[liberationtech] Modern FIDONET for net disable countries?

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 01:21:38PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> That's a rather intriguing concept, though I might look at starting
> from UUCP & NNTP, or perhaps BITNET, rather than the FIDO model -
> the software is a bit more mature, and UUCP at least is still
> supported.  Mobile devices could associate themselves, via local
> WiFi, when in range of each other, and messages would just flow
> through normal news exchange protocols.

I'll second this.  Usenet is still the most successful experiment in
distributed communication, it's resource-frugal (after all, it was
developed at a time when we thought 1200 baud modems were speedy),
it's highly resilient, it's delay-tolerant, it's scalable, it's agnostic
about transport, and it supports undirected broadcast communication --
something useful when trying to evade traffic analysis.  It supports
bidirectional mail<->news gateways, it runs on minimal hardware, and
among other things, it could be used to provide prolific news feeds
(albeit with some delay) into areas that are heavily censored.

---rsk