Subj : Re: BBSing opportunties
To   : Oli
From : DustCouncil
Date : Thu Dec 30 2021 05:46 am

 Ol> What threats do you worry about? Why would internet connectivity go down?
 Ol> Unreliable ISP? Cyber war? World wide catastrophe? Authoritarian regime
 Ol> that can shut down the (national) internet or a Great Firewall?

You weren't asking me, but of these, Cyberwar is my largest concern.  It can be as simple as a kind of domestic terrorism:

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/security-news-this-week-bay-area-fiber-optic-cab
les-mysteriously-cut/

One plus side of being in the US is most of the essential Internet facilities I use (save the noble fsxNet hub in the antipodes, of course) are here in the US.  An authoritarian regime cutting off its country's access doesn't impact me directly (my sympathy for those impacted by such a thing notwithstanding).

Packet radio has been around a long time and I have seen some YouTube demos of bulletin boards running on it; however, what is not clear is whether or not anyone has ever tried to use a repeater network to store-and-forward messages across oceans and over borders.

I would be less concerned about real time communications because that seems fraught with all manner of technical challenges, and more concerned with something like Fidonet in which local cities could store data, then send them via repeater networks out of their region and on to destinations, with routers at each point sorting and sending through the right networks.  A lot of the repeaters around me are solar-powered, so this could be disaster-resistant, and ideally such a network should be able to send something other than (but in addition to) plain text, like maps, or images.

Does anyone who is more than a dabbler like me know if such a thing has been tried, or exists?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hm6omrVaeE

This is a packet radio BBS.  I have no idea how many of these exist or are in regular use.  I have tried to find a list but the ones I can find are out of date and most indicate there are none near me in Tucson, Arizona.

https://f1zwt.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/world-bbs-listing-dec-2018.pdf

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/09/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227)

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