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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

I recall a mechanism like this used to deliver email in rural India. There were basically email “kiosks” which would let you receive and send mail for a fee and would store these messages locally until a truck with the company’s transponder stopped at the village, at which point it would send the data to the truck which would upload the data to the Internet when it reached the city. Obviously obviated by mobile data.

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In 2006, I did a summer internship at NASA implementing the Bundle protocol [1]. It assumes intermittent connectivity and/or large delays between transfers. For example, you have intermittent line-of-sight between Mars and a tracking station on earth or line-of-sight between a rover and an orbiter on the far side of Mars that will at some point in the future relay the data onto Earth. I can't find it in the RFC, but using it to provide internet to rural villages was definitely discussed.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5050

Do you know if there are open reference implementations of this protocol?

I haven’t looked since I worked on it. I think it kind of fell into the dustbin of history...

The process of delivering the internet by trucks is quite laughable, yet SMTP is the perfect protocol for that: Mail can hop from server to server until it finds the right one, as opposed to now where SMTP hosts like Gmail only accepts mail sent from or to a Gmail account.

Can you explain what you mean about gmail?

Classically SMTP let you "relay" mail that neither originated or is destined for the specific server. Gmail, and most modern SMTP servers, only permit mail from or to a Gmail address/their primary domain.

Edit: added clarification that all SMTP servers do not only permit Gmail addresses...

Is this sarcasm? As the gmail part is completely false.

Relaying used to be a thing, before spammers and unwillingness to deal with it at the source (boot infected devices, originating AS / IX, .. ) resulted in a choice between a game of whack-a-mole or only accepting gmail¹.

These days, relaying has to be setup on the specific relay server, the originating address needs to permit it (DNS SPF/DKIM/DMARC/whatever), and the relay server will still have a reputational problem with deliverability to unrelated servers, which is problematic even for direct mail, unless you are gmail¹.

¹ usually gmail + varying number of big players

Ah I was a little unclear. Edited. I meant that free-for-all relaying is a thing of the past.

I had a professor that made us answer questions about the bandwidth, latency, and reliability of a stationwagon loaded with hard drives. I never imagined I'd see a practical example of that principal at work.

Physical transportation of storage has always been a thing. Of course, over time, internet speeds increasing means it only makes since for larger amounts of storage. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Cloud providers like AWS will do data import/export via racks of drives in a shipping crate, if you have that much data. [1] (Or just a few drives in the mail if you're not moving petabytes.)

On the other end of the enterpriseyness scale, but still an actual real-world use, there's SD cards attached to homing pigeons [2], in addition to numerous stunts or pranks ala RFC1149.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/#Snowball_Data_Transfer

[2] https://www.denverpost.com/2007/06/22/homing-pigeons-get-dow...

Back when computers were connected only intermittently, UUCP was the means of doing this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

Sneaker UUnet?

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