
How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011) - ffffruit
http://owni.fr/2011/03/13/how-a-handful-of-geeks-defied-the-ussr/
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hardmath123
Relevant—here are IRC logs from the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090628013626/http://www.ibiblio...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090628013626/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/report-
ussr-gorbatchev)

~~~
efoto
Thank you for this link!

I was reading this USENET group non-stop for two days back then, retelling the
posts to all my friends.

Just read this: "PLEASE STOP FLOODING THE ONLY NARROW CHANNEL WITH BOGUS
MESSAGES. WITH SILLY QUESTIONS. NOTE THAT IT'S NEITHER A TOY NOR A MEAN TO.
REACH TO YOUR RELATIVES OR FRIENDS. WE NEED THE BANDWIDTH TO HELP. TO ORGANIZE
THE RESISTANCE, PLEASE, DO NOT (EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY). HELP THESE FASCISTS!
BEFORE SENDING SOMETHING TO SOVIET UNION PLEASE. THINK TWICE (OR BETTER
THRICE). THANK YOU"

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bootload
_" Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized
architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982) to circumvent
traditional censorship."_

That should read, _" re-inveneted in USSR"_.

Tom Truscott [0] and Jim Ellis [1] are the creators of Usenet. Bnews was
indeed released in '82, using UUCP to exchange between machines. [2] This was
before NNTP. In '95, Truscott and Ellis received the Flame award at USENIX.[3]
Guess what for?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29)

[2]
[http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html](http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html)

[3] 1995: _" the third Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Tom
Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis for their work in creating USENET."_ ~
[https://www.usenix.org/about/flame](https://www.usenix.org/about/flame)

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efoto
Relcom and USENET indeed played a role in helping the people of Moscow and
Leningrad to defeat that coup d'état: the mere fact, that it continued to
operate was an indication of a weakened grip of the KGB.

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lukasb
"All channels were blacked-out except for one; Usenet, which is the
grandfather of chat-rooms and is capable or [sic] surviving without the
Internet."

Do they mean Usenet doesn't require IP to work? And did that matter here?
Would actually be fascinating if some alternative federated server comms
played a pivotal role, but more likely this is careless writing.

~~~
scarmig
Indeed, Usenet _doesn 't_ require IP to work. See UUCP[0].

Some gray beard can probably speak more intelligently than me about this, but
I think people would basically specify a series of hops. Each hop would store-
and-forward the message to the next hop. Nowadays people talk about delay and
disruption tolerant networks, which use similar techniques.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP)

~~~
hga
If you wanted to do "retail" level transactions like sending an email, you
needed to know the path, like systemA!systemB!destinationsystem!user

Usenet systems had established neighbors communicating with UUCP and used a
flooding algorithm to get messages to the entire network of systems. All built
on top of these point-to-point links, could be done over the Internet (NNTP)
but it wasn't required. This was a big enough thing that specialized modems
for UUCP were popular:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit)

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chiph
There's a good account of the coup attempt in _The Dead Hand_ [0] in the last
1/3 of the book. According to it, Gorbachev and family were isolated in his
dacha, and his "Nuclear Football" \-- the _Cheget_ , that controlled their
ICBM launch codes was taken from him.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-
eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-
ebook/dp/B002PXFYPQ)

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guard-of-terra
I guess pretty much anybody had defied the USSR at that point.

The coup attempt was an act of desperation.

~~~
dogma1138
Not within Russia proper much of the infrastructure and many of the
establishments were still either in the hands of hardliners or sitting on the
fence. This actually continued as isolated events till the mid 90's with so
often a random general deciding to become the next great patriotic hero. In
1991 Russia could've went to a civil war and worse cause a nuclear incident
which some generals were promoting, while people do not know this and today
some even dismiss it that period had us closer to ww3 than probably most of
the Cold War, any spark could've ignited that powder cake and if a war would
break out no one in Russia would've been in a position to stop it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Not sure about "random generals", but the red belt did exist.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Belt_%28Russia%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Belt_%28Russia%29)

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obrero
Usenet probably did play some small part in taking power away from the
government and Gosplan, and handing it to the people of the USSR.

This is one of the main reasons the US government and the corporations which
monopolize the last mile of communications effectively killed off Usenet in
2009.

