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From: Toaster <toaster@dne3.net>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: ad-hoc wifi news transport
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:41:21 -0400
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Not sure if this is an appropriate newsgroup for this topic. Correct me
if I'm mistaken and I'll send this elsewhere.

I was researching NNTP and came across this project:

https://github.com/nntpchan/nntpchan/

Using NNTP as a base protocol for other services. Personally, I think
it's a great idea, and it got me thinking.

Wireless ad-hoc mesh networks are an interest of mine. Normally the
purpose of the network is to route traditional TCP/IP protocol stacks
on top of whatever routing technology (like babel). But for radios,
they broadcast out naturally, it seems like a service like news/store
and forward message sending would be a natural fit.

The idea is to use a smart flooding algorithm, like uflood
(https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~jaya/uflood_thesis.pdf) and skip all the 
routing/high speed packet delivery problems and just flood news
articles over it. I think it would be a good fit.

Usenet is already decentralized, decentralizing the infrastructure seems
like a cool idea. If I were going to do it, I'd add some kind of
proof-of-work scheme to prevent spamming the network. Bandwidth would
be low due to the air-time of a large mesh network being saturated, but
I see that as a plus, prevents abuse (spamming binaries on the net).

It's half baked, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there and see if
other work has already been done on something like this.