praetor242

Nothing says we can't run some nodes via i2p or Tor, and I suspect eventually someone will do it, which I like. I'd like to this to be a place where people with internet censorship can get the world out when Twitter fails. Hence the freedom fighter. We don't impose a transport. SSH is just a good trade off for easy and secure. The ol' UUCP books have to be dusted, so I want to keep the entry reasonably low. Once people are familiar (or re-familiar) with UUCP and feel confident enough to make contributions, I think we'll see this very thing. Like I said, it's ripe for tinkering.

If you have a dedicated host and reliable internet, you can be a Tier 1. We have a guy who is going to be hosting one at his house, and soon as I get some parts for an SGI Challenge server I have, dataforge's uucp server will be hosted here too. So feel free to join us in IRC!

Hello! I'm Wes (aka; praetor), the founder of the UUCP project ! I'm humbled my project reached the front page of HN and has generated some interest.

Yes. I do apologize for the documentation being sparse. I'm developing the Tier 1 provisioning scripts, and documenting at the same time. Plus, unfortunately, I have a full-time life. But once I finish the Tier 1 stuff, I can delegate duties out to those with an interest :D

Yup. It's all run via SSH. The preferred server is Taylor UUCP, which is super flexible. I've sent an e-mail to the developer, Ian Taylor, to hopefully revive that project and breath some life into UUCP. It's a fantastically resilient protocol and will run over damned near anything. We've even had some talk of running UUCP over ham radio links!!!

All the Tier 1 hosts are mesh interconnected, so even if one goes down, it doesn't take huge swathes of the network with it. With how the Internet is shaping up to be, if Google goes down, it's taking a huge piece of the network with it. This is really intended to reawaken the DIY ethos the Internet was founded on. Mostly public nixes and tilde servers, but anyone with some dedication can be a Tier 1. We've kinda democratized it that way.

And no, you don't have to be the "right kind of freedom fighter". The Tier 1 operators have a gentleman's agreement to let anything pass through their node to the broader network unless it's something like CP or flagrantly against the law (or spam)

It's an exciting project! It really is a network for the modern nerd, and is ripe for all sorts of projects!

Please join us on IRC @ irc.tilde.chat or subscribe to the project mailing list at [email protected]

See ya on the network! :D