YouGov :"POLL - Blunkett's proposals on internet privacy: for or against"

[Jon Ribbens]

Skywatch <skywatch@skywatch.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
> Also, on the subject of article numbers, are these universal among all news 
> servers or does each news server maintain it's own catalogue? Just curious.

Each server assigns its own, i.e. article numbers are meaningful only
in the context of a given news server and group name. Message-IDs
however are the same for a given news article no matter what server
it's on, and are in theory unique amongst all articles ever posted.