vnews: a multicast, multimedia news service with virtual messages

We describe the vnews news service, an alternative to the USENET news service that provides full read compatibility with USENET news. vnews allows the posting of binary (8-bit) messages without extra encoding. An interface is provided to metaviewer, a utility for displaying multimedia mail messages which can be composed as a series of attachments. Multicast network transport is used to provide efficiency and automatic connection of new news servers to the news feed. The vnews protocol detects and corrects some classes of errors, such as corrupt packets, lost packets, and incorrectly vnews also provides virtual message for storage efficiency.