Finally, I got a dc-net working. It is now quite primitive, and useful only as a proof of concept. It does not yet do any key management, I just copied the binaries of several unix utilities to be used as one time pads. The reservation system does not work yet. If there is a message to be sent, it is sent immediately. That means only one of the participants can send a message in one round. The messages are not forwarded anywhere, they are just dropped to "outgoing" directory. It runs on one machine, under three accounts I created just for that purpose. The mail keeps going back and forth constantly between the three accounts, with null files being deposited to the outgoing directories. Temporary files are being created and deleted. As soon as I put a file in one of the incoming directories, within one round it appears in each of the outgoing directories. So the main function works. It is written in perl, because of the ease I can manipulate binary data of any size. As soon as I add the minimal necessary features (PGP based key exchange, and reservation blocks) I will be looking for some people to participate in an experimental dc-net. People who want to participate in this, should have fast, reliable, e-mail connections (preferably round-trip time to any other participant should be less than 10 minutes). If even one participant has a slow link, it will hold everyone up. You also need the ability to pipe incoming mail with a certain subject header through an arbitrary program. You can use any of the various 'slocal' programs, or you could use elm's filter program, or any other means. You also need to have perl working on your system. You need PGP. As someone suggested, an arbitrary group of people might not have much to talk about amongst themselves, so the next feature will be forwarding to a mailing address (or list), a newsgroup, or another dc-net. It is very simple to do the forwarding, it is a little more complicated, and interesting, to decide who will do the forwarding. I would not want to rely on any single site serving as a gateway, since that would introduce a single point of compromise. I would rather have some dynamic system, similar to the reservation blocks, that would let the net randomly decide who will forward a particular message. As soon as this first test network has run for a couple of days, and all the bugs are fixed, I will release the code, so that anybody can work on it. I expect that some people will work on various projects I mentioned in the "FUTURE ENCHANCEMENTS" section of my initial posting on this topic. I hope that people who add features to the system send the mods back to me, so I can incorporate them in a new version. When there is a number of networks running, it will be interesting to experiment with hierarchical nets, or linked networks of networks. -- Yanek Martinson mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek uunet!medexam!yanek this address preferred -->> yanek@novavax.nova.edu <<-- this address preferred Phone (305) 765-6300 daytime FAX: (305) 765-6708 1321 N 65 Way/Hollywood (305) 963-1931 evenings (305) 981-9812 Florida, 33024-5819