John Goerzen

> So what does nncp-exec do? It reads stdin and encrypts it to node bob. It adds metadata, saying it’s requesting the “tarextract” command, and adding two arguments to it (the -C /var/local/backups). It writes this all into a packet file in the transmission queue for bob.

> When bob processes the packet, it spins up /usr/bin/tar -xpf - -C /var/local/backups, piping to it the data that had originally been piped to nncp-exec.

I was with them until seeing that nncp-exec accepts user provided arguments[2], and that just smells like an escape waiting to happen. Since they drew parallels between that and the command= in authorized_keys[2] I looked it up and it doesn't appear that either command= nor its ForceCommand sibling accept user provided arguments

I presume its target audience is where both ends of the connection are "you" (or at least fully trusted)

1: https://www.complete.org/nncp-concepts/#remote-execution

2: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man8/sshd.8.html#:~:text=specifies%20that%20the%20command%20is%20executed%20whenever%20this%20key%20is%20used%20for%20authentication

The original hackers are the ones from the Lisp Machines and ITS/WAIS under the PDP10.

The rest of these are just PC wannabes.

Actual hacker knownledge: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html

Under PC's, today, great hackers should be the guy behing https://t3x.org, the one behind EForth running under Subleq, reverse engineers, people reusing DNS' connections for tunnels such as the folks from Iodine, people reusing AWK+netcat (or plain GAWK) and awk+openssl to create Gopher and Gemini clients, Goerzen from https://complete.org creating NNCP and a bunch of nice tools...

And OFC Fabrice Bellard, which is on par with people from the MIT/SAIL and ITS/WAIS who created and expanded TECO Emacs, LISP, primordial AI, first networked environements, AI grounds...

I mean, I think understand what you mean, but that feels somewhat uncharitable. That is a kind of catch-all site and not the blog proper, which was linked in OP.

From https://www.complete.org/how-this-site-is-built/ :

> Each page on this site starts as an org-roam note. org-roam helps highlight, make, and maintain links between related concepts, and you will no doubt notice many, many links here. Since org-roam is a layer atop org-mode, the pages are, of course, in org-mode format.

More detail is on the wiki for the project, and the tone is much less TempleOS-y:

https://salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/docker-nncpnet-mailnode/-/wikis/home

I think Syncthing is an under-appreciated tool! I wrote more about it at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10219-a-simple-delay-tolerant-offline-capable-mesh-network-with-syncthing-optional-nncp

https://www.complete.org/parallel-processing-of-filespooler-queues/ discusses parallel processing in Filespooler. This isn't a design goal and may not be the best fit, but when everything's just a file, some tricks are possible here.

Another interesting use case is one-to-many and many-to-many; https://www.complete.org/filespooler/ describes those.

nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found. It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets" either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.

[1]: http://www.nncpgo.org/

[2]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/