LOL...all I could think of was messaging via ‘pony express’...silly...but I felt exactly the way you did when this site went down. There’s got to be a way to remain organized and in touch.
Agreed, Kimberly. It's not a good feeling to be afloat with nobody in sight. Keep the thread going. Maybe even get some names and contacts for off-line discussion.
Oh yes. I'd look at the places where repression has been the norm, but has now sort of flipped roles. For example, in the old soviet union, I saw at least a couple solutions for full forums that couldn't be read by outsiders - not the KGB, not hackers. These were typically run by the virus writing community.
One can be quite open - even the places like the Golden Corral etc
Just watch for V's and Fives....
Billions of riders, each carrying an IP packet.
Someone actually wrote a paper about using pigeons for that. They have high latency, but with advantages like a built-in collision avoidance system and not being restricted to line-of-sight transmission. See RFC 1149 ("IP over Avian Carriers") of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Even worse, somebody actually implemented it, successfully sending an ICMP echo ("ping") request.
Not doing TCP/IP itself, but even better a pigeon won a transmission race vs. an ISP using DSL once, moving 4 GB of data 40 miles. The bird won using a 4 GB SD card.