In the pre-smtp days, email links were over UUCP, which was often relayed via dial up lines which connected intermittently, on a schedule (e.g. every hour).<p>You also specified not just the destination, but also the route for the email to take, via a 'bang path': <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path</a><p>Add in the situation of disk quotas for university students, but not email quotas, and you get the means, motive and opportunity for people to use the email spools of a mail servers around the world as an annex to their home directory...
Technically, the data is not stored in the network, but in the buffer memory of the routers (and switches) in the path of the packets. So what this is really doing is externalizing the cost of storage to the network providers.<p>There is a problem called “<i>Buffer bloat</i>”¹ which is that many manufacturers of networking equipment provide too much buffer memory, which leads to TCP latency and timeouts, since TCP was not designed with these large buffers in mind. Using Pingfs will take up buffer space in networking equipment. This could either be a good thing, since it decreases the available buffer space, or it might be a bad thing since it might make networking providers increase their buffers.<p>I’m not sure how much of this comment is serious.<p>① <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bufferbloat.net/</a>
This is crazy cool. Nevertheless, if everyone used it, we would saturate whatever network we are using and I am curious what it would do to traffic costs since you are basically bouncing around a whole bunch of data back and forth. Sounds expensive.<p>Still crazy cool.
Hi, author here.<p>Just like with iodine (dns tunnel) this was one thing me and my friends talked about that would be cool.<p>I actually started to implement this in haskell in 2011, and gave up after I had basic writes to files working. I can get dig out that code if anyone is interested.<p>The c version of the project hasnt gotten very far yet as you can see, I might pick it up again though.
Just for the record: there was some previous work on that: <a href="http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt" rel="nofollow">http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt</a> (see point 7)
Could do some crazy docker things with this. Imagine bouncing around your entire P2P net on a .bit domain. Makes popcorn time look like a bunch of amateurs.
Some radio HAMs have done this with packet radio and EME transmissions so the idea isn't new but this is really neat and likely much higher capacity.<p>Very slow refresh DRAM, next up, Mercury? (the planet or the metal, take your pick) ;)
A long time ago as a joke a few of us sketched out "netfs" that would use network switch forward buffers as a filesystem in a similar manner (constant resending), but never actually tried to make it. This is really neat.