XSF Discussion - 2019-09-15

Hi! Is there a protocol or standard for connecting a standalone XMMP server to the Internet using USB sticks? I thought of poor areas in the world or Cuba, where people have a traditional grown "offline network".

Jens Korte: I'm not aware of something fitting that description. How would this work?

ralphm, I don't know with a new connection type between servers? I don't know the protocols

What I mean is: how is it supposed to work from a user's perspective?

maybe looking at a protocol for *instant* messaging is not the right approach

Well, I am from the time where BBS and UUCP were still the ways to share messages.

And there's nothing about XMPP that requires instant communication patterns. Especially for messages stanzas.

There are people working on things like https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ which are fully decentralized and can fall back to sneaketnet, but that's not based on XMPP.

But a UUCP like model for XMPP seems feasible.

Daniel, video chat isn't mesaging and sneakernet isn't instant ;) I was just wondering about offline support...

Jens Korte, maybe look towards the Disruption/Delay Tolerant Networking community

XMPP-over-DTN hasn’t been explored much yet to my knowledge, but I’d be surprised if it had not been explored *at all*

Especially because we have entities working for military organisations.

And then there is the ancient https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0013.html, which I don't necessarily recommend, but might address part of this.

I had a look at XEP 0013 before, but that is not the way I mean. Scuttlebutt is new to me and quite interesting. DTN is a quite big and solid thing. I can use it only, if it is used by a software. Thx for that.

There's some related projects around scuttlebutt

I will have a look at it later. I already found it in F-Droid

Jens Korte: I thought Cuba had it's own internet?

> Daniel> maybe looking at a protocol for *instant* messaging is not the right approach XMPP is broader than just instant messaging fortunately, (even if there aren't many (open) implementations to show this off, they are not inexistent)

Totally.

https://gizmodo.com/cubas-illegal-underground-internet-is-thriving-1681797114 this kind of thing

Which of course XMPP works fine on, doesn't need internet, just some type of connectivity

Daniel: you should @xmpp retweet https://twitter.com/iNPUTmice/status/1173175743209189376 as well

i did

Ah, great. Didn't see it.

Guess Twitter doesn't have reliable delivery either

Daniel: you don't want it to be recorded or is the venue?

I don't

That's a bit surprising. May we know why?

I think the format of Meetup (which I want to keep closer to 'friends hanging out') don’t go well with recording it. also I don’t want the pressure of having to live up to the level of quality that is required for permanently putting something on the internet.

also if anything we'd only have audio

i think there is a good chance that a similar talk will be given again in a more appropriate setting with better recording

Ah!

Hello

MattJ

moparisthebest, "“El Paquete”, a sneaker-net distribution of media files that’s passed around the country on USB sticks and hard drives, and which may be Cuba’s largest source of private employment." https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8740-the_internet_in_cuba_a_story_of_community_resilience#t=2 as of 12-2017. And yes there are two other network mentioned on that page, that are not sneaker-networks.

That's neat, though I feel like XMPP would be totally unsuitable for that, I could be wrong

at the point of doing stuff like sneakernet or DTN, you’d do away with the XML stream and just wrap stanzas in bundles and send them through the network.

the only thing left then is how to handle authn

You need a very different type of user identity and routing mechanism. You could use xmpp message elements for the payload, but why?

Ge0rG, for s2s from mars to earth

you don’t want to do TCP over that type of link

Fancy stuff where you gotta take the positions of heavenly bodies into account. And sometimes wait for months because your destination is blocked by the sun or something.

eeyup

In Cuba?

You want sneaker net between Mars and earth? That's some insane RTT

That's basically DTN for ya

If you can handle that then you can handle dealing with the positions of cargo ships.

jonas’: bundles? Like, say, XML documents?

Stream bundles?

ralphm, bundle as in Bundle Protocol

RFC 5050

Ah

I can't say any useful to DTN/sneakernet, but how about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

Not totally unlike SMTP I'm guessing?

jonas’: tl;dr, are the bundles signed by the sending entity?

Ge0rG, I don’t think so in plain RFC 5050

the WIP next iteration of the bundle protocol (Bundle Protocol 7) has some security things

Who would MITM you in space?

ah no, neither, so that must’ve been some extension to the protocol

Yeah, we'll do the crypto after the MVP.

> Yeah, we'll do the crypto after the MVP. Ge0rG: Please give proper trigger warnings before making such a 'joke'

Daniel: the <s/> stands for "serious"! 🤪

Last Friday I had a chat with the founders of a medical startup. They can't afford real developers, so they look for some students instead...

I'm not making this up.

i was that student

Zash, I guess the NSA, Russia or China will do the MITM just to make sure they get all the raw data. Am I right, a company from israel was the cheapest provider for internet in libanon? The same will happen in space with DTN, but instead of cheapest it will be because of fastest or most reliable.

Jens Korte: also Kazakhstan officially does MITM for all traffic afaik. They force people to install special certificates to avoid warnings

rion, yes I have read about it at heise.de (german)