Usenet is still popular today amongst many circles and has the advantage of no HTML bloatware of forums (in fact most Usenet Servers even discard HTML posts) which need reloading every time you visit that forum, and delivering that message right to you, kind of like mailing lists, the ideas for forums and mailing lists actually grew out of Usenet.

Programs called newsreaders are used to read and post messages (called articles or posts) to one or many newsgroups.
These can be accessed via popular clients such as Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Sylpheed, Opera, Pan, KNode, Free Agent, and even text based clients on Linux/BSD using Pine, tin, or slrn.

Usenet does not have any centralised management, it's a collaboration of separate servers that exchange Usenet News. Kind of like P2P (where do you think P2P startups got the idea from, they actually used to use Usenet for the same thing, in fact, many still do, using Binary groups). Usenet has two components, the groups (newsgroups), and the messages (posts/articles).

Posts are submitted to one or more newsgroups (in the latter it's called cross posting just like an Emails CC). for newcomers to the Internet in recent years, one may consider newsgroups like a forum for articles relating to a common topic, except when you open the reader in a topic, it remembers what you have seen and wont show you it again saving you time for not having to sift through what you've already seen.

The groups are organized in a hierarchy, with each group's name indicating its place in the hierarchy. This often makes it easy to see what a group is all about. For example, anybody can see from the newsgroup name that alt.os.linux.slackware is for discussions concerning a Linux based operating system called Slackware. Since the groups are based on a reasonably specific topic, it can be risky business posting in some groups about unrelated, or off-topic material, though many don't mind a slight straying.

There are many different hierarchies for many different purposes, and not always do things follow the way they should (eg: don't expect to only find recreational activities under the rec.* hierarchy), there are also hierarchies for special groups, for countries (eg: de.* aus.*), and lots more, some of the largest, in fact 95% of all groups would fall under the following (with alt.* being the largest)

alt.*   Discussions of all kinds of topics,
comp.*  Discussion of computer-related topics
sci.*   Discussion of scientific subjects
rec.*   Discussion of recreational activities
soc.*   Discussion of social issues.

So you are sure to find what you want somewhere, just use your readers search function for what your interests are, eg: fishing, which would result in about 30 groups, you then subscribe to the group(s) that you think meet your interest, you can also unsubscribe to a group at any time if the group does not meet your expectations.

The local administrators of the News Server decide how long articles are kept on their servers before being expired (deleted). Different servers will have different retention times for the same newsgroup, some may keep articles for as little as a few weeks, others may hold them for many months or years, binary groups tend to have a much shorter lifetime due to storage requirements.

There does exist a very tiny number of moderated newsgroups, where an appointed moderator must approve the article before they are propagated out to other News Servers. A separate address is used for the submission of posts where the moderators then propagate posts which are approved.

While newsgroups were not created with the intention of distributing files, they have proven to be quite effective for this because of the way they work, a file uploaded once will be spread out to all news servers who carry that newsgroup, and can then be downloaded by an unlimited number of users. When sending files on Usenet, it is referred to as sending binaries, and generally only accepted in binary based newsgroups (eg: alt.binaries.*). A benefit of this is that every user is drawing on the bandwidth of the news server, unlike P2P where its dependent on the available seeders, and their upload speeds, and also unlike P2P, you don't share files you download, either whilst downloading, or upon its completion. This may mean those participating in piracy as receivers may not be so easily found out, however, those who upload them may very easily be found, not an issue if the file is legally yours to share, but not such a good idea if your committing an act of software piracy.

There were originally some obstacles to sending binary files, firstly, Usenet was designed for sending text, so workarounds such as Uuencode, Base64, and yEnc were developed which handled the binary data from the files to be text characters which could be sent over Usenet. Most newsreaders have the ability to decode these, there are even special programs to trawl a group, seek out, download, and decode, binary files.

The only real issue for binary files over Usenet is the completion and retention rates, eg: a file may be split into 600 articles (or 600 pieces/bits for the P2P kids), it might take the sender overnight to complete the upload, the News Server will see these as 2 days - before midnight day 1, and after midnight as day 2, so if you start your download when the files have been there for some time already, it is then possible they may approach the expiration date and the articles before midnight might expire before you start your download, therefor you miss a bunch of peices of the file and wont be able to decode the file in most cases.

Just like P2P, binary files via Usenet also have valid legal uses as well as its questionable uses (eg: software piracy), and in the latter case, just as with P2P, obtaining any software from unknown and anonymous sources increases the risks of viruses and malware.

Ausics does no longer carry binary newsgroups, the costs of storage and bandwith can not be justified at this time (and are essentially w4r3z/pirated software anyway), it's also why most Australian ISP's have ceased their News Servers, not sure why they didn't keep the text groups, but that's where we come in and are happy to fill that gap

About us

With the gaining popularity of forums and torrents in the later part of 2000's, we did see, like most news servers, a decline in usage, however usenet still today has a regular following.

In 2013 we noticed most if not all Australian ISP's had closed their news servers completely so we decided to allow access to all Aus users by means of IP addresses pulled from BGP (a network routing protocol) to avoid anyone needing to sign-up anywhere, as it was always our intention to never collect Usenet users personal data.

We currently only provide Usenet over IPv4, DNews is not IPv6 (nor 64bit) capable, we've talked to the guys but they have no plans of addressing these issues at this time, this is fine by us, but we know the day will come when we need to resolve it, though this wont be happening in any forseeable future, and when it does it will be a transparent cutover avoiding downtime.