wiredfool

Peer to Peer

I had a wonderful idea for a peer to peer network that could deal with isp outages where their email servers just go into the weeds for a few days.

It leveraged public/private key encryption, minor abuse of the domain name system, and info stored in the cloud, with interesting message passing and message exipration methods. A gateway client could translate requests from email programs to requests to the cloud. It was all very slick.

Then I realized that what I was talking about was a buzzword compliant version of usenet, with encryption and a little control of what got injected into the system.

Usenet will be around until the cockroaches take over. It just won’t die.

So what I’m thinking now is: a private message hierarchy, each domain has some records pointing at availiable well defined nodes that have a mail 2 news gateway and pgp software installed. Incoming messages get encrypted with the public key, destination address maps to a newsgroup. Messages expire when they do or when they are canceled by a message signed with the private key. A little client side magic to translate pop<>nntp, do the decryption, and finding an availiable server and we’re there.

But now that there’s no pile of code to write, somehow it’s a lot less intresting.

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