my newsreader program takes the messages of binary files it wants to read and reassembles all the chunks of a binary file that I have decided I want to read. The end result being a copy of the original file.

Most of the text messages in these newsgroups are posted anonymously so I don't know who the original uploader is. I'm not sharing or trading any information with him so there's no file sharing involved, all I'm doing is reading text messages posted on the web.

Good god that's beautifull. I remember BBS from baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack in the day, but I had never come across the concept of using this system to delivery binary packets that can be regrouped to form a copy of a file. That is just genious.

I may have to check this out.