Are binary Usenet newsgroups kind of like Kazaa?
Many people think binary Usenet newsgroups are rather like Kazaa (or other P2P programs), but this is not true! There are fundamental differences between the two, even though they can both be used for downloading. You can easily search for something on Kazaa, but what is on offer depends on the people who are connected to Kazaa at that very moment. Usenet newsgroups work differently: someone posts something to a binary newsserver, then all the newsservers exchange data and someone else can download it using his or her news server. How long the files are available on a newsserver depends on the quality of the newsserver. Some ISP’s think of it as an extra and don’t pay it very much attention at all. On most ISP’s you can download a post for about three days, in other words a retention of three days. Sometimes the files provided on a news server are incomplete, and this also depends on the quality of the news server. There are also payservers, however, on which posted files are available
