Internet 101

1. What is the Internet?
2. What do I need to access the Internet?
3. Internet Services
1. Newsgroups
   • Newsgroups are repositories for threaded messaging about selected topics. Mail-type messages are sent to a newsgroup instead of directly to a recipient. Newsgroups are replicated to news servers all over the Internet. Each server "sucks" news articles from its host and sends its users' submissions back upstream.
   • There are over 19,000 Internet newsgroups covering an incredibly wide range of topics. Click here for a list of newsgroups.
   • Usenet, Biznet, and Bitnet are the names of some news networks. There are also many private news servers as well.
   • software packages, operating systems, programming languages, networking protocols, tv shows, movies, music, literature, philosophy, all of the arts and sciences, and every sexual perversion known to man.
   • technical support
   • FAQs - regularly posted to many newsgroups, provide a digest of up-to-date information on the particular subject of the group
   • A full news feed requires approximately 2.5 gigabytes of disk space per day
   • Uses NNTP (the Network News Transfer Protocol).
   • Newsgroups may be moderated or unmoderated, but they are not administered, except by democratic means. They are a distributed resource; there is no central repository. New groups are created by holding a call for votes. If enough people want a group, then one is formed.
   • In a moderated group, all messages are reviewed before they are posted publicly by volunteer moderators who have been approved by the users of the group. Moderators are not obliged to uphold any standards other than those agreed upon by the group. In unmoderated newsgroups, all submissions are immediately published to the group.
   • In many cases, the unrestricted nature of Internet newsgroups means that postings will contain material that goes well beyond the traditionally accepted boundaries of taste, morality and legality. Hate literature, illegal pornography, and other such materials are not uncommon. When you read about the issue of Internet censorship, newsgroups are a far more "open" and potentially offensive medium than the web.
   • Due to their open nature, newsgroups today are subject to far more abuse than most other services. There are certain rules of conduct (commonly called "netiquette") on newsgroups that have evolved over the years. However, as there is no formal enforcement of these rules other than peer pressure, they are often flagrantly violated. One practice that is heavily frowned on is known as "spamming." Spamming is when you post the same message (usually an advertisement or some other sort of scam) to large numbers of newsgroups, usually for the purpose of making a buck. This has resulted in an unacceptable "signal to noise ratio" in many newsgroups. In other words, there is much more useless crap than valuable messages.
   • The Company runs a news server called newshost.thecompany.com.
2. Email
3. Mailing Lists
4. IRC - Internet Relay Chat
5. FTP - File Transfer Protocol
6. File Downloads
4. The World Wide Web
5. Web Trends
6. Web Resources