Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
NNCP: utilities simplifying secure store-and-forward files and mail exchanging (nncpgo.org)
20 points by stargrave on April 24, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



"UUCP can be setup rather easily with few configuration files and few lines in each of them. But you have to add some encryption and authentication overlay for securing you data transmission."

Any projects that attempted to do this sort of overlay for UUCP?

Incidentally, I like the way the author presents this project. Usage examples, thoughtful use cases, comparisons, protocol description and packet formats.

No hype.


I've never done this with UUCP, but if you don't care about anonymity you could do two-way authenticated TLS (both client and server have and present certs).

Maybe you could do a ratcheting protocol like Signal does, instead, which might be better.

There's a couple ways to do this that might be sensible depending on whatever constraints there might be in a deployment.


Anonymity is not the goal, because it is another separate task.

NNCP contains nncp-daemon and nncp-caller that work with online protocol. It uses Noise protocol: http://noiseprotocol.org/ (Noise-IK). So ratcheting as Signal does is already applied. http://www.nncpgo.org/Sync.html


Wonderful, I had no idea what Noise was, or Signal for that matter, or NNCP despite reading the article. Thanks for the links! Guess I'll get back to my punch cards.


>Any projects that attempted to do this sort of overlay for UUCP?

I have met only manual creation of SSH/stunnel tunnels. So did I for many years.


Related: An off-grid social network (3 weeks ago) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049

> Scuttlebutt is [...] a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging.


Really interesting project! Must look on it much more closer! Thanks for the pointer.


This seems like a really interesting project. I've been recently playing with trying to get something like nntp to work over point-to-point HAM connections. This would solve a lot of the end goals I've been wanting to get to!


Unfortunately NNTP(like) is the only thing I have never touched at all. I have several years of experience with FidoNet's echomail (this is like NNTP), but today I see that most of discussion is done in mailing lists and I have got no usecases I really could use with something like NNTP (and that is disappointing, because I really like that echomail/news nature).


I couldn't find your github mirror. (404, https://github.com/stargrave/nncp)


Thanks for mentioning that. I forgot to remove that link. There is no mirror on Github anymore.


So that you're aware, this is nearly unreadable in Firefox on Linux: for some reason all the links are turquoise on pale blue rather than dark blue on pale blue.


Should resubmit with a "Show HN: " prepended.





Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: