On 30/03/2021 12:59, yeti wrote:
xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> writes:
Even now, there is another old time mystery that I haven't got into yet:
the mesh of UUCP. Now it seems that some Tildezens have started making
some progress trekking into this old forgotten land.
The current masters may be there:
https://www.rhizomatica.org/hermes/
https://github.com/DigitalHERMES
But there sure is lots of fun in UUCP with license free carriers or
tunnels too.
Just want to point out that there is a new protocol. It is to UUCP what
SSH is to telnet -- it's called NNCP (node to node copy) and it's pretty awesome. It's totally asynchronous, fully encrypted, and supports file transfer and command execution. It does take a bit of work to get set
up, but once it's up and running it's easy to copy stuff around. It does
need some ancillary software to do more than just copying files, but it
could easily be used for newsgroups/email/whatever.
The data is split into packets, and these can be transferred using
literally any method that comes to mind. The NNCP package comes with a built-in tcp "caller" that can transfer packets the old-fashioned way,
or you can output the encrypted packets to files and then transfer them
via sneakernet, scp, whatever. It also supports file requests (freqing)
and so my first thought was it could be used in areas with limited or no internet connectivity.
One person goes around town collecting USB drives that have freqs on
them. They can't see the contents of the packets, and so can't interfere
if they wanted (or snoop). They then "dial" into the mesh (all the NNCP
nodes can talk to each other, therefore the file request could go to any node). The file requests go out, and at some point in the future (it
depends entirely on how it's configured) they dial in again and get the responses (encrypted to the receiver now). They then deliver the USB
sticks back to everyone, who then decrypt the packets using their local
NNCP stack. This could be used for transferring uncensored news, books,
music, anything. The courier, if caught, has complete plausible
deniability. They can't possibly know what the people are requesting --
if anything at all. The only metadata that could be gleaned is on the
return trip, when the number and/or size of the packets might reveal
something (or nothing, depending on how things are encoded) about the
data. Also, when the recipient receives their requested files, it could
come with an updated list of what files are available for the next trip.
Or, you can just use it to upload files to your VPS, which is all I've
done with it so far. There's a public node called quux that is connected
to a bunch of other nodes. The only thing I dislike about it so far is
that you have to manually configure the nncp json file for each node. I
can connect to quux, but if any of the other nodes it connects to want
to talk to me, I have to add them all to my config, and they have to do
the same before any communication can take place at all. I can add them
to my config, and send files/requests/whatever but if they haven't added
me I'm not sure if their daemon would even accept them. I guess this is
also a bonus as it requires you to positively identify and confirm you
want to communicate with a node.
Anyway this turned into quite a ramble. Just been giving a lot of
thought to how a useful system could be built around NNCP.
Cheers,
amr
In terms of actually spreading data around, things like bittorrent and
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