Updated: Jul 21, 2008 at 09:07 Simply aim your newsreader at news.grc.com!

This page contains important specific and background information which will tremendously enhance your experience while participating in our newsgroups. Even though this page is rather lengthy, it contains a great deal of important information. We, therefore, strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with its material before proceeding to post into our newsgroups.

Thank you!

Click here for our
Quick Reference Guide
to the GRC Newsgroups

If you spend any time in the newsgroups here at news.grc.com you will quickly discover something rather remarkable:The eclectic array of widely different personalities
who inhabit this "CyberSpace" have formed a
true, cohesive, community of terrific people.

The security, privacy, spam, and technology discussion groups have become one of this site's most popular, useful, and important features. For those who are new to considerations of Internet security and privacy — as well as for "old hands" of the Net — these forums present a potent research and news resource.

The people inhabiting this "CyberSpace" are
interested in, and are unusually well informed
about, matters of Internet security and privacy.

You will also discover what many others continue to find: a community of terrific, interesting, and well-informed kindred spirits. Though we never expected this to happen, the newsgroups at news.grc.com have taken on a life of their own and have become a great place to hang out in cyberspace. You are invited to dip in for a specific purpose, to ask or answer a specific question, to find out what's happening in the world of Internet security and privacy . . . and to stay as long as you like.

Whether you choose to lurk and read, or voice your
own opinion, you will find plenty to think about here!

Newsgroup Reading Software:
An immediate — but much less powerful — way of accessing our discussion newsgroups is with the use of our web-based interface. (See "Web-Based Access" below.) Although our web-based interface is a quick and easy way to see how the newsgroups feel, and to get a sense for the information they contain, if you wind up spending much time reading and perhaps even asking questions or contributing to the newsgroups, you will probably find that using a local newsgroup reading client program — a "newsreader" — is vastly superior.Newsgroup readers are available
from three general sources:

Newsreader Configuration:
Whichever newsreader you choose, setting it up to access our newsgroups is as easy as 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4: If you are setting up Netscape or Microsoft newsreaders,
please finish reviewing this page, then use either of these
links for detailed, step-by-step configuration instructions.

Web-Based Access:
If you prefer not using a separate program to access our discussion forums, or if you just want to take a quick look around before perhaps getting more serious about this whole idea, we provide a simple web-based reader that operates through any web browser. Since this runs entirely in our server and not in your computer, there is nothing to install or setup, but the web-only solution lacks many convenient features.

However, it can instantly give you a sense for the content of our newsgroups and it is a useful way to get your feet wet. Each of the newsgroup descriptions below contains a "Browse" link to its group and the "link block" at the bottom of every page lets you hop around among the groups.

~ CyberSpace Netiquette 101 ~

Deleting Articles You Have Posted:
Articles posted to the GRC newsgroups may only be deleted by someone logged onto the server using the same Username/Password passphrase as the article's original poster. Therefore you should use a logon "passphrase" that is secure, lengthy, and very unlikely to be guessed by anyone who might wish to maliciously and unilaterally cancel anything you have posted.

Simply use your news reader's built-in article "Cancel" feature to immediately remove any articles you regret having posted or wish to cancel and resubmit for any reason. Except for the "grc.test" group, articles in all groups live forever. Articles posted into grc.test self-expire after five (5) days.

Frequent contributors to our newsgroups appreciate having the option of removing mistaken or regretted postings. So we have a system for securely authenticating the users of our system and allowing them to delete their own posts — but no one else's.

Secure Authenticated Logon to Our Server:
Before posting any articles to our server you must configure your newsreader to logon with a Username and Password. You can NOT use the "anonymous" or "don't need to logon" mode of your newsreader if you wish to post your own articles. You CAN use anonymous logon if you only wish to read existing articles.

Choose a long and complex "pass phrase" for your logon and use the same phrase for BOTH the Username and Password fields of your logon. That's all there is to it. You can use anything you like for your Username and Password — but they must be identical. In other words, you must use the SAME string of characters for both your Username and your Password.

Please choose something LONG that won't be easily guessed.

The first 29 characters of what you choose will be securely encrypted and used by our system to authenticate your logon so that only YOU will be able to delete your own postings.

Our Profanity and Obscenity Policy:
As mature visitors to public, non-moderated, forums, we must — unfortunately — be prepared to encounter the unexpected obscene, profane, or hateful posting.

If there was a "censorship scale" for the posting-removal policy of corporate sponsored newsgroups such as these, we would deliberately place ourselves at the "extremely tolerant" end of the scale. But, by no means, does this imply that "anything goes" here.

Postings that are obscene, profane, or hateful — where that expression is deemed to be present for its own sake rather than in support of an otherwise useful statement — will be immediately removed from the newsgroups wherever they are found.

Anyone and everyone is encouraged to join in our dialog to share their thoughts and feelings, no matter how strongly they wish to express them, but postings which are purely abusive and intended only to be disruptive, will be removed.

This is not a free-for-all — anyone may go to the public USENET to find that — it is a site for the serious discussion of Internet privacy, security, and technology. By abiding by some simple tenets of respectful conduct, we all gain.

What's a "subscription"??
One of the coolest aspects of the whole newsgroup concept is the idea of "subscribing" (or not) to individual newsgroups. Although this idea is crucial for survival out on the main public "Usenet" — where more than 40,000 individual newsgroups are simultaneously screaming for your attention! — you may still find "subscription" useful during your visits here.

For example, you probably do want to subscribe to my own low traffic "news" group in order to keep track of my current project work.

To Subscribe or not to Subscribe?
THAT is the Question...

Whenever your newsreader logs on to a particular news server, it becomes "aware" of the groups being offered by that server. But, unless you ask to see the list of all possible newsgroups offered by that server, you are spared involvement with most of them. In other words, the decision to "subscribe" to a newsgroup is between you and your newsreader. The news server offers all of its groups, but you determine — and tell your newsreader — which of those available you have an interest in monitoring and reading.

Politics and Protocol:
In addition to the "CyberSpace Netiquette" issues discussed above, a few additional points bear mentioning:

Welcome to the terrific
"CyberSpace Community" at
Gibson Research Corporation!

We believe you will discover a community of truly terrific people!

Last Edit: Jul 21, 2008 at 09:07 (1,307.62 days ago) Viewed 181 times per day