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Fist Protocol

Design

The fist protocol is inspired by the finger protocol and the ways which finger was used people.

finger is said to have be created back in 1971.

I was using finger in the 1990s — and maintained my own finger (.plan) file. Back then, my finger (.plan) file contained:

  • contact information,
  • URLs to my presence on other parts of the Internet,
  • a short biography,
  • a journal,
  • articles,
  • jokes,
  • a bunch of ASCII art.

I stored all that information in separate files, which were compiled into a finger .plan file.

Back then I (and I suspect most people) accessed finger from a terminal or terminal emulator, connected to a Unix system, by invoking command similar to:

finger username

(Here username would be replaced by the person's username on that Unix system.

So, for example:

finger joeblow

Or:

finger dariush

Finger Protocol Advantages

Some desirable qualities of the 1970s era finger protocol are:

  • ✅ it is a human-legible protocol
    • rather than just a programmer-legible or machine-legible protocol
  • ✅ the protocol is simple enough for even a more junior software developer to be able to understand it
  • ✅ the protocol and default data-format are simple enough for a competent software developer to be able to create a (simple) working client as a weekend project
    • ✅ if the default data-format is dumped to a terminal or terminal emulator it is human-legible
  • ✅ the protocol is simple enough for a competent software developer to be able to create a (simple) working server as a weekend project
  • ✅ all of a (single) user's content is provided as a single download
  • ✅ a client could make a request from a server for a user who is not (necessarily) local to that server
  • ✅ key-value pairs which are in a format that is human-legible, programmer-legible, and machine-legible.

Finger Protocol Disadvantages

Some undesirable qualities of the 1970s era finger protocol are:

  • when a client receives a response from a server, it does not know whether it received all the data or not, as, for example, the network connection could have been disconnected prematurely, but there is no way to detect this,
  • there is no tamper detection,
  • there is no way to determine whether the finger (.plan) file was actually from the user whose content was requested,
  • there is no privacy,
  • the entire finger (.plan) file must be download each time, even if the exact same finger (.plan) file was previously downloaded,
  • identity is strictly tied to an Internet domain,
  • there is no official way of segmenting the download (into sub-pages).