Re: ad-hoc wifi news transport

On Fri, 04 Apr 2025 10:13:46 -0300
Ethan Carter <ec1828@somewhere.edu> wrote:

bp@www.zefox.net writes:
 

Ethan Carter <ec1828@gmail.com> wrote:

Toaster <toaster@dne3.net> writes:
 

Posting this here (was on comp.misc)
>
I was researching NNTP and came across this project:
>
https://github.com/nntpchan/nntpchan/
>
Using NNTP as a base protocol for other services. Personally, I
think it's a great idea, and it got me thinking.
>
Wireless ad-hoc mesh networks are an interest of mine. Normally
the purpose of the network is to route traditional TCP/IP
protocol stacks on top of whatever routing technology (like
babel). But for radios, they broadcast out naturally, it seems
like a service like news/store and forward message sending would
be a natural fit.
>
The idea is to use a smart flooding algorithm, like uflood
(https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~jaya/uflood_thesis.pdf) and skip all the
routing/high speed packet delivery problems and just flood news
articles over it. I think it would be a good fit.
>
Usenet is already decentralized, decentralizing the
infrastructure seems like a cool idea. If I were going to do it,
I'd add some kind of proof-of-work scheme to prevent spamming the
network. Bandwidth would be low due to the air-time of a large
mesh network being saturated, but I see that as a plus, prevents
abuse (spamming binaries on the net).
>
It's half baked, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there and
see if other work has already been done on something like this.

 
Everything in your post looks interesting, but I'm reading it all
for the first time.  I would have liked a slower presentation of
everything. For instance, nntpchan.net is down.  I'm asking for
help on their IRC channel at Rizon.  It's not clear what it aims
to achieve, but it looks interesting.
 
What I'm working on right now is an NNTP server for a small
community. So far the server is not able to peer itself with
another one.  Where am I going?  I see a lot of websites hosting
forums.  That's the wrong thing to do.  These forums should have
an interface-independent storage that provides the data for a web
interface as well as others such as NNTP itself.
 
I'm beginning the work with the NNTP protocol because it allows us
to use the system right away with all the NNTP clients out there.
But I plan to build an HTTP API with which people can build their
web preferred web interface and then power their communities.
 
But I'm aware you're talking about something considerably lower
level here---which is also interesting.  Perhaps I could keep the
idea in mind while I work on this project.

>
To a degree, ad-hoc wifi bears some resemblance to the dialup
connections used in the days of UUCP. I wonder if a UUCP-like
approach, at some level in the stack, might be useful.

 
A UUCP approach sounds nice for peering.  Now, typically servers would
peer by plain TCP, so the server should plan for a UUCP-type of
exchange ahead of time.  I am not there yet, but I'll keep that in
mind.  I believe a UUCP-type of exchange might be too much for a
first release with peering support.  I also think we should take
advantage of what's available.  I think TCP plus NNTP is what the
most popular servers do.
 

AIUI, NNTP relies on always-on, always-same network connections.

 
I think a server can come online, fetch all articles their peers want
to deliver and then disconnect.  But, yes, I think peers register
their peers and communicate with the same ones always.  I don't think
we should go towards a discovery of peers, say.
 

UUCP functions with mostly-off, manually configured connections.
That seems like dialup.

 
That makes sense.

My original idea was to leverage wifi's characteristics to propagate
articles in a flooding manner. It bypasses all of the complexity of
ad-hoc wifi peering and uses all of the strengths of a radio based
broadcast medium. It'd be anonymous and virtually uncensorable. (and
free transport with no configuration or centralized anything)

Using the internet, I'd just use NNTP. UUCP would work for serial links
or the like, but NNTP already exists, so why not use it?

But don't stop there, imo NNTPchan should have leveraged the existing
usenet network instead of having another separate network of
incompatible servers. Just make a top level hierarchy and use that for
the service data, or under alt, who cares.

I think the problem is going to be getting people to use it, as it
stands alot of people like having control over their own little
communities. Bad news is good data can just disappear forever. So many
lost geocities pages full of content gone. :(