running fips
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Johnathan Corgan
npub19wav...8p6k
πΆ Older now, but still running against the wind πΆ
Scientist, engineer, consultant, pilot. Slinger of bits and reducer of gradients.
EN/ES βΈοΈ
GM β BIG PLANS
GM β The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
GM β Another day of just doing things!
The FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) repository is unavailable from Github currently. We've mirrored it here:
We were attempting to transition it from my personal github space to a new organization we had just set up for multiple fips repositories, which succeeded, but then the new org got flagged by some automated process, and the original is no longer in my account. It's under appeal.
This is why we Nostr.
GitWorkshop.dev
Decentralized github alternative over Nostr
GM. β
Don't apologize for using coding assistants to increase your productivity, but remember--they aren't accountable for what you publish, you are. The difference between AI slop and 10x output is design, oversight, testing, and standing by what you make. Proper software engineering hasn't changed, it's just gotten...amazingly easier.
GM. I love the smell of packets in the morning.
Announcing FIPS, the Free Internetworking Peering System
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.
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.
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 β 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 β
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