Hello! I'm Wes (aka; praetor), the founder of the UUCP project ! I'm humbled my project reached the front page of HN and has generated some interest.<p>Yes. I do apologize for the documentation being sparse. I'm developing the Tier 1 provisioning scripts, and documenting at the same time. Plus, unfortunately, I have a full-time life. But once I finish the Tier 1 stuff, I can delegate duties out to those with an interest :D<p>Yup. It's all run via SSH. The preferred server is Taylor UUCP, which is super flexible. I've sent an e-mail to the developer, Ian Taylor, to hopefully revive that project and breath some life into UUCP. It's a fantastically resilient protocol and will run over damned near anything. We've even had some talk of running UUCP over ham radio links!!!<p>All the Tier 1 hosts are mesh interconnected, so even if one goes down, it doesn't take huge swathes of the network with it. With how the Internet is shaping up to be, if Google goes down, it's taking a huge piece of the network with it. This is really intended to reawaken the DIY ethos the Internet was founded on. Mostly public nixes and tilde servers, but anyone with some dedication can be a Tier 1. We've kinda democratized it that way.<p>And no, you don't have to be the "right kind of freedom fighter". The Tier 1 operators have a gentleman's agreement to let anything pass through their node to the broader network unless it's something like CP or flagrantly against the law (or spam)<p>It's an exciting project! It really is a network for the modern nerd, and is ripe for all sorts of projects!<p>Please join us on IRC @ irc.tilde.chat or subscribe to the project mailing list at uucp@lists.tildeverse.org<p>See ya on the network! :D
LOL kids these days. I remember when we first got Internet access and didn't have to batch up a UUCP download late at night any more, what a great convenience! Also things like URLs are remarkably useful; finding a file via UUCP was quite a hassle. I mean as an art project goes, sure, why not? But it's hard to imagine UUCP offers any practical advantages unless you literally don't have an always-on Internet connection.<p>For more nostalgia, enjoy the UUCP maps: <a href="http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/" rel="nofollow">http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/</a>
UUCP is one of those good things that many early ISP providers overlooked, You had companies with an e-mail server that would dial up to the internet to send and receive e-mail and would get a dynamic IP address. This would be no problem for UUCP, but since many newcomers to the internet didn't know it they would use some clunky dynamic DNS system instead. Also if the connection dropped there was no 'resume' feature if this happened during the sending or receiving of a large e-mail, so it would have to start sending or receiving that e-mail all over again.
I suspect this is #1 on HN because we are all very interested in ideas that enable decentralized publishing. The trouble with uucp is that it wont take long for a tier 1 node to disconnect a leaf for being the wrong kind of freedom fighter.
Interesting. I had no idea someone had layered SSH and certificate auth on top of UUCP.<p>Used UUCP a lot back in the day to push software updates out to customer machines over dial up.
Seems interesting, but unfortunately the leaf guide is empty.<p><a href="https://uucp.dataforge.tk/~uucp/wiki/index.php?n=Main.LeafNode" rel="nofollow">https://uucp.dataforge.tk/~uucp/wiki/index.php?n=Main.LeafNo...</a>
I remember uucpssh.org[1] which I had bookmarked for a while but didn't get around to setting up before it closed down. Now it resolves to a spam website. Sad!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article330.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article330.shtml</a>
Somewhat in a similar vein (in that it provides an NNTP interface and provides for decentralized distribution of newsgroups/mailing lists) is public-inbox [0] which is used by kernel.org for mirroring LKML; it's quite straightforward to get running and has a great technical foundation on git.<p>[0] <a href="https://public-inbox.org" rel="nofollow">https://public-inbox.org</a>
I used to run a leaf node in Hawaii with an AT&T 3B1 using its internal 1200 baud modem. My upstream was Pegasus Information Systems, run by by a guy named Richard Foulk.
I can haz UUCP+Briar using (in order of preference) GNUnet/i2p/Tor as the underlay with full end to end PGP encryption, Web & Chain of trust & custody attestation, via fully bootstrappable & replicable builds?<p>No?<p>Meh. Guess it'll take another 7 years until crypto & libre take off.