Phaeton's main design goals are to be simple, secure and fast.

• Simple: It doesn't even implement all of RFC977. It just implements the most basic NNTP commands needed by news readers, and doesn't support all the "interactive" features in the standard.
  • LIST ACTIVE
  • GROUP
  • ARTICLE
  • HEAD
  • OVER
  • QUIT
  • HELP
  • MODE READER

• Secure: Although it's written in C, effort has been made to make it secure.
  • It's small, so there's less code to audit
  • Runs as a wholly unprivileged user without write access

• Fast: It doesn't do anything advanced.
  • Small memory foot print
  • Uses efficient data structures to minimize disk traffic

Phaeton depends on Reticule running as a separate process. It can't be used stand-alone. Anything advanced (like posting) is handled by Reticule, which Phaeton communicates with via a unix-domain socket.