On 8/31/21 05:01, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> If you haven't heard of it, NNCP [1] is to UUCP approximately what
ssh is to
> rsh/telnet. NNCP is asynchronous, delay-tolerant for fire-and-forget
secure
> reliable files, file requests, Internet mail (and now NEWS) and commands
> transmission. All packets are integrity checked, end-to-end encrypted,
> explicitly authenticated by known participants public keys. Onion
encryption is
> applied to relayed packets. Each node acts both as a client and
server, can use
> push and poll behaviour model. NNCP can operate over a lot of
transports:
> Internet, USB sticks, tapes, CD-ROMs, ssh, Dropbox, etc.
>
> So basically it's UUCP for the modern world. I've used NNCP for
everything from
> automated git repo synchronization [2] to hundreds-of-GB ZFS backup
streams.
>
> And I now intend to offer Usenet feeds to interested people that
would like to
> receive them over NNCP. The setup is easier than with UUCP, the
environment is
> more secure, and the approach is so similar that it needs only a tiny
bit of
> glue to drop in to INN in place of UUCP.
>
> Over at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/usenet.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/usenet.org you can
> find my instructions on doing this. It contains instructions both for
> communicating with news.quux.org over NNCP (including prerequisites and
> expectations) as well as some background on setting up NNCP for
standalone
> INN-based non-public networks.
>
> It is also a sort of brief-ish tutorial on the minimum setup
necessary to get
> INN working with NNCP in this way. It could also, by extension, be
somewhat of
> a starting point for the INN side of things for those wishing to use
UUCP as
> well. The primary difference is using nncp-exec instead of uux, and
there is a
> small shell wrapper to pretend to be uux and transform the uux
invocation into
> an nncp-exec one. No INN patching is necessary.
>
> For those interested, NNCP's integration page [3] discusses how to
integrate it
> with Postfix or Exim (agin using UUCP-like techniques), BitTorrent,
etc. Over
> at my nncp-tools page [4] I have information on the NNCP public relay
I operate,
> tunneling NNCP over other transports, and so forth.
>
> I would welcome any corrections, contributions, feedback, etc. on any
of this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>
> [1] http://www.nncpgo.org/ or https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/
>
> [2]
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10274-distributed-asynchronous-git-syncing-with-nncp
>
> [3] https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Integration.html
>
> [4] https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools

(Necropost, but this project is still actively advertised on your site.)

My concern with this idea is that you may have designed an Abstraction
Inversion (https://wiki.c2.com/?AbstractionInversion): it seems like
NNCP is a protocol stack to transfer news over something virtually
identical to news, or at least something virtually identical to e-mail.

You make a point that everything's nice and simple because NNCP packets
are fundamentally just files - but so are news articles (and e-mails).
If you have a system to transfer NNCP packets containing news articles,
why not just transfer the news articles? I feel that e-mail and news
(not SMTP and NNTP) are already the asynchronous communication system
you want. I think the biggest difference is that in NNCP every node is
an anonymous remailer.

On 12/16/23 15:35, immibis wrote:
> On 8/31/21 05:01, John Goerzen wrote:
> [snip]
>
> (Necropost, but this project is still actively advertised on your site.)
>
> [snip]

Oops, sorry, this probably shouldn't have been posted to both groups.