228 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
228 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
<HTML
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><HEAD
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><TITLE
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>Usenet History</TITLE
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><META
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NAME="GENERATOR"
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CONTENT="Modular DocBook HTML Stylesheet Version 1.57"><LINK
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REL="HOME"
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TITLE="Linux Network Administrators Guide"
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HREF="index.html"><LINK
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REL="UP"
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TITLE="Netnews"
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HREF="x-087-2-news.html"><LINK
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REL="PREVIOUS"
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TITLE="Netnews"
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HREF="x-087-2-news.html"><LINK
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REL="NEXT"
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TITLE="What Is Usenet, Anyway?"
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HREF="x-087-2-news.usenet.html"></HEAD
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><BODY
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CLASS="SECT1"
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BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"
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TEXT="#000000"
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LINK="#0000FF"
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VLINK="#840084"
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ALINK="#0000FF"
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><DIV
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CLASS="NAVHEADER"
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><TABLE
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WIDTH="100%"
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BORDER="0"
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CELLPADDING="0"
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CELLSPACING="0"
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><TR
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><TH
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COLSPAN="3"
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ALIGN="center"
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>Linux Network Administrators Guide</TH
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></TR
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="10%"
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="bottom"
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><A
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HREF="x-087-2-news.html"
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>Prev</A
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></TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="80%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="bottom"
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>Chapter 20. Netnews</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="10%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="bottom"
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><A
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HREF="x-087-2-news.usenet.html"
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>Next</A
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></TD
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></TR
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></TABLE
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><HR
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ALIGN="LEFT"
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WIDTH="100%"></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="SECT1"
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><H1
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CLASS="SECT1"
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><A
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NAME="X-087-2-NEWS.HISTORY"
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>20.1. Usenet History</A
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></H1
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><P
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> The idea of network news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom
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Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for
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information exchange among Unix users. They set up
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a small network of three machines in North Carolina.</P
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><P
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>Initially, traffic was handled by a number of shell scripts (later
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rewritten in C), but they were never released to the public. They
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were quickly replaced by “A News,” the first public release of news
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software.</P
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><P
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>A News was not designed to handle more than a few articles
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per group and day. When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten
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by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the “B” release
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(a.k.a. B News). The first public release of B News was version 2.1
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in 1982. It was expanded continuously, with several new features
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added. Its current version is B News 2.11. It is slowly
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becoming obsolete; its last official maintainer switched to
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INN.</P
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><P
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>
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Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer rewrote B News and released it in 1987; this
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is release “C,” or C News. Since its release, there
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have been a number of patches to C News, the most prominent being the
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C News Performance Release. On sites that carry a large number of groups,
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the overhead involved in frequently invoking <B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>relaynews</B
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>,
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which is responsible for dispatching incoming articles to other hosts, is
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significant. The Performance Release adds an option to
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<B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>relaynews</B
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> that allows it to run in
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<I
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CLASS="EMPHASIS"
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>daemon mode</I
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>, through which the program puts
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itself in the background. The Performance Release is the C News version
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currently included in most Linux releases. We describe C News in detail in
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<A
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HREF="x-087-2-cnews.html"
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>Chapter 21</A
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>.</P
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><P
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>
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All news releases up to C were primarily targeted for UUCP networks,
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although they could be used in other environments, as well. Efficient news
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transfer over networks like TCP/IP or DECNet required a new scheme. So in
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1986, the <I
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CLASS="EMPHASIS"
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>Network News Transfer Protocol</I
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> (NNTP) was
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introduced. It is based on network connections and specifies a number of
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commands to interactively transfer and retrieve articles.</P
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><P
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>
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There are a number of NNTP-based applications available from the Net. One of
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them is the <B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>nntpd</B
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> package by Brian Barber and Phil Lapsley,
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which you can use to provide newsreading service to a number of hosts inside a
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local network. <B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>nntpd</B
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> was designed to complement news
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packages, such as B News or C News, to give them NNTP features. If you want
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to use NNTP with the C News server, you should read
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<A
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HREF="x-087-2-nntp.html"
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>Chapter 22</A
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>, which explains how to configure the
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<B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>nntpd</B
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> daemon and run it with C News.</P
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><P
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>
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An alternative package supporting NNTP is INN, or
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<I
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CLASS="EMPHASIS"
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>Internet News</I
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>. It is not just a frontend, but a news
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system in its own right. It comprises a sophisticated news relay daemon that
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can maintain several concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is therefore the
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news server of choice for many Internet sites. We discuss it in detail in
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<A
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HREF="x-087-2-inn.html"
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>Chapter 23</A
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>.</P
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></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="NAVFOOTER"
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><HR
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ALIGN="LEFT"
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WIDTH="100%"><TABLE
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WIDTH="100%"
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BORDER="0"
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CELLPADDING="0"
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CELLSPACING="0"
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="x-087-2-news.html"
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>Prev</A
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></TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="index.html"
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>Home</A
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></TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="x-087-2-news.usenet.html"
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>Next</A
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></TD
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></TR
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="top"
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>Netnews</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="x-087-2-news.html"
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>Up</A
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></TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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>What Is Usenet, Anyway?</TD
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></TR
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></TABLE
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></DIV
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></BODY
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></HTML
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> |