andrew wrote (2022-03-12):
If Putin continues his megalomania it's increasingly likely Russia will
be disconnected from the global Internet, with the government there choosing to run their own Intranet instead.
Splendid. Let's disconnect them from the Internet for good.
Conceivably Fido's "underground" nature may aid the prevention of misinformation, but this can only go so far, and won't work if an entire country unplugs itself. Then you're back to the sneakernet days. Presumably the Russian government would also like inspect all their citizens snail mail next.
How many active Russian Fidonet users are there (out of 144,699,673)?
Fidonet works quite good over i2p, Tor and other overlay networks until they are blocked or criminalized by the government. Public RealName™ echomail / nodelist is pretty shitty though for sharing anti-misinformation or free speech in a free-speech restricted country. Especially if it's archived on the web by Synchronet sysops.
NNCP might be more suitable for "underground" communication.
A side-effect of Russia's disconnection will be that many of the Russian developers who regularly post patches to FOSS projects like BinkD, Husky, GoldED+ etc will be locked-out of the official repos on GitHub.
So what? Bus factor 1 ... Shit happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also worth mentioning, the main BinkD repo is maintained by a Ukranian.
Even before the war development was barely existent. Sometimes a bug fix, but other PRs are still getting ignored.
In the overall scheme of things most of this is trivial, and some of
these projects are fairly dormant anyway.
Indeed.
But as an Australian living on
the other side of the world, Fido development has been basically my only contact with Russian people over the years, so the above thoughts popped into my head.
I wonder what these developers think about the war. Do they care? Do they support it? Is it something you don't talk about publicly, even if you are against the invasion?
My thoughts are with the Ukrainians currently under attack, and the many Russians who oppose the invasion.
Peace.
Will not happen soon, thanks to every single Russian citizen who voted for Putin again and again in election after election.
Do we have an idea which software should be forked? I mean I don't want use software maintained by a pro-Putin asshole or a delusional guy that believes Ukrainians are Nazis and other crazy stuff (hypothetical speaking). Or do we assume that people in (Russian) Fidonet are always the good guys? Or that software security and trustworthiness is above politics?
Peace.
---
* Origin: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. (2:280/464.47)