-=> Matt Munson wrote to All <=-

 MM> Hello everybody.

 MM> If net neutrality is going to fail, maybe we need to come up with a way
 MM> to package bbsing to be a bit more mainstream and we could communicate
 MM> without much issue. We could have torrents for legal downloads like
 MM> Open Office, Thunderbird and others....

I've been thinking along similar lines.

In the BBS Documentary, Tom Jennings mentioned how the dialup Fido
networks in Russia were able to go from the beginning of carrier
negotiation to the end of a Fido transfer and hangup in about 12
seconds.  That's pretty fast considering they were limited to about
33.6k.  On the modern 'Net, my typical session to download a new .QWK
file is about 30 seconds, and the Zmodem transfer speed is about 40
kbytes/sec.  I would bet that for text-only communication we could
probably get down to about 2 seconds between ssh connect and
disconnect and still move a dozen messages.

So that's the upside:  BBS communication is lean and mean.

But the downsides are the same issues that the modern Internet still
hasn't solved well: figuring out what public keys belong to who,
making encrypted messages easier to do than non-encrypted messages,
and getting end users to actually care that they are exposing their
communications to corporations, governments, identity thieves, etc.


... MultiMail, the new multi-platform, multi-format offline reader!
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.49
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32