On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 11:06:51AM -0700, keyser-soze@hushmail.com wrote:
- re-awaken FidoNet
FidoNet, ugh. Would the software even work under most current operating systems? uucp still lives in pretty much every UNIX and UNIX-like operating system and it moves email well. It would be a simple matter to get uucp going for a mail link with some sort of over the wire encryption. It has been about ten years since I've dealt with this, but as I recall each email message went via a uux of rmail (uux was remote command execution - sort of like rsh over a modem). There is no particular reason why one couldn't encrypt before sending and decrypt upon receipt. Mostly just a modification to sendmail.cf and a modification to rmail. Of course this really just solves the problem for a single hop uucp link. People did a lot of multi-hop uucp. I remember trying to work out the right "bang path" to get mail across the country to people I was corresponding with quickly. Of course, you end up with the same problems. Traffic can be monitored. multi-hop uucp means there are lots of very easy interception points. This doesn't really get around the whole problem, uucp is just something different to monitor, still subject to traffic analysis, and you'd need real end to end encryption of email messages via something like pgp/gpg anyway. The only thing a large multi-hop uucp network would give us is that it would allow us to do is decentralise and control our own mail paths, so monitoring would be harder, in that sense. In a large enough network, one could even use a different path for each message. I wonder if my old Telebit modem still works. It is in a box somewhere... --- Mark Henderson, mch@squirrel.com, mch@informationanarchy.org "Heilir fsir. Heilar asynjur. Heil sja in fjvln}ta fold." - Sigrdrmfumal OpenPGP/GnuPG keys available at http://www.squirrel.com/pgpkeys.asc