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Looks like FIDOnet is still a thing after all these years.

Part of FidoNet raison d' etre was to get around long distance charges. It was to be augmented with radio to jump artificial political and telephone boundaries.

I'm an expert, and I never even managed too.

No, you aren't ... because:

E-Mail needs a complete redo/replacement with hard asymetric encryption and zero-fuss key handling and exchange built in as a core specification.

Its called S/MIME, look it up, expert.

Not all messages need to be encrypted, thats stupid. If you think Fidonet was so awesome compared to SMTP then I'm 100% certain you don't know jack shit about how fidonet or SMTP work under the hood, and I can safely assume this because you also make no actual example of why fidonet is 'better'.

Let me go ahead and quote official fidonet policy, which basically says using encryption is not allowed and that everyone along the path SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO READ EVERY MESSAGE:

2.1.4 Encryption and Review of Mail

FidoNet is an amateur system. Our technology is such that the privacy of
messages cannot be guaranteed. As a sysop, you have the right to review
traffic flowing through your system, if for no other reason than to ensure
that the system is not being used for illegal or commercial purposes.
Encryption obviously makes this review impossible. Therefore, encrypted
and/or commercial traffic that is routed without the express permission of
all the links in the delivery system constitutes annoying behavior. See
section 1.3.6 for a definition of commercial traffic.

Thats from http://www.fidonet.org/policy4...

Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.

Ooh, like a cross between Freenet and FidoNet? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.

Is anyone else very much in favor of thorium but also gets really really annoyed by the fan club?

I'm very much in favor of thorium. As to the fan club, I conform to the FidoNet guideline: "Do not be excessively annoying and do not become excessively annoyed."

Instead of re-inventing the wheel

Instead of re-inventing the wheel why not just use Fidonet?

Hell, I was using Fidonet since before the Internet was available to the masses.

Tell you what, why don't we let those that have ideas, and itches to scratch rally supporters for their own implementations based on their own merits, and let the best protocol win?

Sometimes you have to break an egg to make an omelet; Sometimes you have to re-invent a wheel or axle to innovate.

Oh wait, what about fidonet and pbboard. Those were the days! Surely the infrastructure still exists.

Sure.

Link to more information:

Welcome to FidoNet.org

There used to be different shareware BBS's around; connected through Fidonet and alike; as well BBS's with a sh*tload of electronic schematics ready to be used towards real world applications. There were shared filelists inbetween BBS's, multinodes, chats and gatewaying to other systems ...

We used to know which BBS to call to get which information. Sysops were almost 24/7 ready to chat with their users. There used to be RIP, Ansi, Ascii ready to entertain the user. Internet e-mail was not a problem and was delivered 8 times a day through a mail gateway (through polling).

We got this now with live nets, forums, msn and other systems; it's more centralized; but do mind the world of BBS is a heavy pioneer when the Internet wasn't ready available for others. There are millions of sites out there, maybe a few thousand really interesting to read. It's not because everything is easier to find (centralized), it must be of more quality ...

Trying not to forget an age which had great potential is not always that bad... and, if you rather look well, lots of sites act like a BBS now-a-days.

You are probably talking about FidoNet.

Yes, mostly...unfortunately, this sort of thing was far beyond anything I could construct myself. What my ideal implementation included was the ability to connect through a gateway to another BBS -- i.e. user in city A connects to BBS in city B, then has the ability to dial any BBS in city C by selecting it from a list or whatever, and potentially city D, E, F, and so on...unfortunately, that really meant that one user could occupy an indefinite number of phone lines, hopping all over the place.

Anyway...the idea sounded good.

You are probably talking about FidoNet.

Fidonet!

if they shut down free and open net access, we'll just have to fall back on an open, decentralized, reputation-driven model like FidoNet

Update it peer-to-peer wifi with IP-level packet incryption, and it could be nearly as fast and certain;y more secure than the current net.

Well, goodbye Internet, we hardly knew you. It's been a long, strange and wonderful ride.

I guess we can always all go back to Fidonet, using 33.6bps modems. Fortunately, the necessary software can be installed on Linux.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely joking. It's either Fidonet, or creating a some sort of cooperative (not-for-profit) ISP, based in part on WiFi technology.

I always wanted to run a BBS. Now I have the time, income, and computer power, and look, Fidonet is still around!

Now where's my copy of QBBS...

trend of using inbox as a sort of personal database.

i heard that before. friend of mine had ~200M on our server, 199M of it spam - he was just too lazy to sort it out.

i don't know. this was funny back in the old days (tm). one was just fascinated by the possibilities. and you knew most of them folks personally.

but now, setting up and administering mailservers got somewhat boring. there was a fascination for me with BBSes and FTN style networks, then SMTP. but i don't have that much use for it now. if something is important, i get a call.

emails tend to pile up for a week or two, then i look at them. but everyone expects me to answer right away (i do too, if i write one).

sorry. call me outdated, but sometimes i like to punch certain people:

"hey i wanna send you my [pics|video|wav|...] of my [holiday|girlfriend|soccer game|blarp]! | heres the [.ppt|.pdf|.ps] of [meaningless]"
"ok, url? ftp?"
"hugh? i'll send it by email."

yes there is such a thing as uuencode or base64. but at twice the price.

damn, it really has become convenient. and yes, they called me a nerd, when i talked about "modem" and "i can talk to other people with my computer".

I remembered this bit from the old FidoNet - I saw it on a BBS when it first made the rounds in 1993.

1993. Boy, am I dating myself... (I mean in the chronological sense, get your mind out of the gutter!)

Ah yes, FidoNet. I must say I never got any SPAM on FidoNet.

The BBS craze began with hackers eager to receive neat utilities and games, and the best way to receive is to give. Membership was usually free. A primitive forerunner of BitTorrent.

The BBS scene really blossomed with the introduction of adult boards. These were not so much for downloading pics as for swapping fantasies and meeting people who shared your kink. Image downloads had to wait for higher resolution displays, afforable scanners, and higher bandwidth. By then, AOL and the Internet had taken over. Eventually, and many would say regretably, these would merge.

time warp back 10 to 20 years and make do without information networks

He, sorry bub, but Fidonet was created 20 years ago, in 1984, and it quickly became a worldwide information network (1985).

I think Fidonet was (and still is) an information network, and not a bad one at that...

time warp back 10 to 20 years and make do without information networks

He, sorry bub, but Fidonet was created 20 years ago, in 1984, and it quickly became a worldwide information network (1985).

I think Fidonet was (and still is) an information network, and not a bad one at that...

If this gets off the ground, there's going to be somebody out there who creates a bridge to the rest of the world from this otherwise proprietary network. It's the same thing they did with FidoNet, UUCP, and many other store-and-forward networks that were (or, as exists with Fight-o-net, still) out there.

I read of a similar idea here on /. - the idea was to build a free net ontop of the existing network so as to avoid censorship/filtering etc.

A collection of localized wifi networks interconnected via VPN would probably do the trick. The agreement would be not to provide an internet gateway - just gatways to other local nets. A certain level of trust would have to be established between purveyors of these nodes - like FIDOnet back in the day.

FIDOnet is probably a good model for this - provided you wanted to reach further than your local community. Actually FIDOnet is still around - and might be a good place to look for information.

The upside of having a completely isolated network would be that warezdoodz would probably find it frustrating and leave (nothing real 'juicy' on the servers and connected machines - and no gateway to the larger internet). On the other hand, crackers might consider it an oasis and/or a secure vault for storing or passing their ill-gotten booty. You would have to weigh the potential threats with the value of such a system before commiting. You definitely don't want the FBI to come calling because of some script kiddie's actions on your network - or heaven forbid, a terrorist cell!

Once people had access to it, signifigantly less than 10 years. Sure, email was around for a long time before it took off, but that's a function of access to the Internet, not a function of the usability or functionality of email.

About 10 years ago or so, this would have been called FidoNet" FidoNet is now still alive, but is mostly just one large Flame War. It's a shame that they're using the web for this, as Zone 6 (Asia) is down to about 20 some members.

Me too, but it's still out there.

Sounds remarkably like a tiny version of Fidonet. Fidonot had many zones, regions, nodes, and points. It standardized the serial interface via FOSSIL (Fido-Opus-Seadog-Serias-Interface-Layer), which many early BBS software used (such as the Maximus package I used), and the mail programs.

Through it, you could have message echoes, file echoes, you could offer files for remote login (I had BBSes from Texas dailing in to my Saskatoon BBS and requesting libraries I'd written, it was cool), and request files from remote BBSes. You could also send them via file echoes, so they'd be scheduled and sent between the nodes when the optimal time to call was (I used BinkleyTerm as my front end, it handled all that).

Towards the end, the technology was really advanced. Maximus version 3 ran on NT, OS/2, and DOS. It had a complete VM and language you compiled to byte code, as well as the MECCA display language. Using it, you'd make MECCA files that were like templates. It could insert anything, and would be tranlated on the fly to ASCII, ANSI, AVATAR, or (thanks to v3) RIP (remote image protocol) -- which was a very fast remote EGA-like display. Mecca itself was internally similar to Avatar.

The VM language (similar to Pascal and Basic) allowed you to automate it further. Naturally, none of the local teenaged sysops who barely understood computers used Maximus; they were all busy using Renegade with some ansi pack to be leet. I "tricked out" my BBS by having it send long and pretty ansis at the users as much as possible, since this noticably increased my callbacks. People always seemed surprised at what I could do with Maximus ;)

Anyways, that's my trip down memory lane for the day.

Or maybe you could just join FidoNet, which tried to do the same thing back in the 80's -
Or maybe you could just set up a Packet Radio node.

But if you want to re-re-reinvent the wheel, who's to stop you?

Nice to see that the 'Other Nations' are outside the US. And I'm glad its South (not North) Korea at No. 4, considering that Nuclear Engineering is at No. 7!

Those figures are a bit misleading. The North Koreans are taking the course through a FidoNET gateway in South Korea. The link across the border is by an RFC2549 connection.

When will the U.S. learn, and stop educating its enemies?

I believe this site has some relevant info on FidoNet.

I personally find slashdot's moderation system interesting and useful especially in the aspect of assigning points and tags (e.g. Funny). Also, I didn't know trolls existed before entering slashdot ^_^; Might it be because people eventually can get moderated to read only mode for posting bullshit statements?

Message networks allowed people to communicate across the nation. It was USENET and email for non-internet folks. (This was before the internet was opened up.)

Fidonet was obe of my favorites as it forced the sysop to prove they could configure everything properly. It was open on systems run on all sorts of OS could join.

Later message networks used the QWK format which was much simpler.

Others like the RIME network used proprietary software, but allowed more control and file attachments.

Ah, those were the days.

Message areas are not only availible through QWK packets (can be downloaded via FTP as well) but also through NNTP, and Gopher.

Everyone loves door games as well, and there are many Leages (Inter-BBS) that still run games such as BRE, Falcon's Eye, Arrowbridge, and more.

So, to all of you who think the BBS got left in the dust with the Modem, think again! :)

No need to redo it, the original is still around.

So how would we replace the university backbones that began the internet?

Communicate the old-fashioned way: FidoNet

Seriously, the only way break the megacorp's choke-hold on the net is to go totally wireless, and completely circumvent the need for the existing millions of miles of strung wire. There needs to be a communcation method that can go end-to-end without *depending* on all that wire.

Right now, he who owns the pipe controls the communication.

No start-up or co-op or RMSophile (of which I am one) is going to gather enough resources to lay down an equal amount of wire to compete.

It's gonna be AT&T or TimeWarner. Coax or twisted pair. Cable or DSL. There is no other option, and all the wire is owned.

There will have to be an all-wireless solution. Until then, grab your ankles -- but don't hold your breath.

FidoNet is still very much alive. It's smaller obviously, but it still functions pretty much the same way. They've adopted the use of the internet for moving mail and files around cost effectively.

Even thought my BBS has been gone for 5 years (I was 1:114/244), I still get a copy of FidoNews by email just to keep up with some of things going on.

Not just a pain in the arse on its own, but also a pain that I couldn't ever find a suitable plugin for .qwk and BlueWave (I think that's what the FidoNet-compatible offline BBS e-mail reader I was using was called). Shelling to the command prompt was never so annoying, unfortunately.

Ah, those were the days. At least PGP in Win32 likes grabbing stuff you've sent to the keyboard as its lowest common denominator if you can't get its plugins to work, no more command prompts. :)

The software i used for the system was Remote Access, originally written in Pascal if i remember correctly. The theme of my system was mostly multiplayer BBS door game inspired, including a famous play by email game called VGA Planets. I remember using Frontdoor for the Fidonet daily exchange, and The-Draw a lot, to build nice looking (and friendly) ANSI menus.

I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS :) with mono HGC like card for disply. It didnt change very much, at the last days it used an AMD 386SX-40 with 4Mb ram and a mighty (IDE/ATA :) 80MB seagate hard disk (uhm.. ST-3096A, still fully operational :) and those CPU upgrades were to minimize the downtime required per day for the turn process of the VGA Planets games. (which could easily take 1 to 2 hours on the 286! :) Hmm btw that AMD/Intel 12Mhz 286 (still functional!) was an old DTK *full size board* (i have the large desktop DTK case) with the memory on 256byte chips... (hence, the full size :).

Ah the old days, only thing needed was a decent terminal (with ANSI :) program and preferably a good protocol (zmodem). Who cared what OS/platform had the caller, as long as it were a modem, which, were all true (non soft) modems back then.

--

For a time, I gated newsgroups wholesale into FidoNet. Oh what an annoying setup I had. I registered Gigo (serial number 7), Jason Fesler's wonderful gateway package.

Later, for a very short time, I ran a gateway for all of Region 19, which I shut down abruptly because of the political insanity that was Fido.

I learned a lot from my experience in Fido. I made some friends who are still with me today. I found romance because of a connection made in FidoNet (wow); I learned to edit messages and to > quote properly. I wrote for FidoNews, and developed a specification for a text-based nodelist that never took off. I learned the Artful Insult thanks to the not-so-gentle-moderation of Ed Cleary in POLITICS. I even got to try my hand at moderating some large (INTERUSER) and not-so-large (SIP_SURVIVOR) echos. I quit drinking.

Wow.

I guess, mostly of nostalgia, I'm still a member of FidoNet. Yes, mail only, but still 24CM. I could have put my BBS back up, and considered it for a time after I found my Remote Access registration key a year or so ago, but nobody called it in 1993, before the popular rise of the Internet; why would anyone call it now?

So onward I plod, receiving my echomail ... all 10k/day of it.

Still, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Not just were, FidoNet is still alive, and some would say well. Dial-up connections have in many places been replaced by data exchange over Internet, but otherwise little has changed. And, in many ways, it's a giant step above Usenet.

Before TUX, there was OPUS!
---

I remember being a leafnode to a fidonet BBS. Ah, they had flame wars in those days! Scary that they're still around.

Here you can find the latest FidoNet policy document.

This is the sobering part:

FidoNet Policy Document
Version 4.07
June 9, 1989

--

I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet

You could even meld Usenet and FidoNet together in some places. Sometime in '93 or so, Net209 here in Las Vegas set up a gateway to move email and Usenet between the Internet and FidoNet. I had a small selection of newsgroups (mainly comp.sys.apple2.*, rec.arts.startrek.*, and a few others) going into my BBS, first with Maximus-CBCS running under DR DOS 6.0 and then with some custom menu stuff I hacked together under Linux. (Getting cnews and ifgate (?) to communicate with each other in the way I wanted was a bit of a chore, but I eventually had it set up with nearly transparent Usenet access and Fido echoes under a bogus "fidonet" hierarchy (e.g., the STARTREK echo got mapped to something like fidonet.rec.arts.startrek). Fun stuff, and the $10/month it cost to be a node was cheaper than what local ISPs were charging and I could do things with it that I couldn't do with Internet access through college. (Having email addressed to sysop@sknkwrks.genesplicer.org or sysop@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org (neither has been active in over five years, so don't click :-) ) appear on your very own computer without any manual intervention was kinda neat. :-) )

I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet

You could even meld Usenet and FidoNet together in some places. Sometime in '93 or so, Net209 here in Las Vegas set up a gateway to move email and Usenet between the Internet and FidoNet. I had a small selection of newsgroups (mainly comp.sys.apple2.*, rec.arts.startrek.*, and a few others) going into my BBS, first with Maximus-CBCS running under DR DOS 6.0 and then with some custom menu stuff I hacked together under Linux. (Getting cnews and ifgate (?) to communicate with each other in the way I wanted was a bit of a chore, but I eventually had it set up with nearly transparent Usenet access and Fido echoes under a bogus "fidonet" hierarchy (e.g., the STARTREK echo got mapped to something like fidonet.rec.arts.startrek). Fun stuff, and the $10/month it cost to be a node was cheaper than what local ISPs were charging and I could do things with it that I couldn't do with Internet access through college. (Having email addressed to sysop@sknkwrks.genesplicer.org or sysop@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org (neither has been active in over five years, so don't click :-) ) appear on your very own computer without any manual intervention was kinda neat. :-) )

I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet

FidoNet is a network of independent, dial-up bulletin board systems. You connect with a modem to a PC running in some guy's basement. Everything is text. "Graphics" means color text with line-draw characters. Almost none of these systems are connected to a permanent network other then the one run by AT&T. Every night, all these BBSes call the BBSes in the next towns over, and exchange mail and files. It isn't far wrong to say FidoNet was designed primarily to cheat the phone company.

For a long time, this was the only way for someone like myself, living in rural New Hampshire, USA, to get "online". The Internet was something to be found at universities. But FidoNet was everywhere. It had over 40,000 nodes when the Internet hit the big time and started killing it off. It's still alive, but slowly dying out as the 'net makes it obsolete.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, FidoNet had open discussion forms, like Usenet. Fido's "newsgroups" were called "echos". Like Usenet, FidoNet was largely self-regulated. The "coordinators" were a loosely-knit group of system operators who tried to keep everyone on the same sheet of music. But, unlike Usenet, Fido had controls in place to keep things like spam from getting out of hand.

Every Fido echo (discussion group) had a moderator. Not like a Usenet moderator, but more like an IRC "op". The moderator was responsible for keeping the echo in the echolist -- if noone cared about an echo, it would automatically remove itself in about six months. Moderators were free to implement whatever policy they chose. Anyone was free to start their own echo if they didn't like any of the current ones.

The big thing was: People were held accountable. If someone started making an ass out of themselves, the moderator would warn them. If the twit didn't listen, the moderator could mail the sysop of their board and get them removed from the echo. If the same guy kept getting kicked out of echos, the sysop would generally cut their echo access entirely.

But wait -- it gets better. If a particular board was a frequent source of twits, spammers, and the like, a coalition of moderators could contact the local network coordinator (NC). The NC would warn the board, but if it did not improve, it's FidoNet feed would be cut completely. There were ways for this to progress up the chain of command so that entire networks (local areas) could be cut.

If you are used to the loosely regulated anarchy of Usenet, this seems drastically different. But it did work, for the small population of Fido at the time. In effect, FidoNet has a cabal, and is better off for it.

Of course, we'll never know for sure if FidoNet would have scaled as well as UseNet has (and Usenet scaled, just not as well as we'd like). However, a system like FidoNet's might be something to consider for those looking to "replace" Usenet with something "better".

*climbs back down off soap-box*

Just my 1/4 of a byte. ;-)

I used to be a system operator of a dial-up BBS (bulletin board system), back when FidoNet was pretty much the only way to get online to any kind of WAN in places like back-woods New Hampshire, USA, where I live.

One of the things I've always liked about FidoNet over UseNet was that people were held accountable.

If you broke an echo's rules (an echo is like a newsgroup), the moderator of that echo could ban you from the echo. (Fido moderators are more like IRC channel operators then UseNet moderators).

If you got banned enough times, most system operators would simply ban you from the echos entirely.

But it got better. If a system's operator was unresponsive, or a system was a continual source of twits, the FidoNet feed to that system could be cut.

If other systems in the area kept refeeding him any, that entire network (local geographical area) would be cut.

Seems a little heavy-handed if you are used to Internet anarchy. But I think UseNet's system of waiting until things have deteriorated to the point of uselessness doesn't work, and a system that doesn't work isn't a good system. FidoNet preemptively cut off the garbage-makers. It was all run by the lose organization of system operators, was very grass-roots, and generally operated on concenus. It worked pretty well.

In a way, FidoNet has a cabal, and was better for it, IMNSHO.

Of course, the big-time (the Internet) has pretty much killed it off these days, so we'll never know how it would have scaled compared to Usenet.