Note 59: you write, you will want

Rubric: Our networks

You write, you will count

Anton Nosik

Email allows two Internet users who are at the opposite ends of the globe to exchange letters, text documents, programs, graphic and other files - and the time of passing the message from the addressee is usually calculated by seconds or minutes. In this sense, e -mail in the world of communications and communication has no analogues. Neither fax, nor television, nor telegraph, nor radio broadcast is able to provide equally fast, uninterrupted and high-quality transmission between two addresses of almost unlimited arrays of information as e-mail.

A feature of email is its personal character. No letter can be sent by e-mail without an unequivocal indication of specific addresses of the sender and recipient. The electronic message is addressed only to the person (or a group of persons) to whom it is sent, and no one else - up to the point that in many states of the world the secret of electronic correspondence is protected by laws, and the violation of this secret is persecuted in criminal order.

Meanwhile, one of the most important functions of the Internet is no less important than communication between individual users - consists in ensuring the exchange of information between large groups of people. In groups, the number of which is calculated by hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users of the network around the world. And, since e -mail does not allow us to send a message to hundreds of thousands of unfamiliar addresses at the same time in all the ends of the planet (“to all interested persons who they are” - to whim it May Concern, or “Lehol Maan Dib'i” by a high Aramaic calm), then there must certainly exist such an Internet mechanism that would make a similar global exchange of ideas of possible.

This mechanism is the system of public Internet "news" conferences of USNET (in English conferences are called NewsGroups). Usenet acts on the principle of a general Internet, non -certificate global ads. Almost any network user can connect to these conferences at a convenient time, read the messages there, send their answer to them (or offer a new topic for discussion).

Technically, the USENET conferences are distributed through the News Servers system that support NNTP (the network transmission protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol). These servers exchange information among themselves, and also allow access to the content of conferences for their local users (for example, News.netvision.net.il server allows you to read conferences and write to them Netvision users; News.NetMedia.net.il server gives the same customers of netmedia). Ideally, the same set of messages should be stored on all servers; In practice, as long as a new message will be added to the information base of all servers that carry this conference, it takes a lot of time - from day to week.

The flow of new messages passing per day on all NNTP servers on the Internet exceeds 100 megabytes (100 million printed marks, 50 thousand printed pages) per day. Obviously, not even the most zealous fan of network exercises is able to digest such an amount of information per day. Therefore, it is quite natural that the flow of messages is divided on various topics; The complex hierarchical system of the usenet conferences allows each participant in public correspondence to read and send messages only on those topics that really interest him. If, for example, you are interested in Vivaldi's music, herbalife trading and programming on Pascal, then you are most likely signing for three to five conferences dedicated to these topics that are exciting you, and the remaining 16 thousand conferences to which your news server is signed with secret regret to leave without attention.

Usenet conferences, their alphabetical enumeration, explanation of the subjects and rules of behavior, is devoted to more than one weighty monograph. As part of the current note, we cannot afford to either list especially interesting conferences or dwell on the characteristics of individual groups. We restrict ourselves to the story of how to connect to the USENET news system and get a list of conferences that you can subscribe to.

As we have already explained, the exchange of information on the Internet is carried out mainly on the basis of client-server architecture. That is, for the successful use of the NNTP protocol, we need to fulfill two conditions. Firstly, our car should be installed a client to read the USENET news, and secondly, somewhere on the network there must be a server ready to serve the requests of our client.

Usenet conferences reader programs are included today in the installation packages of the two most popular Vispenses on the market - Netskayip and Explorer. The Netskime product is called Netscape News, and Microsoft is much more modest - Internet News. The Mycrosoft product has the advantage that it can be obtained separately, as part of the Mailnews.exe file (the size of less than megabyte), unloaded free of charge with the Microsoft FTP or WWW server. The NTSKIPEP client cannot be separately unloaded, but if you already have a copy of NTSKAIP, then the news client is already built there. Otherwise, we do not recommend one or the other client. The best, in our opinion, program for reading network news is the agent of the Forte Corporation and its free variety, Freeagent. You can purchase a paid version as a gift on the server of the mentioned corporation at http://www.forteinc.com/.

By acquiring a client, you can take care of connecting to the server. Clients of Israeli commercial providers, as a rule, receive information about the news servers available to them along with other information for the initial connection to the network (that is, together with the user name, password, addresses of local DNS, POP3 and SMTP servers). Students and employees of academic structures gain access to the news servers of these structures. Moreover, there is still a fairly significant circle of people who need to access conferences for a certain outsider NNTP server that is not related to their direct place of connection to the network (a classic example - when our NNTP server is not signed for the conference of interest, such as the NetMedia news server, unlike Netvision, is not signed for many pornographic and pirate groups). There are a fair amount of Russian -speaking postal conferences to which not a single Israeli NNTP server is signed at all.

For such cases, there are a considerable number of public NNTP servers that allow users from any outside machine. Such charity creates a huge load on the news server, and therefore owners of public NNTP servers are not very interested in a wide advertising of their services. But, fortunately, the world is not without good people to ensure that the "unprofitable" network users always receive updated information about the addresses of the NNTP servers open to the public. Good people, in particular, support the constantly updated list of these servers at:

http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~jwa/open-sites.html

There we recommend that our readers contact if their own NNTP server for some reason does not suit them. And in future issues, we will repeatedly return to the topic of NNTP, since it, as already noted, is inexhaustible.

The next issue will be a note about Scott Pakin, the author of the "Idiot", the journey into the bowels of the Altavists and the next study in Russian tones, dedicated to the solemn premiere of the Easter cakes.