NAVIGATING NEWSGROUPS

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Although there are thousands of newsgroups to choose from, you can often decipher the type of information each one contains by examining the newsgroup name. For example, the newsgroup named sci.space is a science-related newsgroup focusing on space interests such as space exploration; comp.privacy is a computer-related newsgroup focusing on privacy issues. The following table lists the most common newsgroup names you’ll encounter along with a brief description of the type of information each one contains.

WORD	TYPE OF INFORMATION COVERED	TYPICAL NAME
comp	Computer-related topics	comp.privacy
news	News about Usenet itself	news.announce
rec	Recreational activities	rec.audio.misc
sci	Science-related topics, except for computers	sci.space
soc	Sociology topics	soc.culture.bolivia
talk	Chat forum for discussing and debating different ideas and topics	talk.atheism
alt	Alternative topics	alt.binaries.movies
misc	Miscellaneous topics that don’t fit anywhere else	misc.jobs.offered

To see a massive list of newsgroups (including newsgroups from other countries), visit ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/config/newsgroups.

THE ALT.BINARIES NEWSGROUPS

Although you can probably find files scattered among several thousand different newsgroups, most people post files in newsgroups with the word “binaries” in their names, such as alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobook or alt.binaries.movies. (“Binaries” is just a technical term for any type of computer-readable, such as a program, a digital photograph, an audio file, or a video file.) If the newsgroup doesn’t contain the word “binaries,” it probably just contains text messages.

Fortunately when looking for files to download, you can sort the newsgroups alphabetically, starting with the phrase alt.binaries. To get idea of the variety of different newsgroups available that trade files on particular topics, take a look at the following, each of which contains more specialized newsgroups:

alt.binaries.multimedia Videos (TV shows, mostly)

alt.binaries.pictures Photographs

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 MP3 files

alt.binaries.cd.image Images of CDs (mostly PC software)

alt.binaries.warez Pirated software, sorted by platform and category

Once you’ve jumped to the beginning of a newsgroup section, you can find similar, more specialized newsgroups within your chosen category. (Chapters 9 through 15 contain more information about finding different types of files in newsgroups and from other sources.)

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