How the usenet newsgroup system works

Let's start off with a very simple example. Let's say we have two users, Alice and Bill.

Alice has obtained a new picture of Britney Spears that nobody has seen before on the internet. Maybe she scanned it out of a magazine, or she saw it on tv, or maybe she took it with her digital camera -- who knows... But she has the picture and wants to share it on the internet. Alice is going to use a newsgroup poster to post the picture to the usenet:

	Here is Alice's Picture of Britney Spears
	Here is Alice uploading the picture of Britney Spears using some newsgroup posting software.

When Alice posts the picture of Britney Spears to the Internet, it goes to a special computer called a "Newsgroup Server". The Newsgroup server is typically owned by Alice's Internet Service Provider (ISP). Alice's news server will in turn disseminate the pictures throughout all of the servers on the Usenet. Here's what the process might look like:

Okay, I didn't do that just to draw all kinds of tiny pictures of Britney Spears -- the drawing illustrates two points: 1) the news servers propagate the pictures amongst themselves, and 2) the news servers each store a copy of the picture on their hard drive. Thus, once Alice posts the picture, it is rapidly distributed to everyone's news server. Remember, the news servers are located at the ISPs (internet service providers), so Bill doesn't have the picture of Britney... yet...

Now, let's say Bill is using a newsgroup downloader and wants the picture of Britney Spears. His Newsgroup downloading software will query his ISP's news server for the picture. It might look kinda like this:

Here is a diagram of Bill's newsgroup downloading software getting the picture of Britney Spears. Bills software asks the news server for the picture, and the news server responds by taking the Britney picture from its hard drive and sending it to Bills computer.

 

Now, here is a picture of what the software might look like on Bill's computer. Bill is running his newsgroup downloader software in a streaming download mode, and it has automatically downloaded the new picture of Britney.

Here's an overview of the whole thing showing Alice's computer, Bill's computer, the news servers, and a couple of Britney pictures:

This example is meant to demonstrate several aspects of the news system:

1. There are two software programs being used:
   • Alice is using a "newsgroup posting" program (like "power poster" or something like that)
   • Bill is using a "newsgroup downloader" program (like Binary Vortex, SBNews, etc)
2. There are a minimum of four computers involved:
   • Alice's PC that she used to post from
   • The news server at Alice's ISP
   • The news server at Bill's ISP
   • Bill's PC that he used to download the picture to
3. So what did Alice and Bill need to purchase ?
   • If Alice is a good girl, then she registered (or purchased) the newsgroup posting software
   • If Bill is a good guy, then he registered (or purchased) the newsgroup downloading software (Binary Vortex, etc)
4. And what did Alice and Bill need to subscribe to ?
   • If Alice uses her ISPs news server, then she doesn't need to subscribe to anything
   • .... or she could use a paid third-party newsgroup provider (supernews, giganews, etc) and pay a monthly fee for better service.
   • If Bill uses his ISPs news server then he doesn't need to subscribe to anything
   • .... or he could use a paid third-party newsgroup provider (supernews, giganews, etc) and pay a monthly fee for faster downloading

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