Subj : Re: Is binkp/d's security model kaputt?
To   : Oli
From : tenser
Date : Sat Sep 04 2021 03:24 am

On 03 Sep 2021 at 11:16a, Oli pondered and said...
 
 Ol> The Fidonet standards are a convoluted mess.

Not only that, they're not as efficient as people think.  There's
a lot of wasted space in .PKT (space for fields that are never filled
in), and the need to record every node that's seen a message doesn't
seem scalable.  USENET solved this by including a routing path as
articles transited the network; this mean that one could cheaply
detect loops when communicating with peers.

 Ol> We have the message as the central
 Ol> building block. I wouldn't touch the message format, because that would
 Ol> break compatibility and would lead to a different network.

I thought about these problems a bit when I wrote ginko, and became
convinced that the real solution was to serve legacy systems at the
edge.  For backbones and hubs, use new formats with a standard
canonicalization and checksumming for duplicate detection and article
identification, but only translate to/from legacy formats when
communication with legacy software.

 Ol> Everything else can easilyI
 Ol> be changed. We can use another transmission protocol, just create a
 Ol> nodelist flag (or use DNS SRV records). We don't have to use PKT files
 Ol> (their not even a
 Ol> standard) for transmission. We can get rid of the weird and limited BSO. 
 Ol> Tossing / routing could be handled differently ...

Honestly? The whole hunk of poo ought to be tossed and re-architected.
Using the things we've improved on in the last 40 years will actually
simplify the whole mess, making it easier to move to IoT devices and
so on.

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