Pigeon as a Service – Send Messages by Carrier Pigeon | Hacker News Reader

Pigeon as a Service – Send Messages by Carrier Pigeon

flypigeon.co

44 pointswarent21 comments

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=flypigeon.co.

If they let me strap a high capacity card to its neck, and fly it back and forth between my office and apartment, allowing me to avoid large transfers, this would still be faster than Comcast and I would pay a premium. :0

There was, as I recall, a contest in South Africa about exactly this - could a pigeon carrying a USB stick beat a normal file transfer.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-pigeon/pigeon-tra...

It looks like these guys applied to YC 2 years ago. http://blog.flypigeon.co/our-application-to-y-combinators-w1...

Is this still being worked on and planning to actually release?

Their fleet hasn't changed in 2 years (I remember seeing them back then). Should we interpret this negatively (no growth in headcount!) or positively (no turnover!)?

https://flypigeon.co/fleet

Their last tweet - RIP, pigeon fleet.

https://twitter.com/fly_pigeon/status/685041481887944704

Is this real? Can it deliver to a balcony? Or does it just drop it off at your doorstep?

For real, I read everything I could on their site. They do mention living birds, I don't know why I'm still sceptical...

I don't see any way this could be real, personally. As a previous owner of pigeons, they don't generally fly to random places. You release them somewhere and they fly to a place they KNOW (their coop generally). That in and of itself is amazing, but yeah, I don't know any way you'd be able to get them to fly random places... not to mention predatory birds and such.

Also, even if it was 'real' at some point, none of their stuff has been updated at all since 2015/2016.

Since sending messages by homing pigeon requires taking a pigeon from location A and then releasing it with a message so it will fly back home to location A, I'm going to guess this isn't real. Unless every customer has to install a pigeon coop to raise birds that will head home to that location.

They have servos on the wings and neck of the birds. On the back is an rPi or some small computer. They have a long wire antenna (looked to be 1 meter long) dangling from the computer.

I am guessing they are controlling the servos via the rPi and doing midcourse updates over the air.

You can also train them to have a secondary home and fly between their primary and secondary home in order to achieve full duplex messaging.

They should use this protocol as their API: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

Wonder if Pidgin will support Pidgeon as a backend? Both of them seem to like purple.

Come on, drones would be a million times better than this.

Someday we will look back and laugh that we had to use pigeons to send letters

Well, its certainly a clever work around, Are they also their own VPN though? How do we know we won't get hit by a man in the middle attack?

Wait... Is it April's Fools already?

This is needed in Puerto Rico right now.

wow thats something new!!

However, When it comes to emails and spams, what is the meaning of the word "inappropriately"? Thats the question.

Wat.

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