It seems like "censored internet" will be the least of the worries when it comes to agent explosion. Even if your internet is free, how are you going to find it through the slop brigades generating and consuming the same "load bearing" crap. Even if you setup the oracle of the day, and no one stops you, how are you going to filter all the crap out to find it? And how will you afford it when everyone puts up pay gates to deal with the xplosion, leading to only the most valuable aislop being allowed on.
>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.
As a parent you'll punish or otherwise teach your kids not to lie. Really quickly you'll find yourself punishing them for telling the truth, but not the full truth.
In the topic we're talking about proving something was a lie or bullshit, and proving a lie by omission gets really really hard, much harder than proving something is an outright lie.
> If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?
No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.
> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?
The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.
I mean yes, it is likely there is no other probable outcome.
One of the big problems with the HN rugged individualist types is they think they'll get to have awesome unlimited power at their broke ass individual scale and that somehow people with millions or billions of dollars aren't going to use said power fully to their advantage while crushing anyone that stands in their way.
More so they think that power seeking type people and organizations will not quickly adopt this technology and spend massive amounts of money to entrench their legal position while weakening everyone else's rights.
As much as technology may free us, it seems even more probable that it will put us in the perfect cage as you say, or just completely end us all. There is no universal law that says technology cannot power scale way beyond humans ability to remain chemically stable. If we fly too close to the sun our wings will melt off.
Is there an uncensored intetnet, because i dont think there is. if there is any, it can be turned off because its being routed on the censored net wrapped in encryption.
that being said, that makes me pretty interested in this talk. outside of hacking sattelites and such things and/or infra i really dont see any opportunities to break free of the will of corporations as they can simply pay infra providers to do their bidding.
I dont think software can solve all problems because internet exists essentially as informaiton transported over infrastructure. the software surely helps enable that but its a helper not the actual network.
Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.
Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.
Even building your own internet, say over wireless is easily detected and jammed.
About the only thing that could save us (though likely cause so many new problems we won't feel saved) is some kind of more sci-fi technology involving the non-locality of the universe for devices to communicate (not even talking about FTL communication, just different topologies within universal limits).
It seems relatively simple to me to detect fibers hanging around cities as soon as the network is bigger than two nerdy neighbors. Same for lasers and telescopes.
Man, I don't think you've ever actually built free optical laser networks, they are kind of a pain in the ass and everyone is going to notice you've got one stuck up on a pole.
The next time its foggy or raining a tuned photon sensor to the spectrum that these devices run at will light up like a Christmas tree. If you're really intent on catching said people, you'd have drones flying around sprinkling light chaff and detecting where it detects optical scattering.
It really depends on what ypu are dealing with - if you are worried about communication being too centralized and monopolized, it might be a good idea to start building and alternative. Doing that might avoid the situation getting worse, slow it down or even reverse the trend.
If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.
Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.
Building an Alternative internet seems like a fools errand to me, like building an alternative road network. How are you going to reach a critical mass of users? What should stop the powers that control the old internet from taking off your network as soon as you beat the odds and gain popularity?
this is the thing. an alternative internet is often suggested but whos gonna host a global switching network and put cables in the seasnfor that, and will it be allowed? what about cables in the ground or antenae everywhere to spread the network? it could simply be made illegal if it isnt already
I mean it would be amazing if one day access to the internet could be truly free (from costs for users, and censorship).
But as the world is now, it's not feasible in any sense yet.
The current internet is the best we have and it >can< work, we have to find solutions inside the current possibilities until tech is advanced, cheap and accessible enough for everyone interested to easily host their own infra.
But this is not easy, because what is the real goal... really?
It feels like most of the internet is about making money or involving money, even from the end users. Is there even something to fix when most people don't care enough to ditch knowingly harmful products like Facebook, TikTok, etc?
People in small towns and some cities in the Americas (North and South) have somewhat casually set up CJDNS an Reticulum networks. CJDNS had a lot of buzz in the 2010s.
In some places these mesh networks have nodes that offer paid gateways to the conventional internet.
Writing user-facing social/messaging applications that can work seamlessly between emergent mesh networks and the conventional internet, using cryptography based zero-knowledge tricks to preserve privacy, is necessary for these mesh networks to gain traction outside of just tech enthusiasts.
Some rural areas centered around some small towns have already done this but have kept it to themselves (understandably so).
That's the thing though, no?
Depending on the use-case, do you >really< need a global network?
Don't get me wrong, an uncensorable and free internet for everyone is something I am very much for, but when we start to talk about nations limiting access while information has to flow, the question is not about mass-adoption anymore, but rather seeing the right tools reaching the right people.
A good example of this, imho, is the situation in Iran, when they cut off the internet. Some people were able to help themselves thanks to VPN-like apps and outside help, but that is not the majority of people.
but in the scifi mindset, what if you have an entangled ram bank with someone else. i write to mine and they can read it from theirs. that could create a sort of entangled ram bank mesh network network? (i know, maybe super stupid thought.)
It's not super stupid, but you'd have to find a quantum effect that actually does this while transferring information. If it transfers information it can't do so over the speed of light. As long as it follows that rule it may be possible, but if we had found anything like that yet we'd almost certainly be using it.
its not that bad, but i do wish ppl would add a comment on the downvote to show why. glad someone else dropped the link :D it might be easy to assume someone else can find such info but in reality people are so into different things that something obvious for one person can be a complete mystery to another. no clue what to search or read to even get there apart from starting physics and electronics courses from scratch and stumbling and bumlbing along to maybe someday find out why that downvote happend.
Glad some people do like to be smart rather than smug, and provide the link :)
But it wasn't even a good question. Someone says "we need to make a website" and someone chimes in "could we do that with blockchain?" and you facepalm because that's just a buzzword they heard somewhere and the question has no meaning.
It's possible that any such technology would be too complicated to ensure a clean supply chain or have weaknesses that would allow it to be tracked or jammed. Real devices have some kind of engineering tradeoff.
But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.
You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.
So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.
Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)
It's not black and white though. There's a scale from "easy to censor without collateral damage" to "need to take the whole nation offline to suppress information flow".
And there is a scale from "trivial to circumvent, if only (you know) you want to" to something like "need to be very tech-savy and use custom hardware"
As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.
OTOH, third world or dictatorships won’t blink when it comes to turning off an entire country - example is Tanzania in the recent election.. are there solutions for communication when international links are cut? A lan like solution scaled to cities or an entire country that is disconnected from the rest of the world?
It’s only censorship when a democratic government does it. When an unelected businessman with no oversight and more power than most counties does it isles just property rights.
A lot of people say this unironically about Facebook/Youtube/other social media. As long as it's in private hands, they're apparently free to manipulate information and restrict selected users however they want, regardless of how enmeshed they are in everybody's life.
In particular, a lot of people say this about major social media platforms when they are censoring content the speaker things is genuinely bad; and then call for government regulation of those platforms in order to prevent them from censoring content the speaker likes and thinks is important. And even if the government did just nationalize Facebook, the fact that it's no longer a private company doesn't remove the political component of the decision - people argue and vote on what they want the government to do, and then sometimes a court rules that it's unconstitutional for the democratically-elected government to do the thing it wants to do.
i don't think anyone with enough money for shootin clusters of sattelites into orbit will be a free open internet builder. ofc thats an assumption. This network of sattelites would also need to join in and coordinate with other stuff up there, as far as i can tell its pretty crowded and theres collision risks etc.
You can receive data over radio waves, which would be pretty hard to block country-wide I think. Sending data would be a bit trickier without being caught.
this does require quite some expertise. as u noted sending can be triangulated. Also because this sending issue, it wouldnt really be an internet since only few parties would have the resources for mobile or ship-based transmitting systems that are harder to pin down or stop
If things get that bad, you make friends in an “unfriendly” country and have them beam in news and resources to you, which you distribute by sneakernet (or even paper). At that point you’re squarely in the territory of latent revolution, as sitting at home is no guarantee that the secret police won’t come for you anyways.
In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP. It's already a self-building network. The hard part is how you incentivise transit nodes. Currently that's what ISPs and backbones provide. They are incentivised to interconnect because that's their core business model. So a truly decentralized Internet requires a decentralized incentive system.
This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.
> In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP.
I'm sorry, that just wrong. Gupta-Kumar capacity scaling law (2000) says that as you add participants, each participant gets less bandwidth, until it becomes impractical. Imagine a room with 10 people talking in it. Easy. Now imagine 10,000. Hard to have a conversation if it's still all ad-hoc.
Someone ends up having to act as a hub. The more you gear for that job, the easier you are to target, and the more worth it it is to target you.
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, you have to remember that all tech is predisposed on a functioning society with cooperative people to move your packets from A to B.
Tech cannot solve the problem of Trust. Quite the opposite. It amplifies to immense degrees. In short, if you're looking for tech to save you because your Government is doing something shady, you're at the wrong level. Tackle the government.
> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut
There are, but currently the most promising one is under control of a very rich and very politically opinionated person who is not afraid to use that power in any way he pleases.
A truly distributed version (with multiple tech stacks, ownership and control) would be the real solution but I don't see any way this could ever manifest.
To be fair, those are usually cases where the reason they turned off the internet is entirely unrelated to anyone doing something questionable, and more about personal political whims as security theater. As long as you keep the bribes flowing to the dictatorship, you aren't at risk of being shut down for what you're doing.
US corporations have always had these kinds of relationships with foreign governments. If a given government won't accept bribes the CIA will work to overthrow them, financing and puppeting "democratic" groups to that end.
Dark? That's just business as usual in a large chunk of the world, across every industry. Ask any company with a large, multi-continent presence and you'll get stories for days about this kind of stuff.
Can the dictator turn off the power? Turn off the phones? Turn off the internet? Close the ports of entry? Hold food hostage? Hold your shipment hostage? Stop fuel imports, production, and distribution? Nationalize anything and potentially everything? Run off or genocide entire ethnic groups? Yeah. And it happens often enough that examples are easily found of most of these (note: turning off power and stopping fuel imports are possible, but would simply piss people off, so it's usually bad politics).
Not sure what's dark about how the world works. Doesn't make it right or just, but that doesn't mean it can't be how things are.
Every time there’s a football game? At least that I’m hearing in the case of Spain. No, they don’t throw a switch, but they turn off enough CDNs to effectively turn off the internet.
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
i think tech ceos might also have benefit from uncensored internet because they can build more accurate profiles of the masses to target their products etc.
I've been reading about the early history of the Internet.
The first ARPANET link to the United Kingdom required an exception to UK law. The traditional interpretation was that the state telecom monopoly (the General Post Office) had a monopoly on data transport. It was assumed that national governments have an absolute sovereign right to inspect data packets at the border, just like they do mail and parcels. That includes searches and seizures of foreign propaganda, material illegal under domestic law, etc.
> In early 1971 Larry proposed to break the circuit and connect in the NPL
network to the ARPAnet. Unfortunately for that plan (but not for me), at this time the British government was trying to get the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC governments, particularly France, were in any case suspicious of U.K. links with the United States. It was therefore politically impossible for NPL to be linked directly to a U.S. defense project. [1]
But the Internet was an experimental network. An exception could be made. Everyone would pretend that they were inside the United States legally speaking. This sort of worked when everyone was an academic restricted by network access policies of their institutions.
> I set up a Governing Committee, with the funding partners on it: Ann Letts represented the BPO, Donald Davies represented the NPL, and I was the Chair. Because of the questionable legality of what we were doing, all proposed users had to be approved individually. I put in security procedures so that all users had to log-in, with a password, on our relay.
[2]
This is related to the protocol wars of the 1980s. The X.25 protocol that was supported by all the established telecoms providers, included mechanisms for packet authority, automatic packet billing, and political boundary packet inspection mechanisms. [3]
X.25 was decried as too centralized, too complex, and too centred around the interests of the established telecoms. (Which it was.) TCP was better for both technical and political reasons. But the Protocol Wars were not a permanent victory. It was a wonderful moment in world history but the underlying tensions have resurfaced.
Except they're not taking the whole country offline. AFAIK even simple VPNs work without issue. Iran took the whole country offline, because their country barely functions, and still some people managed an external connection.
They managed the external connection because they were being provided with one by outside nations trying to topple the government. They were promptly arrested and the "protests" fizzled out. Trump then bombed them anyway.
As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.
The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?
It didn't. They are probably referring either to Quad9 being ordered to block resolving certain hosts (and therefore deciding to not offer service in france) or the french prime minister sending a notice to ISPs to prepare DNS blocks for twitter, facebook, etc.
In both cases this is not taking the whole country offline, and for both of them you can easily bypass the "block" by using any other DNS provider. You don't even need VPN/TOR or anything else complicated.
Soon. Because of the protests again the government, the government ordered the ISPs to set up a nationwide block that the government can enable at the flick of a switch. See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50229861
cant you just disable resedential and non critical connections? ISPs etc. know whos who right? no need to take the nation offline. only the people in it (civilians, medium/small businesses etc)
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
Russia is trying that (white lists) and it's proving costly enough that even they have to back off. They'll probably get there eventually but it requires serious investment of money and time and inevitably hampers the economy.
interesting thanks. i guess its a drastic measure, which costs a lot, so there would be some potential tippingpoint in which the risks to the censors or the costs they are racking up by not doing it outweighs the costs of cutting it all off. Also ofcourse, 'they' need their populations somewhat with them. if an entire nation stands up you have a revolution, so maybe its a balancing act to prevent that. cut it here n there but keep the main perception its all temporary or localized etc
Part of the reason is data centers getting droned lately, which also happens to hurt traffic scanning capacity. As those servers get more decentralized or hidden in bunkers, Russia is likely going to move towards white lists again.
I absolutely agree, and it isn't even a scale, it's multi-dimensional. There are many different little problems that the internet solves, and they could also be solved with many different little alternatives.
this is an interesting take. you are right a lot of stuff currently solved by internet can be done differently to the same effect. didnt think of that at all but ofc once you have a tool ull start applying it to lots of problems even if its not strictly needed.
I sometimes think mid to end of 90s was peak freedom. Never before had there been so much mostly uncensored world wide communication. Unfortunately most likely there never ever will be
again.
I would argue that.. despite much greater attempts at control, the internet is much more wild now. Not because it is not being surveilled, monitored, botted, manipulated or any combination of those, but because the pace of change is getting a little hard to keep up with.. not just by orgs and govs ( they normally struggle with those ), but by even by above average humans. I miss the 90s, but the feels are the same now man ( minus the hope;p ).
Fuck man, even if you watch early apprentice tv show, it is just different. I initially just thought it was just nostalgia ( I briefly got into old arcade games and VF2 didn't age that well ), but man.. even the stupid reality shows were better.
- LoRa has actually quite a long range if done right (tens of km, upt to hundred+) so you would have to jam all that.
- This kind of jamming would be actually illegal, so you would have to make it legal first/tollerate it & expend non-trivial respurces to jam tiny repeaters from Aliexpress on random trees.
- The 868 MHz hand is actually used by a lot of IoT stuff like sensor networks, water/gas/electricity meter monitoring, some alarm systems - so if you did effectively jam the band, those things would break as well.
- Also if things went as far as active jamming being used, things might be heated up enough that whoever is running the mesh won't be playing by the reules as well - like, using a different, notmally ilegal fregvency or even triangulate and attack the jammers.
We've had enough people around here _accidentally_ jam the 868 MHz and each time it took months to figure out what was going on before meshtastic worked again..
Yeah, MeshCore works impressively well but definitely there is a huge space for many nice improvements and novel use cases. Only time will tell if they will come MeshCore, the other LoRa mesh projects or something completely new. :)
Reticulum. Encryption-required mesh-routing alternative to the IP stack. Can route over just about any medium (piggyback IP, Lora, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, microwave P2P, anything). Also future-proofed with support for high-bandwidth persistent connections.
In the late aughts and early 2010s I and a few other people came up with the `darknet plan` aka `project meshnet` which was a subreddit and adjacent communities dedicated to creating a completely parallel internet using 802.11s mesh networks akin to the Athens and NYC meshes that span a huge portion of those metros.
The movement eventually got coopted by the CJDNS project and its fans. Instead of a completely separate internet they were advocating more of an overlay on top of the existing internet (because that didn't require solving interurban/intercontinental backhaul), which to my mind addresses essentially none of the problems we set out to solve, so I eventually lost interest.
But today we have things like LoRa and a greater hacker community around the ISM bands, which might be just what's needed. I have hope one day we can achieve global interconnectivity without rent-seeking ISPs.
There was, once, but that has decayed rapidly alongside the centralization of the Internet. There are very few websites people even use nowadays, and many of them block legal expressions due to ideological and economic pressures. Payment processors and banks regularly restrict businesses and individuals from legal commercial activities, examples are Pornhub/MindGeek, Steam, and firearm dealers.
There is also now a precedent for T1 ISPs to block whatever legal websites they wish, and there is little recourse to be had there either. Not to mention arbitrary legal pressure for ISPs is also precedent now due to Judge Katherine Polk Failla.
On top of that, several EU countries have been using DNS blocks to prevent piracy and access to “bad” websites for ages, which has further been eroding the Big-I Internet into various separate internets.
People seem to be oblivious to the fact that the internet infrastructure has been government controlled since its inception. No cable laid under the sea between two nations can exist without the government approval and without the governments tapping into the link. IP addresses, MAC addresses, domain names, all managed by "super partes" international organizations swore to neutrality and fairness.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
People can very practically exchange information without any government knowing the content. This was true from the beginning and is still true today.
The network infrastructure makes it possible to exchange privileged information and tunnel it through insecure channels. That is who we do banking on our phones while using the trains wifi (I would still not recommend to do that). Or generally establish VPN connection. Real data privacy is possible without a physical network.
I disagree with the parent, there is an uncensored net. Most people aren't interested in it for convenience but we should be quite happy it exists.
I think this this the perfect time to bring back old 90-00s webhosting, web rings and all and get them to be trendy and viral if some celebrity could pull people in and get them off this dirtyweb, bot-ridden and dead-internet-theoried. People have been veered hard into content creation and running their own little merchandise dropship etc businesses and all of the options are dinosaurs now.
Wordpress is getting its popularity nuked from orbit, there is definitely room for another "internet" that isn't walled garden social media app slop. Might even get kids into computers again.
But in this admin, economy and no startup capital and a million other things going on right now I don't think it will ever happen.
Before 2021 I hated typos etc but now I like seeing imperfect text in this new age. I wouldn't have considered it could be a bot (and I don't think it is) but it would certainly have worked on me (to what end, who knows..)
If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?
>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.
As a parent you'll punish or otherwise teach your kids not to lie. Really quickly you'll find yourself punishing them for telling the truth, but not the full truth.
No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.
> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?
The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.
No jailbreak, no exploits
One of the big problems with the HN rugged individualist types is they think they'll get to have awesome unlimited power at their broke ass individual scale and that somehow people with millions or billions of dollars aren't going to use said power fully to their advantage while crushing anyone that stands in their way.
More so they think that power seeking type people and organizations will not quickly adopt this technology and spend massive amounts of money to entrench their legal position while weakening everyone else's rights.
As much as technology may free us, it seems even more probable that it will put us in the perfect cage as you say, or just completely end us all. There is no universal law that says technology cannot power scale way beyond humans ability to remain chemically stable. If we fly too close to the sun our wings will melt off.
that being said, that makes me pretty interested in this talk. outside of hacking sattelites and such things and/or infra i really dont see any opportunities to break free of the will of corporations as they can simply pay infra providers to do their bidding.
I dont think software can solve all problems because internet exists essentially as informaiton transported over infrastructure. the software surely helps enable that but its a helper not the actual network.
happy to learn otherwise from anyone here ofc :-)
Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.
Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.
Even building your own internet, say over wireless is easily detected and jammed.
About the only thing that could save us (though likely cause so many new problems we won't feel saved) is some kind of more sci-fi technology involving the non-locality of the universe for devices to communicate (not even talking about FTL communication, just different topologies within universal limits).
The next time its foggy or raining a tuned photon sensor to the spectrum that these devices run at will light up like a Christmas tree. If you're really intent on catching said people, you'd have drones flying around sprinkling light chaff and detecting where it detects optical scattering.
If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.
Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.
But as the world is now, it's not feasible in any sense yet.
The current internet is the best we have and it >can< work, we have to find solutions inside the current possibilities until tech is advanced, cheap and accessible enough for everyone interested to easily host their own infra.
But this is not easy, because what is the real goal... really?
It feels like most of the internet is about making money or involving money, even from the end users. Is there even something to fix when most people don't care enough to ditch knowingly harmful products like Facebook, TikTok, etc?
In some places these mesh networks have nodes that offer paid gateways to the conventional internet.
Writing user-facing social/messaging applications that can work seamlessly between emergent mesh networks and the conventional internet, using cryptography based zero-knowledge tricks to preserve privacy, is necessary for these mesh networks to gain traction outside of just tech enthusiasts.
Some rural areas centered around some small towns have already done this but have kept it to themselves (understandably so).
Don't get me wrong, an uncensorable and free internet for everyone is something I am very much for, but when we start to talk about nations limiting access while information has to flow, the question is not about mass-adoption anymore, but rather seeing the right tools reaching the right people.
A good example of this, imho, is the situation in Iran, when they cut off the internet. Some people were able to help themselves thanks to VPN-like apps and outside help, but that is not the majority of people.
but in the scifi mindset, what if you have an entangled ram bank with someone else. i write to mine and they can read it from theirs. that could create a sort of entangled ram bank mesh network network? (i know, maybe super stupid thought.)
Glad some people do like to be smart rather than smug, and provide the link :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.
You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.
So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.
Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)
And there is a scale from "trivial to circumvent, if only (you know) you want to" to something like "need to be very tech-savy and use custom hardware"
On the other hand, Ukrainians are finding out that someone else is in control of that starlink infra.
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.
I'm sorry, that just wrong. Gupta-Kumar capacity scaling law (2000) says that as you add participants, each participant gets less bandwidth, until it becomes impractical. Imagine a room with 10 people talking in it. Easy. Now imagine 10,000. Hard to have a conversation if it's still all ad-hoc.
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, you have to remember that all tech is predisposed on a functioning society with cooperative people to move your packets from A to B.
Tech cannot solve the problem of Trust. Quite the opposite. It amplifies to immense degrees. In short, if you're looking for tech to save you because your Government is doing something shady, you're at the wrong level. Tackle the government.
Sad, but inevitable.
Now if you have too many leaches and not enough contributors then you get a problem, but that’s not the same as a single point of failure.
There are, but currently the most promising one is under control of a very rich and very politically opinionated person who is not afraid to use that power in any way he pleases.
A truly distributed version (with multiple tech stacks, ownership and control) would be the real solution but I don't see any way this could ever manifest.
Does the tech industry still even see technology as a source for good in the world, or do we now see ourselves as the dictators' keys to power.
What future do we have if we have become totally cynical and Amoral?
Can the dictator turn off the power? Turn off the phones? Turn off the internet? Close the ports of entry? Hold food hostage? Hold your shipment hostage? Stop fuel imports, production, and distribution? Nationalize anything and potentially everything? Run off or genocide entire ethnic groups? Yeah. And it happens often enough that examples are easily found of most of these (note: turning off power and stopping fuel imports are possible, but would simply piss people off, so it's usually bad politics).
Not sure what's dark about how the world works. Doesn't make it right or just, but that doesn't mean it can't be how things are.
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
This is your country. This is your country on intellectual property rights.
i think tech ceos might also have benefit from uncensored internet because they can build more accurate profiles of the masses to target their products etc.
The first ARPANET link to the United Kingdom required an exception to UK law. The traditional interpretation was that the state telecom monopoly (the General Post Office) had a monopoly on data transport. It was assumed that national governments have an absolute sovereign right to inspect data packets at the border, just like they do mail and parcels. That includes searches and seizures of foreign propaganda, material illegal under domestic law, etc.
> In early 1971 Larry proposed to break the circuit and connect in the NPL network to the ARPAnet. Unfortunately for that plan (but not for me), at this time the British government was trying to get the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC governments, particularly France, were in any case suspicious of U.K. links with the United States. It was therefore politically impossible for NPL to be linked directly to a U.S. defense project. [1]
But the Internet was an experimental network. An exception could be made. Everyone would pretend that they were inside the United States legally speaking. This sort of worked when everyone was an academic restricted by network access policies of their institutions.
> I set up a Governing Committee, with the funding partners on it: Ann Letts represented the BPO, Donald Davies represented the NPL, and I was the Chair. Because of the questionable legality of what we were doing, all proposed users had to be approved individually. I put in security procedures so that all users had to log-in, with a password, on our relay.
[2]
This is related to the protocol wars of the 1980s. The X.25 protocol that was supported by all the established telecoms providers, included mechanisms for packet authority, automatic packet billing, and political boundary packet inspection mechanisms. [3]
X.25 was decried as too centralized, too complex, and too centred around the interests of the established telecoms. (Which it was.) TCP was better for both technical and political reasons. But the Protocol Wars were not a permanent victory. It was a wonderful moment in world history but the underlying tensions have resurfaced.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224386328_The_early...
[2] http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/darpa/internet-history.htm...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-OSI_Standard_War...
Iran took their whole country offline because they locked the country behind CGNAT - which is an ideal tech for offlining an entire nation.
The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?
In both cases this is not taking the whole country offline, and for both of them you can easily bypass the "block" by using any other DNS provider. You don't even need VPN/TOR or anything else complicated.
i want to read more
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
In the US apparently 433 MHz is used instead.
- LoRa has actually quite a long range if done right (tens of km, upt to hundred+) so you would have to jam all that.
- This kind of jamming would be actually illegal, so you would have to make it legal first/tollerate it & expend non-trivial respurces to jam tiny repeaters from Aliexpress on random trees.
- The 868 MHz hand is actually used by a lot of IoT stuff like sensor networks, water/gas/electricity meter monitoring, some alarm systems - so if you did effectively jam the band, those things would break as well.
- Also if things went as far as active jamming being used, things might be heated up enough that whoever is running the mesh won't be playing by the reules as well - like, using a different, notmally ilegal fregvency or even triangulate and attack the jammers.
https://meshcore-analyzer.eu/#map
Quite active here in Czech Republic for example.
As for the IP protocol - maybe its too much overhead for this use case ?
MeshCore uses PKI and public key prefixes as addresses & for routing/repeating.
The movement eventually got coopted by the CJDNS project and its fans. Instead of a completely separate internet they were advocating more of an overlay on top of the existing internet (because that didn't require solving interurban/intercontinental backhaul), which to my mind addresses essentially none of the problems we set out to solve, so I eventually lost interest.
But today we have things like LoRa and a greater hacker community around the ISM bands, which might be just what's needed. I have hope one day we can achieve global interconnectivity without rent-seeking ISPs.
There is also now a precedent for T1 ISPs to block whatever legal websites they wish, and there is little recourse to be had there either. Not to mention arbitrary legal pressure for ISPs is also precedent now due to Judge Katherine Polk Failla.
On top of that, several EU countries have been using DNS blocks to prevent piracy and access to “bad” websites for ages, which has further been eroding the Big-I Internet into various separate internets.
https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police...
https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-will-leave-franc...
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
The network infrastructure makes it possible to exchange privileged information and tunnel it through insecure channels. That is who we do banking on our phones while using the trains wifi (I would still not recommend to do that). Or generally establish VPN connection. Real data privacy is possible without a physical network.
I disagree with the parent, there is an uncensored net. Most people aren't interested in it for convenience but we should be quite happy it exists.
Wordpress is getting its popularity nuked from orbit, there is definitely room for another "internet" that isn't walled garden social media app slop. Might even get kids into computers again.
But in this admin, economy and no startup capital and a million other things going on right now I don't think it will ever happen.
Do people (and AI bots) think this makes them seem more human? Or is it yet another symptom of civilization in decline?