INQ reporter drinks reindeer urine, surely shaman mistake

WE'RE NOT QUITE sure if our drinks were spiked last night, but The INQ appears to have held a conversation with Avri Doria, technical vice chair with the Multi-Service Switching Forum, over reindeer tracking software.

[At this point, we'd just like to step in and say that shamans, of old, used to drink the urine of reindeer that had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms in order to trip the light fantastic. Sheesh! Ed.]

Doria is based with the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden and seems to have stumbled upon an extremely unusual application for ad-hoc (mesh) networks.

Apparently the Saami are a tribe of reindeer herders who wander around the frozen wastes of Sweden, Norway and Lapland. Naturally they're completely cut off from the Internet. Unless Doria has her way, of course.

She's proposing to use Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) technology currently being developed by the Internet Research Task Force -DTN Research Group (IRTF-DTNRG) to provide email, cached web access, and reindeer herd tracking telemetry.

Routing would be adapted from Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (Manet) and Network Mobility (Nemo) protocol technology.

In a nutshell as soon as these folks wander in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot they'd be able to download the last week's emails and interesting Web pages.

The Saami are apparently in the same predicament as astronauts in Deep Space so the USA's National Propulsion Laboratory is currently checking all this stuff out. All Avri Doria needs is the grant to get it rolling. She also told us that PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is dead and needs replacing but we're just going to ignore that one.

Just like the rumour that Microsoft is about to sue Sendo which we heard yesterday. µ

See Also
Reindeer
Santa and those reindeer