Assignment 10

Part 1: Usenet

Usenet (also known as NetNews or discussion groups) is not really "news", but rather a forum for information exchange that most resembles tens of thousands of worldwide bulletin boards. It is an electronic community where millions of people interact with one another.

Usenet is extremely decentralized. The only outside help you need to set up a news server is a news feed from another server. Once an article is posted to a particular group, it will eventually propagate throughout the entire network in a matter of hours, being available for anyone in the world to read.

Your text has specific information on how to setup the Netscape Messenger and Microsoft Outlook Express newsreaders for viewing Usenet articles. You are free to use any newsreader program you would like.

Questions from the readings:

1. Using your own words, what is a distributed database?
   
   
2. A series of messages posted to a newsgroup that discuss the same subject is collectively called what?
   
   
3. What does NNTP stand for?
   
   
4. What is the general name of the software used to read or post to newsgroups?
   
   
5. If I can access a message in a particular group on my news server, will you also be able to access the message if you use a different news server? Why or why not?
   
   
6. If I post a message, will it be available worldwide instantly? Why or why not?
   
   

Part II

In this portion of the assignment we will connect to a news server and post messages. Your ISP probably has a news server; for example, subscribers to AT&T broadband use netnews.attbi.com. If you use Saclink for dial up, then you would use the server news.csus.edu. (Note that most news servers don't allow general access, so if you are not sure what your news server is, ask your ISP's tech support.) However, there are free news servers. One good resource for finding these servers is at http://www.newzbot.com/.

Even though your ISP may have a news server, you will need to connect to msnews.microsoft.com to ensure the class is viewing the same messages. (Please read your newsreader's help file for information on how to configure it.) When you first connect to the news server it may take some time for your reader to download the entire list of available groups, so be patient here.

7. Once you have connected to msnews.microsoft.com, subscribe to the group microsoft.test and post a message.
   1. What day did you post your message?
   2. What name did you post under?
   3. What was the subject of the post?

Now for some real work. Connect to a news server other than the microsoft server mentioned above.

8. Find two newsgroups that are related to the topic you plan to research for your project.
   1. What news server did you connect to?
   2. What two newsgroups did you find?

You might be able to find a picture or other type of image related to your topic as well. I suggest starting in the alt.binaries.pictures.* groups which is where most pictures are found. But please be aware of what kind of images you might be viewing BEFORE you attempt to view them. You can probably guess what is in the group by looking at the name of the newsgroup or the subject of the message.

To save the image, right click it, and choose Save Image As... from the pop-up menu. You can then save it to your local disk. From there, you can FTP the image up to your web server if you want to use it in your project page.

Part III - Censorship and the Internet

9. Find and list a newsgroup dealing with censorship.
   
   
10. What is your opinion about censorship? Should CSUS carry newsgroups that might be considered objectionable? Why or why not?