[liberationtech] Modern FIDONET for net disable countries?

[Gary Garriott (ggarriott@INTERNEWS.ORG)]

FWIW, over the weekend I discovered I still have an unused SEAdog package dating from the late eighties. SEAdog was a commercial adaptation of the Fidonet Electronic Mail Protocol and which for a bunch of years we used extensively in another NGO to make overseas modem calls to far flung partners and associates, usually scheduled in the middle of the night. SEAdog also includes a provision for UUCP gateway addressing.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: liberationtech-bounces at mailman.stanford.edu [mailto:liberationtech-bounces at mailman.stanford.edu] On Behalf Of Rich Kulawiec
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2013 4:57 PM
To: liberationtech
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Modern FIDONET for net disable countries?

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

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