From: Boris Kraut <krt@nurfuerspam.de>
Organization: 
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0100
Category: 
Message-ID: <20120208230001.UejXsz@silberbruch>  
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Comments: 
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
Subject: Zitat des Tages

Mark Pesce:
> We have created a centralized communications infrastructure.
> [...] This seems the natural order of things, but it is
> entirely an echo of the commercial requirements of these
> networks. In order to bill you, your communications must
> pass through a point where they can be measured, metered
> and tariffed.
>
> There is another way. Years before the Internet came along,
> we used UUCP and FidoNet to spread mail and news posts
> throughout a far-flung, only occasionally connected global
> network of users. It was slower than we're used to these
> days, but no less reliable. Messages would forward from
> host to host, until they reached their intended destination.
> It all worked if you had a phone line, or an Internet
> connection, or, well, pretty much anything else. I presume
> that a few hardy souls printed out a UUCP transmission on
> paper tape, physically carried it from one host to another,
> and fed it through.
> 
> A hierarchy is efficient, but the price of that efficiency
> is vulnerability. A rhizomatic arrangement of nodes within
> a mesh is slow, but very nearly invulnerable. It will
> survive flood, fire, earthquake and revolution. To abolish
> these dangerous hierarchies, we must reconsider everything
> we believe about 'the right way' to get bits from point A
> to point B. Every transport must be considered -- from
> point-to-point laser beams to wide-area mesh networks using
> unlicensed spectrum down to semaphore and smoke signals.
> Nothing is too slow, only too unreliable. If we rely on
> TCP/IP and HTTP exclusively, we risk everything for the
> sake of some speed and convenience. But this is life during
> wartime, and we must shoulder this burden.