Netscape comes with an integrated news reader. The easy way to subscribe to a group is type in (or click on) a link like
news://news.sfour.com/ietf.confctrl
Once you have subscribed, you only need to go to the message center. This can be done by clicking on the small talk balloons icon in the bottom right of a browser window.
Free Agent is a wonderful news reader by Forte for Windoze. See http://www.forteinc.com/agent/freagent.htm
The old command line newsgreaders like trn and tin are a good
standby. Be sure to set the environment variable NNTPSERVER first.
For example...
export NNTPSERVER=news.sfour.com
trn