On Sun, 31 Oct 2010 07:11:14 -0000, Tim Meddick wrote:

I used to use this group for about a year, until mid-summer, when Microsoft
announced it was closing down all of it's public news servers!

I'm interested to see this group ( microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics )
resurrected again, this time NOT on Microsoft's news server, but taken up
by ( nntp.aioe.org )!!

Resurrected? It was never gone.

Another lie by Microsoft (or at best a lie by omission): the idea
that they somehow control the Internet and can "shut down a
newsgroup".

See "What newsgroups are an dhow they work" at
http://www.anta.net/misc/nnq/how-it-works.shtml

It sounds like you are under the impression that a newsgroup has a
single location. That is emphatically not the case. Every single
server chooses to carry or not carry every newsgroup, so which groups
are available to you depends on which server you use. For example,
at news.individual.net I can't get any binary newsgroups, but they're
still out there.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...