The Usenet News service has grown over the years to contain hundreds of gigabytes of information with several gigabytes of information changing daily. To deal with this girth, OWT has partnered with Newsfeeds.com to provide you this information and all of the updates. News information is as varied as the Internet itself but is essentially composed of millions of discussion documents relating to topics that might be of interest to a group of people. Topics include computer software, movie and TV stars, religion, politics and much more - more topics than you can even imagine. You can join the others in posting your comments or even get help from the group online.

Read on if you would like more information about this technology, but if your are ready to check it out simply configure your news client (we suggest Outlook Express or Netscape) to point to our news server at news.owt.com and explore the wonders of the newsgroups.

Network News, sometimes called Usenet News, is a distributed bulletin board system that runs on millions of computers world-wide. These computers can be interconnected via Local Area Networks (LAN's), Wide Area Networks (WAN's) like the Internet, dialup modem networks or one-way satellite downlink networks. The overall collection of computers and networks, when it is used to store, forward or display Network News is called the Usenet. Users of the Usenet exchange views and information by writing articles that are then transmitted automatically between computers in the network.

Network News has many similarities to electronic mail (E-Mail) but differs in the way it organizes and distributes information. E-Mail systems are typically used to send person-to-person mail to an individual (direct mail) or group of individuals (mailing list). When the group of users become too large or too dynamic to easily administer over electronic mail, Network News is the system of choice. The information is sorted by subject and the user only needs to read the subjects he finds interesting. Network News can be thought of as a collection of very specialized magazines or journals that can be used to search for information or discuss topics.

Newsfeeds.com asks that our users view their disclaimer before accessing the news service.

The software that comprises the Network News system consists of News Servers and News Clients. Some clients that you might be familiar with are:

• Outlook Express
• Netscape Navigator and Communicator
• WinVN
• Newswatcher
• Free Agent
• InterNews
• NewsXpress

Servers communicate with other servers and provide disk space to store the actual messages. They also communicate with clients and provide lists of available newsgroups. A client can request a server to return a list of articles for any newsgroup or can request the actual text for an article. The client formats and displays information from the server in a form suitable to the user interface on the client machine.

The actual format of the messages exchanged between hosts follow the Internet Standard for Interchange of Usenet Messages (Internet Standard RFC-1036) and transfers these messages via the Network News Transfer Protocol - NNTP (Internet Standard RFC-977). Attachments are sent via the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol (Internet Standard RFC-1341).

Configuring Your News Client Software

It is really quite simple to configure whatever client you are using to use our news server. There is no authentication or passwords required, just a server address. Simply enter the server address for our server address in your client software as:

news.owt.com

Then you are ready to go! Initially you will have to load the directory of groups (list) which may take some time. Then you will see groups arranged in a format that may take some getting used to. If you use Outlook Express you will be able to type a key word in the Display box and reduce the number of groups displayed at one time to only those containing that key word. Most client software will allow you to "subscribe" to various groups so that you can readily access the groups you are most interested in.

Now you just need to explore the news groups and play with it. It really is quite simple once you get the hang of it. Not all groups will interest you but there is something for everyone in there.

Other servers are available, each with its own emphasis. Some servers may respond faster than others. Here are your options:

Newsfeeds.com asks that our users view their disclaimer before accessing the news service.

The News Content (Attention Parents)

Like so much of the Internet, along with all of the positive and informative content comes some content not suitable for all ages. There are a number of binary groups containing photos that contain nudity and violence. Other groups may contain language that you might find offensive. Primarily, we feel that news content is more suitable for adults but your child may be interested in the skateboarding group or some other area of interest. There is almost no content suitable for very young children. We urge you to explore the news fully and then talk with your children about your concerns and the ground rules.