Subj : Russian intranet
To   : All
From : andrew clarke
Date : Sat Mar 12 2022 12:51 pm

If Putin continues his megalomania it's increasingly likely Russia will be disconnected from the global Internet, with the government there choosing to run their own Intranet instead.

Such a plan has been documented by the BBC and presumably others:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496  "Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet", 2019-12-24

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60661987  "Russia-Ukraine: Is internet on verge of break-up?", 2022-03-09

Conceivably Fido's "underground" nature may aid the prevention of misinformation, but this can only go so far, and won't work if an entire country unplugs itself. Then you're back to the sneakernet days. Presumably the Russian government would also like inspect all their citizens snail mail next.

A side-effect of Russia's disconnection will be that many of the Russian developers who regularly post patches to FOSS projects like BinkD, Husky, GoldED+ etc will be locked-out of the official repos on GitHub. They might choose to maintain their own forks hosted on a Russian server but if development continues those forks will slowly get out of sync with the main repos. They may also have to abandon the idea of FidoNet altogether if it becomes impossible to communicate with anyone outside Russia.

Also worth mentioning, the main BinkD repo is maintained by a Ukranian.

In the overall scheme of things most of this is trivial, and some of these projects are fairly dormant anyway. But as an Australian living on the other side of the world, Fido development has been basically my only contact with Russian people over the years, so the above thoughts popped into my head.

My thoughts are with the Ukrainians currently under attack, and the many Russians who oppose the invasion.

Peace.

--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707
* Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)