MSGID: 3:633/267 622c0209
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TID: hpt/fbsd 1.9.0-cur 2021-04-15
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.

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