Project 1 - CMPE 80N
Class newsgroup participation (5%)
A class newsgroup will be set up for students to participate. A newsgroup can be thought of as a mixture of an electronic bulletin board (where announcements are posted) and discussion forum.
This project consists of taking part on this newsgroup joining the current discussion topic and/or starting a new one. Discussion topics must be somewhat related to the course. The newsgroup will be monitored by the TAs.

The simplest way to access the class newsgroup is using pine.
If you are using a browser, you might be able to read the newsgroup by clicking on the ucsc.class.cmpe80n link. If you are inside campus then for NNTP server type news.ucsc.edu.

If you are trying to access the newsgroup from off-campus, you need to login to the CATS server (unix.ic.ucsc.edu) and use pine. If you are a  Linux/UNIX user, just use ssh. For Windows users, you need to either download ssh client or Putty based ssh client. Once you have an ssh client, you can login to the CATS machine by giving the server name (unix.ic.ucsc.edu), port (22), your CATS username and password. You will have a command window similar to the machines found in CATS lab. Follow the same steps to access the newsgroup as mentioned above.

More nicer, powerful way is to use "ssh port forwarding" which allows you to use nice newsgroup readers like KNode, Outlook, Mozilla, Netscape etc., The instructions for doing this could be found here.

Resources:
USENET @ faqs.org
USENET @ about.com
UCSC online literacy 101
CMPS 002 USENET lab
CATS Software

CMPE 80n class page
Contact: Debasree (dbanerje@soe.ucsc.edu) or Kiran (cekiran@soe.ucsc.edu)