How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011)

How a handful of geeks defied the USSR (2011)(owni.fr)

43 points by ffffruit 10 years ago | 12 comments

hardmath123 10 years ago |

Relevant—here are IRC logs from the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt: http://web.archive.org/web/20090628013626/http://www.ibiblio...

efoto 10 years ago | |

Thank you for this link!

I was reading this USENET group non-stop for two days back then, retelling the posts to all my friends.

Just read this: "PLEASE STOP FLOODING THE ONLY NARROW CHANNEL WITH BOGUS MESSAGES. WITH SILLY QUESTIONS. NOTE THAT IT'S NEITHER A TOY NOR A MEAN TO. REACH TO YOUR RELATIVES OR FRIENDS. WE NEED THE BANDWIDTH TO HELP. TO ORGANIZE THE RESISTANCE, PLEASE, DO NOT (EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY). HELP THESE FASCISTS! BEFORE SENDING SOMETHING TO SOVIET UNION PLEASE. THINK TWICE (OR BETTER THRICE). THANK YOU"

bootload 10 years ago |

"Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982) to circumvent traditional censorship."

That should read, "re-inveneted in USSR".

Tom Truscott [0] and Jim Ellis [1] are the creators of Usenet. Bnews was indeed released in '82, using UUCP to exchange between machines. [2] This was before NNTP. In '95, Truscott and Ellis received the Flame award at USENIX.[3] Guess what for?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29

[2] http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html

[3] 1995: "the third Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis for their work in creating USENET." ~ https://www.usenix.org/about/flame

efoto 10 years ago |

Relcom and USENET indeed played a role in helping the people of Moscow and Leningrad to defeat that coup d'état: the mere fact, that it continued to operate was an indication of a weakened grip of the KGB.

lukasb 10 years ago |

"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.

scarmig 10 years ago | |

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

hga 10 years ago | | |

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

chiph 10 years ago |

There's a good account of the coup attempt in The Dead Hand[0] in the last 1/3 of the book. According to it, Gorbachev and family were isolated in his dacha, and his "Nuclear Football" -- the Cheget, that controlled their ICBM launch codes was taken from him.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-eboo...

guard-of-terra 10 years ago |

I guess pretty much anybody had defied the USSR at that point.

The coup attempt was an act of desperation.

dogma1138 10 years ago | |

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.

guard-of-terra 10 years ago | | |

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

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

obrero 10 years ago |

Usenet probably did play some small part in taking power away from the government and Gosplan, and handing it to the people of the USSR.

This is one of the main reasons the US government and the corporations which monopolize the last mile of communications effectively killed off Usenet in 2009.