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[habs]

How user-friendly is usenet? Where's a good place to newbies to learn?

Sorry for the dumb questions, but I have literally no experience with this stuff.

What precisely are newsbin and newsleecher?

Thanks

[mekender]

newzbin.com is an indexing site... it costs £15.60 a year... what it does is allow you to search for what is on usenet at the moment... it will also generate index files called ".nzb" files that can be downloaded and used to download files using a newsgroup reader (newsleecher)... so far, newzbin.com is still legal because it does exactly what other indexing services do, points to copyright material... same a google...

imagine a giant cork bulliten board... one where anyone can post a message and where the message will automatically disappear after 6 to 9 months...

now imagine one that is world wide... and you will get some concept of how big usenet is...

what makes usenet better than P2P programs is that all of the files are stored on servers instead of other people's computers... they are stored in text form in files that are usually no bigger than 1000 lines of text... this means that they are almost always in multiple parts and have to be combined again before being useful... this is what a newsgroup reader does...

because of how the files are stored, they are downloaded at MUCH faster rates than is possible with P2P networks... i have seen speeds of upwards of 45megabits!!! basically the files will download at somewhere near 85 to 90% of your maximum bandwidth...

the numbers are staggering, worldwide stats show some 4.65 TB of data per DAY!!!

in addition to using newzbin.com as an indexing service, i also use giganews.com as a host... this costs per month, but to me is worth it because the number of articles that are complete is near 100% whereas the time warner network purposely limits the completion rate on their servers...