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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

(bowshock.nl)
579 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 16 Jun 25 07:38 UTC | HN request time: 1.983s | source
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__MatrixMan__ ◴[16 Jun 25 14:31 UTC] No.44289917[source]▶
I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.

You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.

Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.

The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.

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1. Karrot_Kream ◴[16 Jun 25 16:37 UTC] No.44291126[source]▶
nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found. It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets" either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.

[1]: http://www.nncpgo.org/

[2]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/

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2. cbsmith ◴[16 Jun 25 19:08 UTC] No.44292492[source]▶
...and it's close relative NNTP. There was a whole distribution structure built out of intermittent data transmission. We've had the tools for this stuff for a long time, we've just switched to centralized, always available services because that's easier to build a company around.
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3. immibis ◴[17 Jun 25 12:44 UTC] No.44298456[source]▶
Usenet is fascinating. It's said that communication system is doomed to reinvent half of Usenet the same way every programming language reinvents half of Common Lisp. Hacker News is a itself a worse form of Usenet. And yet almost nobody uses the original.

(Go sign up to eternal-september.org if you're interested)

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4. Karrot_Kream ◴[17 Jun 25 17:54 UTC] No.44301845{3}[source]▶
While the network of Usenet is pretty fascinating, the NNTP protocol is pretty bad. It's a stateful protocol which makes it challenging to write clients for and the protocol itself is textual and chatty which makes it fat on the wire. ActivityPub is a much better "modern" manifestation of the protocol and its capabilities, though unfortunately the actual AP standard is barely glanced at and most people write code for Mastodon's implementation of AP with a minority focused on Lemmy.
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5. immibis ◴[18 Jun 25 08:46 UTC] No.44307952{4}[source]▶
Feel free to write a new protocol implementing NNTP semantics with less cruft.