Working with Usenet news is somewhat tricky because you must find an existing server that allows you to access it. Many systems don’t give you that access, even if you pay for a regular dialup account. A list of public Usenet hosts—which means hosts that attempt to provide news free of charge to all comers—is available on the Net, but in my experience only about 5 percent of them actually allow you to connect. If you really want to read Usenet newsgroups and your ISP doesn’t offer you access of on the some sort (almost all do), start at Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/. web Building a news URL is a straightforward process. Simply type news: followed by the exact name of the newsgroup. No slashes are needed (or allowed), and there’s not yet a standard approach for specifying individual articles. Here are two examples: news:news.answers news:comp.sys.ibm-pc.announce
