GM. I love the smell of packets in the morning.

Announcing FIPS, the Free Internetworking Peering System

GitHub

GitHub - jmcorgan/fips: The Free Internetworking Peering System

The Free Internetworking Peering System. Contribute to jmcorgan/fips development by creating an account on GitHub.

Nostr gives you a sovereign identity. But the network underneath, the IP routing, the DNS, the infrastructure you depend on to reach each other, is still controlled by someone else. FIPS is a mesh networking protocol that makes a Nostr keypair your network identity. Nodes find each other and route traffic using npubs directly. No DNS registrars, no IP address allocation, no routing authorities. Just keypairs and encrypted links. Nodes self-organize into a routing tree without any global coordination. You address peers by npub, and unmodified IPv6 applications work transparently: Nostr relays, web browsers, whatever. Today it runs as a UDP overlay on the existing internet, in order to let you easily test its capabilities. But it is designed from the ground up to directly use arbitrary transports like Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, Tor, and point-to-point links, without any IP stack. We're working on these next, but wanted to get the core capabilities out and tested in the wild. The FIPS design builds on decades of prior work in mesh networking protocols, traffic engineering and network security, and adapts and combines them to solve the problem of self-sovereign internetworking in a new way. https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips/blob/master/docs/design/fips-intro.md This is a v0.1.0 alpha. It has passed extensive simulation testing, small scale deployments, and is ready to be trialed in real world uncontrolled conditions. And if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces... Rust, MIT licensed, Linux for now.

Everything makes sense if you imagine the people in charge are fifth graders.

"If there is hope, it lies with the Nostriches." - George Orwell, 2026, maybe

GM ☕ Do we have any Nostriches who have done the #Camino?

So far my relay crawling experiments show a steady state of about 800 nostr relays online and queryable at any point in time, while the collective unique relays extracted from recent NIP-65 kind 10002 inbox/outbox lists is nearly 3000. About half of the difference is down to DNS failures--relays that simply don't exist anymore.

I have to say that coming back into the world from seven years of self-imposed hermitage is both gratifying and horrifying. On the plus side, I have recently met and interacted with young people carrying the torch of a movement I had given up upon, yet the forces of humans at their worst remain arrayed as always against us. Nonetheless, I am hopeful again.

Nerd sniped by so many new ideas in the last few days the day job is really gonna suffer.

GM ☕

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One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old. Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo. There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr. And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers. We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control. Let's do this.

I've been away, but still kicking. Sometimes a break from the craziness is needed to regain one's equilibrium 😎