Reanimating UUCP

http://hypernets.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/reanimating-uucp/

by sj4nz • 14 years ago

43 23 14 years ago

hypernets.wordpress.com

nerd_in_rage• 14 years ago

I had a UUCP feed through the early 90s. Fun times!

dougabug2• 14 years ago

All of this has happened before...

Actually, Usenet worked amazingly well even under the limitations of computers and networks in the 80's. Shared information streams strike me as superior to isolated data motes and walled gardens.

ef4• 14 years ago

This whole article is based on the premise of bandwidth scarcity. I don't buy it.

I also don't buy the complaint that suburbs are already suffering from too much interference. I live in a dense urban environment, and while I can see a lot of networks, I can easily get enough wireless bandwidth to max out my upstream connectivity.

Yes, radio spectrum is a scarce resource. But we keep getting better and better at using it. While there's an upper bound on the amount of data that can be sent over a shared medium, you can redefine the medium. Imagine if your wireless router only broadcast a low-rate unidirectional rendezvous signal, and then targeted each associated device with a focused high rate beam. Etc.

dougabug2• 14 years ago

Not everywhere in the world has reliable landline connections and other forms of fixed infrastructure. And there are environments where wireless communications can be sporadically impaired due to weather or terrain (or ocean or space). There are also security and latency issues which might cause a user to prefer asynchronous communication.

sj4nz5• 14 years ago

This only presumes that you have line-of-sight or uncanny luck to have a reliable Fresnel zone to bounce signal through---but this is still constrained by distance. I used a "Portland, ME to Portland, OR" example to emphasize that these links aren't the kind that you can use allocated low-power radio spectrum to connect as in WiFi. You may be able to max out your upstream capability with local radio, but you can't supply bits to the other side of the city, state, or country. Unless everyone has the same exact interests as you, you won't even have the bits they want---this is what the pub-sub mechanism has to address on top of the content-network. Some people will specialize in carrying the bits that everyone wants and at every step of the way, nodes will have to look at subscription demand and throughput to decided which bits are sent in a batch. Yes, we can imagine our wireless routers as a low-rate signal system with focused high-rate beams, etc, but the probability that you will reach an interested audience from your radio is low. This is why FM/AM radio licenses are so valuable, and this is why having a content channel carried by all the regional cable monopolies is so valuable and vulnerable to censorship---there are many people who would love to watch Current.tv or Al Jazeera but cannot get it in their own regional cable systems. However, radio and cable are still synchronous mediums, which I'm suggesting we should back away from.

Using radio always assumes that there are other nodes interested in what you're sending. In nearly every case of radio-based Internet Service Providers I've been able to find, users always find that the service is "great" for the first month and thereafter totally sucks in every imaginable way: slow speeds, down-time, and bandwidth caps. There's only one tower and enough bandwidth for so many users, after that, there is no upgrade path because almost all the spectrum is allocated. This is guaranteed to happen for any homebrew WiFi network or municipal WiFi network---remember that you only get three separate frequencies without overlap ( http://www.bridgingthelayers.org/channel_overlap.html ) The limits are obvious with FM and AM radio is regulated by the FCC to prevent channel interference between cities---you never get "new" stations, you only get "different" stations when a broadcaster changes format. My favorite example of a broadcaster changing "format" is WHFS in Baltimore, MD---one day it was a progressive rock-radio station and the next morning a spanish-pop-radio station, without warning. (The DJs working there had no idea this change was coming.) By redefining the network medium to "bits via matter" instead of "bits via energy" (SD cards in my example), and relaxing our attention-spans to something less than "instant", you get more bandwidth by adding more cards to the network as needed. We may be getting better at using radio spectrum, but it will always have a political limitation of how it is used when it has real reach to many people---in short, if you can touch many people via a medium, more than a few people will always seek to control that access for their own interests. Bandwidth for information transmission via energy I still believe is scarce and will always be scarce for any situation where you wish to send to many people over long distances. The medium has to be redefined away from energy to matter---and perhaps, just to throw a huge monkey wrench into the mix and stir the pot more---this is what newspapers (which in their print format are already sending matter instead of energy to your household) need to add to their offerings to save themselves. Now, imagine receiving a 4GB SD card with your morning newspaper every morning while the paper-person retrieves old cards during delivery---and what would happen if you were uploading back to everyone else on those same cards? 8GB/day in and out becomes 56GB/week becomes 2.8T/year of data transfer, one SD card at a time. Relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again.

Subscribe to two newspapers and you double your network bandwidth and no one needed to climb on a roof. :)

dalke4• 14 years ago

Large data transfers are still best done through physical shipping of encoded atoms. Take a look at AWS Import/Export for one real-world example. But the threshold for that being useful is rather high. Have you worked out the breakpoint for where a person moving cards is more effective than a network connection? What information, other than DVDs, would be appropriate for this?

Why do you focus on radio-only connections? The highest bandwidth devices can easily be plugged into a wired connection. Why do you assume that bandwidth will get more congested? I think instead that there will be a move towards smaller cells, with lower power. The network provider could have an antenna on every other streetlight or power pole, where each only handles a few dozen devices in range.

Your comment about suburb wifi congestion doesn't feel right. The most cluttered wifi I've seen has been in big apartment buildings, where the transmitters are much closer to each other. One possible solution there is to move towards per-building based cells rather than per-apartment ones. Though this would mean that the hardware has to be as reliable as the building wiring, which isn't yet true.

Where I've heard uucp being useful is for things like "drive-by wifi" for rural parts of the world, for example http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ .

But the idea that "relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again" is just strange. If people want their news less frequently then that just gives more time for their local network aggregator to download that news. Where's the cost savings or revenue boost for the newspaper?

femto• 14 years ago

There are fundamental limits on the capacity of a radio channel [1], but I understand we're not really near them yet. I haven't read the linked paper in detail, but I have attended a seminar by the lead author, where he gave a summary in plain English. I gather the limit is related to the surface area of the volume that the antenna occupies, measured in wavelengths.

I think it's a fascinating result, as in my mind such results are closely linked with some very fundamental physics and maybe even an ultimate information theoretic description of the universe. I'm probably overstepping the mark with that unsupported comment, but it is nice to think about.

[1] http://www.itr.unisa.edu.au/~alex/papers/HanlenGrant04.pdf

dfc• 14 years ago

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

I always thought that was an Tanenbaum quote? The Wikipedia[1][2] citations use the word tapes but I seem to remember that DLTs was used instead of tapes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

sj4nz5• 14 years ago

This is why I labeled the quote "(apocraphal)". :) I first remember hearing it during the early days of Netflix---and I think it was Reed Hastings who said something similar to that effect as a quote of someone I can't remember now. I went with http://www.bpfh.net/sysadmin/never-underestimate-bandwidth.h... as the reference for Dennis Ritchie's variant of the quote.

toddh• 14 years ago

Be part of the slow network movement? I was so excited when a friend agreed to connect to me and bring in email and usenet via UUCP. Good memories, but I like the real-time fast food world a lot better. Though for interplanetary communication it makes a lot of sense.

mahmud• 14 years ago

We use UUCP at work to send POS data from some of our stores to head office.

astrodust• 14 years ago

Every Linux system has a uucp account for no other reason than it's been there so long that removing it is proving more than a bit troublesome.

It seems like some kind of monument to the past at this point.

cnvogel• 14 years ago

It used to be the case that device nodes for serial ports and lock files for those were owned by that user/group. Historically uucp (uucico - uucp call in call out) was the only sensible thing to use the modem for anyway...

Personally, I never used uucp over serial links, but for several years fetched my emails via uucp-in-tcp. It was a homegrown system with sendmail, later qmail, later exim and it worked very reliably.

lloeki• 14 years ago

I was quite surprised to see there's uucp(1) and friends right there on OSX. It actually never crossed my mind to check until now.

nonameyes• 14 years ago

Any chance cjdns will be ported to BSD?

jsilence2• 14 years ago

Sneaking SD-Cards might also be a nice alternative of communication in times of increasing online surveillance.

jsilence2• 14 years ago

Encryption would of course be mandatory. Maybe even enhanced with steganograhy.

"My dear photo sharing friend, enclosed you'll find the collection of my latest pictures which are simply to huge in volume for my crappy internet connection. Enjoy and keep sending pictures in return. PS: I love your artistic subtle casual picture style."

Reanimating UUCP

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