Subj : Russian intranet
To   : andrew clarke
From : Daniel Path
Date : Tue Mar 15 2022 10:27:06

Hello andrew,

12 Mar 22 12:51, you wrote to All:

 ac> If Putin continues his megalomania it's increasingly likely Russia
 ac> will be disconnected from the global Internet, with the government
 ac> there choosing to run their own Intranet instead.

 ac> Such a plan has been documented by the BBC and presumably others:

 ac> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496  "Russia 'successfully
 ac> tests' its unplugged internet", 2019-12-24

 ac> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60661987  "Russia-Ukraine: Is
 ac> internet on verge of break-up?", 2022-03-09

 ac> Conceivably Fido's "underground" nature may aid the prevention of
 ac> misinformation, but this can only go so far, and won't work if an
 ac> entire country unplugs itself. Then you're back to the sneakernet
 ac> days. Presumably the Russian government would also like inspect all
 ac> their citizens snail mail next.

 ac> A side-effect of Russia's disconnection will be that many of the
 ac> Russian developers who regularly post patches to FOSS projects like
 ac> BinkD, Husky, GoldED+ etc will be locked-out of the official repos on
 ac> GitHub. They might choose to maintain their own forks hosted on a
 ac> Russian server but if development continues those forks will slowly
 ac> get out of sync with the main repos. They may also have to abandon the
 ac> idea of FidoNet altogether if it becomes impossible to communicate
 ac> with anyone outside Russia.

 ac> Also worth mentioning, the main BinkD repo is maintained by a
 ac> Ukranian.

 ac> In the overall scheme of things most of this is trivial, and some of
 ac> these projects are fairly dormant anyway. But as an Australian living
 ac> on the other side of the world, Fido development has been basically my
 ac> only contact with Russian people over the years, so the above thoughts
 ac> popped into my head.

 ac> My thoughts are with the Ukrainians currently under attack, and the
 ac> many Russians who oppose the invasion.

they can switch back to plain old telephone lines an can collect fidonet
via that :)

Regards,
--
dp

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