How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011)

#11

Post by dogma1138 » Tue, Dec 15, 2015, 8:06 AM UTC

guard-of-terra wrote: post #4

I guess pretty much anybody had defied the USSR at that point. The coup attempt was an act of desperation.

Not within Russia proper much of the infrastructure and many of the establishments were still either in the hands of hardliners or sitting on the fence. This actually continued as isolated events till the mid 90's with so often a random general deciding to become the next great patriotic hero. In 1991 Russia could've went to a civil war and worse cause a nuclear incident which some generals were promoting, while people do not know this and today some even dismiss it that period had us closer to ww3 than probably most of the Cold War, any spark could've ignited that powder cake and if a war would break out no one in Russia would've been in a position to stop it.

Re: How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011)

#12

Post by guard-of-terra » Tue, Dec 15, 2015, 10:52 AM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #11

guard-of-terra wrote: post #4

I guess pretty much anybody had defied the USSR at that point. The coup attempt was an act of desperation.

Not within Russia proper much of the infrastructure and many of the establishments were still either in the hands of hardliners or sitting on the fence. This actually continued as isolated events till the mid 90's with so often a random general deciding to become the next great patriotic hero. In 1991 Russia could've went to a civil war and worse cause a nuclear incident which some generals were promoting, while peop…

Not sure about "random generals", but the red belt did exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Belt_%28Russia%29

Re: How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011)

#13

Post by hga » Tue, Dec 15, 2015, 12:25 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #10

lukasb wrote: post #7

"All channels were blacked-out except for one; Usenet, which is the grandfather of chat-rooms and is capable or [sic] surviving without the Internet." Do they mean Usenet doesn't require IP to work? And did that matter here? Would actually be fascinating if some alternative federated server comms played a pivotal role, but more likely this is careless writing.

Indeed, Usenet doesn't require IP to work. See UUCP[0]. Some gray beard can probably speak more intelligently than me about this, but I think people would basically specify a series of hops. Each hop would store-and-forward the message to the next hop. Nowadays people talk about delay and disruption tolerant networks, which use similar techniques. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

If you wanted to do "retail" level transactions like sending an email, you needed to know the path, like systemA!systemB!destinationsystem!user

Usenet systems had established neighbors communicating with UUCP and used a flooding algorithm to get messages to the entire network of systems. All built on top of these point-to-point links, could be done over the Internet (NNTP) but it wasn't required. This was a big enough thing that specialized modems for UUCP were popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit