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Comment by iamerroragent | Hacker News Reader

Latency might be a tad bit high but with a 2TB SD card Pigeon internet has great bandwidth.

  Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Love Tanenbaum.

One of the first computer scientist I remember learning about a decade or more ago when I started getting into FOSS and learning how these great tools work! Thanks for bringing those memories back.

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

One SD card seems to weight about 2G. Considering the pigeon could carry 30-50G (depending on source), it seems they could carry about 15TB - 25TB in one go, flying up to ~100km/hour. Not sure how that would compare to a fiber-optic connection though. But for short distances it must surely have a higher bandwidth.

Now is it a European pigeon or an African pigeon?

Kidding aside, I really appreciate that you got an accurate estimate on how much data a pigeon could potentially deliver today.

And it's highly censorship resistant - birds are ubiquitous.

In this case censorship might be a 12 gauge shotgun with #8 birdshot shells

Jokes aside though this form of communication would be very difficult to disrupt or intercept even in times of crisis.

Sure, but you'd need to identify the bird as a messenger bird in the first place, which is made harder by the fact that pigeons live pretty much everywhere.

> Sure, but you'd need to identify the bird as a messenger bird in the first place

Why? Dragnet censorship doesn't care about collateral damage, assume all traffic is potentially "dangerous" and shoot every bird at sight. Or just capture them and release if confirmed free of harmful information.

Ahem.

https://birdsarentreal.com/

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