Original article at
https://raddle.me/f/wednesday/169488/introducing-the-new-federated-anarchist-networking-protocol
UUCP is a networking protocol that was popular prior to the rise of the commercial Internet and TCP/IP. UUCP has a number of advantages
(implicit in its design) that make it much preferable to TCP/IP for
autonomous, distributed communities.
UUCP is a network of loosely-affiliated nodes, which are just computers
running the UUCP software. each node is identified by a human-readable
name (there is no numeric addressing system comparable to an IP address)
and each node is only aware of the nodes it is directly connected to.
each node may be connected to any number of other nodes. these
connections can happen over any telecommunications system that supports byte-oriented data transfer; that includes TCP/IP (allowing UUCP to interoperate with the Internet) as well as dial-up lines, leased lines,
direct connections (copper or fibre), wireless (radio) links, signals
bounced off the moon, and so on. UUCP nodes are typically not
permanently connected, but establish scheduled temporary connections;
for example a node connected via dial-up might connect to two nodes once
each per day, or a single wireless radio could connect to multiple
wireless peers.
a UUCP network with 6 nodes (A, B, C, D, E and F) might look something
like this:
```
C
|
A -- B -- E -- F
|
D
```
here, B is a large 'hub' node which connects to many peers. A, C, D and
F are probably end-user sites. E might be an end-user site which also
provides connectivity to F, because with UUCP, any node can provide connectivity to any other node without needing any kind of formal
approval from the rest of the network.
because UUCP lacks centralised routing database, a user must specify the complete path to the destination, so a user on D who wants to email the
user 'wednesday' on F might send email to `b!e!f!wednesday`, which means “send this message to B, which will send it E, which will send it to F,
which will deliver it the local user `wednesday` on F”. to reply to
that message, the reverse email address from F might be `e!b!d!sendername`.
of course, it can be quite annoying to manually work out the path every
time you email someone, so many sites run automated 'routers' where you
send an email to '
wednesday@f.uucp' and the node's email software works
out the actual path based on its local UUCP map. but this is different
from how Internet email works, because the UUCP map is local to every
node; there is no centralised authority which creates the map or decides
which nodes can be included or how they can be named, like there is with
the Internet.
UUCP supports the transfer of any kind of file; often those files are
emails, but they could be discussion groups (Usenet), general file
transfers, or any other protocol someone wanted to implement on top of
the network.
so why is this preferable to the Internet TCP/IP model?
- completely decentralised: the Internet depends on centralised
authorities like IANA, ICANN and the IETF which UUCP, by its nature,
simply doesn't need.
- based on voluntary free association: any node can choose to federate
with or *not* federate with any other nodes if wants to, without needing
to ban those nodes from the entire network (and indeed, it would be
impossible to ban a node from the entire network).
- technically simple: UUCP can run on 1970s-era computers.
- explicitly anti-real-time: although UUCP can run over fast links, its scheduled nature means it's inherently a 'slow' protocol which doesn't
rely on, or even permit, constant user engagement the way modern
Internet platforms do.
- interoperates with TCP/IP: we might imagine a community which had a locally-managed IP network (an intranet) for its own communications, and
used UUCP to connect to remote networks.
in summary, it seems clear that UUCP (or a similar protocol based on the
same principles) is far superior to the centralised Internet model.
are there any downsides? well, the most likely downside is that like any loosely affiliated network, certain nodes can become more important to,
or even essential to the network[0] and therefore gain implicit
authority over it; resisting this would be an ongoing process of
structuring the network in an antiauthoritarian way.
[0] this did happen historically with nodes like `ihnp4`, `uunet` and
`decvax`, but their prominance was a natural extension of their
prominance in capitalist society, so this is not necessarily inevitable.
--
Mima
Reincarnated Legendary Evil Spirit of Complete Darkness
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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