Sometimes we want better-than-firewall security for things. For instance: An industrial control system for a municipal water-treatment plant should never have data come in or out Or, a variant of the industrial control system: it should only permit telemetry and monitoring data out, and nothing else in or out A system dedicated to keeping your GPG private keys secure should only have material to sign (or decrypt) come in, and signatures (or decrypted data) go out A system keeping your tax rec...| www.complete.org
Gopher is an interactive Internet browser. It is something of a successor to FTP and predecessor to the Web. Gopher had a brief moment of popularity in the early 1990s, but was eclipsed within a few years by the web. Gopher’s chief innovation was presenting menus that could refer to content across many different servers. This was a contrast to systems of the time, such as FTP or telnet, that had no programmatic way to point to content elsewhere, and made it cumbersome to switch to alternati...| www.complete.org
I sometimes see people read about NNCP and wonder “This sounds great! But… what can I do with it?” This page aims to answer those questions. Either before or after reading this page, you might find these three pages useful: NNCP NNCP Concepts Getting Started with NNCP Asynchronous Communication A Quick Word on Background NNCP frees you from the tyranny of online. Compared to something like ssh, with NNCP, you trade latency for reliability and flexibility.| www.complete.org
I loaded up this title with buzzwords. The basic idea is that IM systems shouldn’t have to only use the Internet. Why not let them be carried across LoRa radios, USB sticks, local Wifi networks, and yes, the Internet? I’ll first discuss how, and then why. How do set it up I’ve talked about most of the pieces here already: Delta Chat, which is an IM app that uses mail servers (SMTP and IMAP) as transport, and OpenPGP encryption for security.| www.complete.org
Keeping your (digital) bits secure. See also Airgap, Encrypted. My page Consider Security First discusses the importance of security in an operating system. (this page is a stub and will be improved) Links to this note Airgap “Airgap” refers to a computer (or network) that is physically disconnected from a larger network and the Internet. Ideas for NNCP Projects I sometimes see people read about NNCP and wonder “This sounds great!| www.complete.org
Keeping your data safe in the event of a disaster or compromise is important. That’s why we back up. Here is some information on backups: Backing up every few minutes with simplesnap on ZFS For hosting backups offsite, my 2021 Roundup of Unique Data/Storage Hosting Options can be useful. How and Why to use Airgapped Backups (see also Airgap) Links to this note Dar dar is a Backup and archiving tool.| www.complete.org
“OK,” you’re probably thinking. “John, you talk a lot about things like Gopher and personal radios, and now you want to talk about building a reliable network out of… USB drives?” Well, yes. In fact, I’ve already done it. What is sneakernet? Normally, “sneakernet” is a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to using disconnected storage to transport data or messages. By “disconnect storage” I mean anything like CD-ROMs, hard drives, SD cards, USB drives, and so forth.| www.complete.org