Re: ad-hoc wifi news transport

On Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:56:47 +0000
D <noreply@mixmin.net> wrote:

On Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:41:21 -0400, Toaster <toaster@dne3.net> wrote:

Not sure if this is an appropriate newsgroup for this topic. Correct
me if I'm mistaken and I'll send this elsewhere.
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.

 
very nice website . . . https://www.shibaura-it.ac.jp/en/index.html
 
akaik, the old-fashioned method was public pgp keyrings and
clear-signed plain-text messages for authentication of articles
posted anonymously to unmoderated usenet newsgroups, but there could
be more modern and easier to use technologies for confirming
"proof-of-work" without extra efforts, otherwise it would have to be
moderated, such as social media always has
 
also, news:news.software.nntp is probably the most on-topic newsgroup
to ask the experts there (ditto news:news.admin.peering as you
already know)

Thank you for the advice, very much appreciated. It's my belief that
moderation should be at the community/group level and not centrally
done. I think usenet's model is pretty good if used properly.

the implementation i have for this in my head is a series of small
raspberry pi type SoC chips with a radio and a battery. use low
frequency band like 27Mhz. Have a bunch of people in the neighborhood
install one in their house, they all peer via flooding, no setup
needed. with a small battery, itd run when nothing else will. each peer
can run some sort of verification to prevent spam.

nice thing about text, it's small and doesnt have to be real-time.
compress for more throughput.