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.

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.

What's a Newsgroup? Our forums are based upon standard Internet-style USENET newsgroups. Although reminiscent of eMail messaging, newsgroups add the powerful concept of "conversation threads" where people are able to reply to specific public postings and the newsgroup system keeps track of these individual conversation threads. Another important advantage is that the software for reading these newsgroups typically downloads only the message "headers" for new notes, rather than the note's complete content. This allows you to decide which notes look interesting and which do not. And finally, as you can see from the diagram to the left, news reading software "remembers" which notes you have already read (dimmed out) and which notes you have not yet seen. In other words, it helps you to "keep your place" in any number of conversations at once.

	Configure the "news server" address to:  news.grc.com In the same way your eMail reader needs to know the names of your "pop" and "smtp" servers for receiving and sending eMail, your newsreader needs to know the domain name of the "nntp" server which will be hosting newsgroups. Our newsgroup server is located at the same 'news.grc.com' domain as our web server, so you must configure your newsreader to access 'news.grc.com' for its newsgroups. Also, in the same way that some eMail clients allow the standard eMail "ports" of 25 and 110 to be changed, some newsreaders allow the standard port 119 to be changed. Our news server obeys the NNTP standard and should normally be set to the default NNTP port of 119. However, since some networks block or "traffic shape" port 119, we also serve the same (non-SSL) NNTP service over port 110 (normally POP3 eMail), port 563 (normally secure NNTP), and port 11911 (just a random high-numbered port). You may configure your news reading client to use any of those.
	Choose a personal, private, secret passphrase: Our news server uses a secure authentication technology to prevent spammers from posting, prevent anyone from "spoofing" someone else's identity, and allow posters to cancel anything they have ever posted while preventing others from cancelling someone else's postings. The system uses up to the first 29 characters of any user-chosen "passphrase", so yours should probably be at least that long.
	Set the Username & Password to your secret passphrase: Set both the "Username" and "Password" fields of your news reader to your secret passphrase. This can be anything you wish, but you MUST enter the same secret passphrase into BOTH the username and password fields.
	Refresh or Reread all server newsgroups: Once you have "connected" to the news server at 'news.grc.com', you should determine your newsreader's way of "refreshing" or "rereading" the names of the newsgroups available from the news.grc.com server. Also, if your newsreader provides the option to automatically notify you when new groups appear in the future, that's a handy feature to enable.

Read-Only 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.

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:

	20 kilobyte posting size limit: Since these newsgroups are intended to host a textual dialog among its readers (rather than binary images and programs), a 20k byte limit is imposed upon the length of any single posting.
	Disable the use of "HTML":  (please!) It is our feeling that the slowly creeping increase in the use of HTML in eMail is a very bad thing. It adds no value to most communications, it allows web-bug-style "tracking" of its recipient, it is insecure, it is all flash and no substance . . . and for those reason it is a sure way to be seen as either a "rookie" computer user or a junk mail spammer. In either case, that's probably not how you want your communications to be regarded. So please take a few minutes to hunt around within your eMail and/or News clients to figure out how to turn off HTML in your eMail and News postings. Everyone will be much happier!
	These groups are 'unmoderated': In other words, there is nothing to prevent anyone from posting anything at any time. This absolute posting freedom is occasionally abused, with the result that hateful and profane postings are sometimes made by newsgroup "trolls" (as they are called) for no purpose other than to annoy and upset the groups readers. We will immediately delete any purely abusive postings which appear in the groups, and we would appreciating knowing of any that you may encounter. Please send a note containing the entire posting to '' and we'll zap it immediately.
	Please DO NOT FEED the trolls: Trolls post annoying and abusive messages in order to incite anger and in an attempt to force reactions. Difficult as it can be at times, PLEASE AVOID REPLYING TO ALL SUCH POSTS and thus feeding the trolls. Since trolls exist only for the attention they can generate, they will leave only — and always — when they are simply ignored.

Click here for our Quick Reference Guide to the GRC Newsgroups

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

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