«In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.»
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/russian_censors.html
@kensanata Time to revive Fidonet, anyone?
@kensanata Ok, interesting, that is news to me. So maybe it’s a poor metaphor. I recall that they did a similar bandwidth / uptime tiering as Tor, but not anything about rigid hierarchy.
I looked into Fidonet in depth relatively late. It was already on the out, and I was sorry for that. Store and forward asynchronous nodes have real practical DIY appeal, and not to mention network robustness, which is why they are still a thing with hams.
@kensanata Ok. What do you make of #APRS as a model for possible multicasting networks in an insecure or besieged DIY internet future? That is, a layer for formally routed, acked info backbone, and then an adhoc layer for mobile or other intermittent nodes to toss data to whoever in the network picks it up? How would trust work in that? (APRS keys are ridiculously insecure fig leafs.)
http://www.aprs.org/
http://www.aprs-is.net
@Shufei I think this aprs stuff is way over my head. 😄
@kensanata Somehow I doubt it! But I probably expositted my question poorly.
@Shufei I’m sure there are some people who still keep it running, haha. I think one of the #Fidonet drawbacks was it’s hierarchical tree structure. There was no routing around damage, I think. But back then when I was active in the BBS world, I hardly understood Fidonet so who knows.