

Reanimating UUCP - sj4nz
http://hypernets.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/reanimating-uucp/

======
dfc
_Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway._

I always thought that was an Tanenbaum quote? The Wikipedia[1][2] citations
use the word tapes but I seem to remember that DLTs was used instead of tapes.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet>

[2] <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum>

~~~
sj4nz
This is why I labeled the quote "(apocraphal)". :) I first remember hearing it
during the early days of Netflix---and I think it was Reed Hastings who said
something similar to that effect as a quote of someone I can't remember now. I
went with [http://www.bpfh.net/sysadmin/never-underestimate-
bandwidth.h...](http://www.bpfh.net/sysadmin/never-underestimate-
bandwidth.html) as the reference for Dennis Ritchie's variant of the quote.

------
ef4
This whole article is based on the premise of bandwidth scarcity. I don't buy
it.

I also don't buy the complaint that suburbs are already suffering from too
much interference. I live in a dense urban environment, and while I can see a
lot of networks, I can easily get enough wireless bandwidth to max out my
upstream connectivity.

Yes, radio spectrum is a scarce resource. But we keep getting better and
better at using it. While there's an upper bound on the amount of data that
can be sent over a shared medium, you can redefine the medium. Imagine if your
wireless router only broadcast a low-rate unidirectional rendezvous signal,
and then targeted each associated device with a focused high rate beam. Etc.

~~~
sj4nz
This only presumes that you have line-of-sight or uncanny luck to have a
reliable Fresnel zone to bounce signal through---but this is still constrained
by distance. I used a "Portland, ME to Portland, OR" example to emphasize that
these links aren't the kind that you can use allocated low-power radio
spectrum to connect as in WiFi. You may be able to max out your upstream
capability with local radio, but you can't supply bits to the other side of
the city, state, or country. Unless everyone has the same exact interests as
you, you won't even have the bits they want---this is what the pub-sub
mechanism has to address on top of the content-network. Some people will
specialize in carrying the bits that everyone wants and at every step of the
way, nodes will have to look at subscription demand and throughput to decided
which bits are sent in a batch. Yes, we can imagine our wireless routers as a
low-rate signal system with focused high-rate beams, etc, but the probability
that you will reach an interested audience from your radio is low. This is why
FM/AM radio licenses are so valuable, and this is why having a content channel
carried by all the regional cable monopolies is so valuable and vulnerable to
censorship---there are many people who would love to watch Current.tv or Al
Jazeera but cannot get it in their own regional cable systems. However, radio
and cable are still synchronous mediums, which I'm suggesting we should back
away from.

Using radio always assumes that there are other nodes interested in what
you're sending. In nearly every case of radio-based Internet Service Providers
I've been able to find, users always find that the service is "great" for the
first month and thereafter totally sucks in every imaginable way: slow speeds,
down-time, and bandwidth caps. There's only one tower and enough bandwidth for
so many users, after that, there is no upgrade path because almost all the
spectrum is allocated. This is guaranteed to happen for any homebrew WiFi
network or municipal WiFi network---remember that you only get three separate
frequencies without overlap (
<http://www.bridgingthelayers.org/channel_overlap.html> ) The limits are
obvious with FM and AM radio is regulated by the FCC to prevent channel
interference between cities---you never get "new" stations, you only get
"different" stations when a broadcaster changes format. My favorite example of
a broadcaster changing "format" is WHFS in Baltimore, MD---one day it was a
progressive rock-radio station and the next morning a spanish-pop-radio
station, without warning. (The DJs working there had no idea this change was
coming.) By redefining the network medium to "bits via matter" instead of
"bits via energy" (SD cards in my example), and relaxing our attention-spans
to something less than "instant", you get more bandwidth by adding more cards
to the network as needed. We may be getting better at using radio spectrum,
but it will always have a political limitation of how it is used when it has
real reach to many people---in short, if you can touch many people via a
medium, more than a few people will always seek to control that access for
their own interests. Bandwidth for information transmission via energy I still
believe is scarce and will always be scarce for any situation where you wish
to send to many people over long distances. The medium has to be redefined
away from energy to matter---and perhaps, just to throw a huge monkey wrench
into the mix and stir the pot more---this is what newspapers (which in their
print format are already sending matter instead of energy to your household)
need to add to their offerings to save themselves. Now, imagine receiving a
4GB SD card with your morning newspaper every morning while the paper-person
retrieves old cards during delivery---and what would happen if you were
uploading back to everyone else on those same cards? 8GB/day in and out
becomes 56GB/week becomes 2.8T/year of data transfer, one SD card at a time.
Relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again.

Subscribe to two newspapers and you double your network bandwidth and no one
needed to climb on a roof. :)

~~~
dalke
Large data transfers are still best done through physical shipping of encoded
atoms. Take a look at AWS Import/Export for one real-world example. But the
threshold for that being useful is rather high. Have you worked out the
breakpoint for where a person moving cards is more effective than a network
connection? What information, other than DVDs, would be appropriate for this?

Why do you focus on radio-only connections? The highest bandwidth devices can
easily be plugged into a wired connection. Why do you assume that bandwidth
will get more congested? I think instead that there will be a move towards
smaller cells, with lower power. The network provider could have an antenna on
every other streetlight or power pole, where each only handles a few dozen
devices in range.

Your comment about suburb wifi congestion doesn't feel right. The most
cluttered wifi I've seen has been in big apartment buildings, where the
transmitters are much closer to each other. One possible solution there is to
move towards per-building based cells rather than per-apartment ones. Though
this would mean that the hardware has to be as reliable as the building
wiring, which isn't yet true.

Where I've heard uucp being useful is for things like "drive-by wifi" for
rural parts of the world, for example <http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/> .

But the idea that "relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper
profitable again" is just strange. If people want their news less frequently
then that just gives more time for their local network aggregator to download
that news. Where's the cost savings or revenue boost for the newspaper?

~~~
sj4nz
I focus on non-radio solutions because I'm looking to see how we can do it
without radio, period. So, there is no "live" connection for aggregators to
download from. News is perhaps a bad name for the kind of content, think about
it more in the sense of magazines or programs that aren't strictly time-
sensitive, but entertaining and informative.

This is kind of related to the "Slow Web" movement I just read about in
<http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web> . I'm not interested
in seeing regional radio-ISPs blanket cities with smaller radio. I'm coming
from this with the view point that some people won't have an "active" Internet
connection, period. This can be very rural or situations where the density is
just too low to bother with radios---who's going to build a network for 5
customers? The networks create their own scarcity of bandwidth because they're
only profitable where there are enough people---where there are enough people,
there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience. A
asynchronous hypernet is something that is "instant-on" for any location where
people desire to have it---there's no permitting required, building agreements
to negotiate, pole rights to acquire, or hardware to buy-install-maintain. If
you want it, a few SD cards, a USB SD card reader and software similar to UUCP
to manage it will make it happen for everyone---the cost to start is less than
$50 or even $25 for anyone wanting to start a node.

Instead of being potentially online 24/7, I'm imagining these asynchronous
hypernet users are /never/ online with the Internet. What they receive is what
comes on the memory cards or other mediums. If some content does come from the
Internet, it's because someone elsewhere on the asynchronous hypernet is
providing a gateway for it. For a news paper that isn't increasing their
readership of physical papers and struggling to convince readers to pay for
the online version (again, only useful to users of synchronous networks), a
daily memory card of batched data will be attractive in any area where the
local Internet monopoly starts charging significant money for GB of data above
their "approved" threshold. If the newspaper can deliver data cheaper to the
user than the synchronous Internet provider can, people will use it. If the
newspaper makes their own original audio/visual content (which is already
happening at newspapers like the NYTimes) and makes it available only via the
cards, they have content that people can't get anywhere else---and a reason to
subscribe.

~~~
dalke
That "drive-by wifi" shows one way to get internet service to rural parts of
Africa and Asia, without other internet access. One proposal I heard had a guy
in a motorcycle going from place to place with a wifi connection to do uucp
transfers once in range of each destination. The other related technology you
should consider is "delay-tolerant networking."

We can get wired electricity to just about all homes in the US, and it looks
like there's telephone service available to 98%. Adding wired internet isn't
that much harder than those other two, and there is a Federal program to
promote rural internet service. Who's going to build a network for 5
customers? Us, through our taxes.

Iridium and other systems offers global service, it's just very expensive. I
find numbers like $5/MB.

So you're talking about at most a small number of American homes which won't
be able to have basic internet access if desired.

Of those, how many are interested in New York Time's data delivery service
over newspaper delivery? I can't come up with any number which makes it
interesting to the NYT - nor any other newspaper - to provide this service.
Your point about caps doesn't affect things because the NYT iPad app takes
between 1 and 20 MB per paper, depending on the number of sections read. Even
daily reading of the entire paper is only about 0.5 GB and an order of
magnitude or two less than the caps I've heard about. Print media just doesn't
take much bandwidth.

Even worse, your numbers only possibly might make sense for newspapers with a
reach into large amount of rural areas. That might work for parts of Alaska,
but it won't help, say, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. 95% of Vermont
people have broadband access at home, leaving very few left who 1) want it, 2)
can't get the print version, and 3) can't get the broadband version.

You say "where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give
everyone a good experience." In my experience this is rare, even in apartments
where I've seen a dozen or more access points. ef4 confirms that observation.
The link you gave also states that there is overlap but "This artifact has
relatively little impact on the majority of 802.11 functions." Can you point
to real-world cases where people are having problems because of too many
access points? Can you estimate how often that occurs?

Overall, I think you're having fun with ideas. That's great. But you're
letting your vision of what you want - you want people enjoying the slow web,
perhaps - take precedence over what people really do want, and trying to back-
fit justifications without a back-of-the-envelope estimation to see if those
justifications are approximately right.

Suppose I live in rural Wyoming with no internet access, but wanted it. The
first question is why? If I'm a farmer who wants to get better market
information, then a slow internet won't help - the information might come too
late. Okay, you can fix that - have someone come by every day. Is that the
postal service? Will postal service holidays and interruptions cause problems
to a farmer?

Perhaps I'm a writer, who needs occasional literature lookups. Perhaps then I
could use the service well (assuming interlibrary loan and similar services
aren't enough). But who's going to set up that sort of service, with the
research staff on the end to find a literature reference?

But as described, your proposals are wildly off the mark, because people don't
work that way.

~~~
sj4nz
If you want Internet access for news, research, and other "real time"
information in rual Wyoming, of course you don't want the Slow Web experience,
so this idea doesn't even apply. If the Slow Web is brought to you via postal
service, you don't expect it everyday and its not a hardship if service
holidays and interruptions occur. Do you complain for 29 days a month that
your favorite magazine didn't arrive in your mailbox? No, you just wait for
it, and enjoy it when it arrives that month. This is where most of the
conflict I'm seeing with proposals for different kinds of radio-management are
coming from. I know people don't "work" this way, but this was never an idea
for the Fast Web to begin with.

The reason why I'm suggesting this is useful for newspapers isn't because this
is how people would receive the newspaper, and only the newspaper, they would
be sending and receiving any other content from the network (as in not-
original-content by the newspaper) but instead from everyone else connected to
the network via the newspaper. Newspapers are already suffering from the Fast
Web/Slow Web problem, a newspaper on paper is slow-web and the newspaper
online is Fast Web, and with so much freely available Fast Web content, they
have a hard time convincing people to pay. News goes stale faster than the
speed of rumor, so let the Fast Web have it, and make long-lived content that
people want instead, enjoying it on their own time.

If access points no longer have the issues I observed 4–5 years ago, that's
great, but they don't solve the problem of network coverage over larger
geographical areas and I'm pretty sure that few or no access point systems can
handle the load if someone fires up a popular torrent or watches a streaming
movie on the shared network, but then, no one wants them to do that, that's a
violation of the Fast Web Etiquette—but receiving an hour television show you
subscribe to on a 4GB SD card is going to be a much better experience in terms
of video quality and the lack of buffering should there be any hiccups with
the Fast Web. In that respect, newspapers can become the "store" for other
desired content and save their collective asses.

~~~
dalke
My point was to ask you describe the sorts of information which are best sent
via the slow web. I gave some examples where it wouldn't work, because of the
need for timely responses.

Your example of receiving an hour television show on a 4GB card does not work,
because we already have that. It's called Netflix. I mean, it's a perfect
example of what you're wanting, but it's already a solved problem built on top
of the postal system, and not based on uucp nor your proposed slow web.
There's nothing stopping you right now for implementing this via the postal
service - so my question to you is, which types of people would want this sort
of system, why would they want it, why will there be a long-term demand for
this sort of service, and why doesn't it already exist atop the postal system?

It looks like you propose that the newspapers could leverage their delivery
system in order to deliver the data. But surely the postal system is the
better fit, given that newspapers don't deliver to place with "only five
people" and instead charge more so they can mail the newspaper.

The other problem I have is that you keep coming back to "radio-management."
That's not important. We can wire 99+% of US homes with wired connection - we
did that with power and are nearly there with phones. Why is radio important
if you can get 14.4K wired to your home? Assuming a rather low value of
1KB/sec over twisted pair, that's 2GB per month. If you also want local
wireless for the house, that's under $100. I set up that system 10 years ago
for myself.

To emphasize, 1KB/sec is fast enough to download the entire NYT in 6 hours.

So the potential users, after removing the Netflix factor, are 1) those people
who can't get any network connection, and 2) those people who are restricted
to dialup but want more than 2GB/month, and don't care about 'fast web'
responsive access. Both are small and decreasing in numbers.

Oh, and how does someone signal which 4GB of data they are interested in? I
tried but completely failed to come up with any solution which doesn't require
a large majority of the sites in the world to rearchitect their interface for
this tiny minority - and that's not going to happen.

~~~
sj4nz
To be short: Netflix doesn't accept uploads from customers via postal mail—so
it doesn't exactly match the example. Most people want content that requires
more than 2GB/month. Yes, NYTimes is much less than 2GB/month, but this
wouldn't be about receiving "just" the NYTimes---the newspaper delivery
service would work as a "carrier" of bits. Users signal for the data they're
interested in via what they upload. Publishers of bits upload indexes to the
content network. It can be implemented now with the postal service, by
sneakernet in communities of people, or it could be something that newspapers
implement, it doesn't matter who does the physical work of bit-moving. And
finally, I'm not interested in supporting the "large majority of the sites"
because they're all Fast Web. If they want Slow Web, they can add it, but they
don't have to, it's not mandatory and its not expected of them.

~~~
dalke
My examples were all meant to show areas where a slow web would not be
effective. Who are the people and what are the use cases for a slow web, and
why doesn't it exist now on top of the existing postal system?

The newspaper delivery service would not work. Period. Delivery service only
covers the local service area, where there is a high enough density of
subscribers to make a special delivery service worthwhile. These people can
get broadband and/or cell service. Otherwise newspapers use the postal
service, and charge a premium to those customers who want that service.

Now you say that "upload" is important. Yes, when my wife was deployed in
Iraq, we mailed USB sticks back and forth, containing music and video files.
So that service exists now for point-to-point, and scales decently well to
several people. Who are the people who want one-to-many data broadcasting via
the slow web? What do they want to accomplish?

And I return again to mechanics. How does one "signal for the data they're
interested in via what they upload?" If I send videos of our baby to family,
do I get baby videos in return? Or do I get ads for baby products? I can't
think of any mechanism which would handle what you are describing, other than
having a human concierge service - and that's expensive.

If there are no adapters to make the slow data resources which are available
on the fast web available to the slow web, then why would people use the slow
web?

------
toddh
Be part of the slow network movement? I was so excited when a friend agreed to
connect to me and bring in email and usenet via UUCP. Good memories, but I
like the real-time fast food world a lot better. Though for interplanetary
communication it makes a lot of sense.

------
dougabug
All of this has happened before...

Actually, Usenet worked amazingly well even under the limitations of computers
and networks in the 80's. Shared information streams strike me as superior to
isolated data motes and walled gardens.

------
mahmud
We use UUCP at work to send POS data from some of our stores to head office.

------
astrodust
Every Linux system has a uucp account for no other reason than it's been there
so long that removing it is proving more than a bit troublesome.

It seems like some kind of monument to the past at this point.

~~~
cnvogel
It used to be the case that device nodes for serial ports and lock files for
those were owned by that user/group. Historically uucp (uucico - uucp call in
call out) was the only sensible thing to use the modem for anyway...

Personally, I never used uucp over serial links, but for several years fetched
my emails via uucp-in-tcp. It was a homegrown system with sendmail, later
qmail, later exim and it worked very reliably.

------
nerd_in_rage
I had a UUCP feed through the early 90s. Fun times!

------
jsilence
Sneaking SD-Cards might also be a nice alternative of communication in times
of increasing online surveillance.

~~~
jsilence
Encryption would of course be mandatory. Maybe even enhanced with
steganograhy.

"My dear photo sharing friend, enclosed you'll find the collection of my
latest pictures which are simply to huge in volume for my crappy internet
connection. Enjoy and keep sending pictures in return. PS: I love your
artistic subtle casual picture style."

------
nonameyes
Any chance cjdns will be ported to BSD?

