I’m sure I’d be preaching to the choir if I told you that it’s time for us to immigrate from übercorp owned social media and services. All of you have done so, so that’s not the point of this post. Even though we are on these new platforms, the fediverse is still sensitive to requests from governmental bodies and organizations. Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same. Due to the size of Matrix’s biggest homeserver matrix.org, the admins of said homeserver are beginning to follow the OSA and have already raised their minimum age to 18+. And instances who don’t follow the Act could be subjected to insurmountable paperwork and even blocked from the UK, Australia and other countries enacting these outrageous laws soon.
Blocking UK users to avoid this is almost a necessity, and as Labour is attempting to get lawmakers to outlaw VPNs, we could be seeing the equivalent of the UK Great Firewall soon. However, it will take significant amounts of time, money and paperwork to outlaw VPNs and to get ISPs to block sites and protocols. This is where federated and open source platforms have an advantage, without being shackled by bureaucracy they are able to quickly adapt. But this is not sustainable, and eventually the UK will become even more overreaching in order to gain more control over people’s Internet usage.
Darknets such as Tor, I2P and Yggdrasil are a potential solution, however they have multiple issues. Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load. Yggdrasil is alpha software and requires IPv6, which in many countries is simply not possible to use. Whilst these darknets are extremely resistant to censorship from other countries, with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet, they still are not capable of handling modern Internet usage.
We might need new completely independent mediums seperate from the Internet to avoid this. Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up. All I know is that governments will not stop here. I might seem like I’m overreacting here, but we need to be prepared for what is coming.
CORRECTION: I was told by a peer that Yggdrasil peers must have IPv6, however one does not need an IPv6 enabled network to use it, they just need an IPv6 operating system/device, which virtually every modern operating system including Windows and Linux does. Yggdrasil is actually Beta software.
The UK moves are very worrying. We’re trying to help people to move away from big tech at our site https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/
We recommend fediverse protocols wherever possible - so I’m interested in the comments here about how that is affected
This site would be more compelling if it didn’t look so much like a you wouldn’t steal a car ad.
Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!
Lora is typically 50k max (theoretical 256k). So less than dial up speed.
It is in no way a replacement technology for wifi.
Obviously the solution is to have thousands of nodes per file transfer to increase the bandwidth.
This is a perfect plan which has absolutely no downsides.
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.
It sucks that literally using something that should be the default, truly protecting privacy, has such a bad reputation because… well it protects privacy.
That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.
Oh they’re all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that’s the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.
Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that’s not really a coincidence.
Paper money is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.
A lot of inert things are used in bad ways.
Trouble is, there is little that can be done.
Enough folks drank the coolaid, and now we’re stuck with surveillance laws masquerading as child protection laws.
Those laws can, and will, get worse over time. However, new mediums will arise, or old ones will rise to the occasion (IRC goes brr). The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.
The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.
What’s your plan to make it a key voter issue? Lamenting about it on censored internet?
We need bulletproof alternatives and solutions.
It’s always about trust in your government. As a Slovakian, I don’t believe mine.
Enough folks drank the coolaid,
You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely.
Tech corporations own most popular and visited websites/services, they are not going to do it. That said you have countries with major websites blocked like russia or china, while it upset many people censored internet is also a strong tool to brainwash people so don’t assume a blockage would lead to a positive outcome.
Maybe things will go back too when the internet was a less decentralized and more for a select few who were interested? Personally that’s when I enjoyed the internet the most. Were message boards reigned supreme and chatrooms were filled with 30 year men pretending to be women. Actually that last part hasn’t changed
Only tangentially related, but in the vein of privacy and circumventing surveillance, one communication idea I really like in that vein is from the show The Leftovers–the way the “Remnant” group communicates only by simple handwritten notes.
I just like the idea that something so rudimentary could theoretically overcome a lot of very high-tech snooping equipment. Good luck using your Stingray cell tower simulator to intercept my notepad scribbles.
Camera’s or any other matter of visual detection. So perhaps we should get back into cyphers. Vigere anyone?
Obviously, yeah, it wouldn’t work in the middle of a Target. And given the AI tools that can use keyboard typing sounds to determine what was typed, it’s even theoretically possible there’s some bleeding-edge capability to circumvent it. But in general, if you’re in some context where you’re not sure if you’re being listened to/monitored, handwritten notes would definitely work, because your biggest concerns are e-mail, text messages, phone calls, GPS, etc…
Outlawing VPNs? Good luck doing business with the rest of the world
Good point. How tf are they going to work remote?
You are not overreacting, an alternative to internet is needed and it’s not that hard to create, there are many projects already of networks working over radio and wifi, we should probably just stick to one of these and work to expand it
Meshtastic-Based Web?
This tech we all use is advancing exponentially.
And we must be ready to embrace the dizzying changes in the next few years so that we can improve our lives and have better governments.
Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there’s still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.
We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.
I don’t know enough to know whether this is a dumb suggestion - but could web3 / blockchain hold some of the answers?
The irony of Lemmy not letting me post this until I turned off my VPN 😖
Probably not any existing systems; you can still finger and thus demand censorship from a block producer, and you end up with situations where you just can’t host the chain anymore because it’s full of pirated MP3s or whatever now.
And they introduce new problems around having to globally replicate everything and thus getting the net performance out of the system that you get from the worst server involved.
If you need to track some kind of root signing key for a whole p2p system, or something, maybe you can stuff it into Ethereum somewhere. But I don’t think you can get very far trying to actually run a service out of a globally replicated database, and even then you’d have hundreds of operators in legal trouble rather than no operator.
Great explanation, thankyou!
I just jack off into the camera every once Ina a while in case any government agent is watching. I don’t have to do it. But they have to watch it
Hate being assigned to this guy
Back to printing presses
geocaching + memory sticks
Tor is not that slow for normal internet usage. You can even watch videos in SD.
Two days from now there’s a seminar happening in the capital city of my country on a technology called mesh/meshtastic(?). They claim to have found a way to send messages in blackout conditions.
I’ts difficult to find resources but here’s a blogpost about it: https://blog.liamcottle.com/2024/05/01/getting-started-with-meshtastic
Not saying this is our solution, but I think these sorts of ideas and re-imaginings are what we ought to be in the pursuit of right now.
The official website has a lot of good resources. You can burn the firmware into the devices directly from there.
Have you checked out mander.xyz/c/meshtastic ?
I just ordered a couple of meshtastic transceivers. Here’s what it is:
LoRa is a patented radio technique that uses some kind of fancy spread spectrum technique to give very low power sub-GHz UHF radio somewhat impressive range. We’re used to a single Wi-Fi access point being able to cover about the size of a large-ish house with wireless data. I can’t pick up my house Wi-Fi in my workshop at the back of my suburban property. LoRa manages to reach out several miles on the same amount of power as a Wi-Fi signal. The tradeoff is bandwidth. A typical Wi-Fi connection can stream video, LoRa isn’t really practical for much more than text messaging. It is my understanding that it’s designed to do things like industrial telemetry.
On top of this is built Meshtastic, an open source mesh networking protocol. You buy a little circuit board that’s got a microcontroller, a LoRa transceiver and a bluetooth transceiver. You flash the Meshtastic firmware to it, and now it is a “node.” “Nodes” can be configured in several ways, but in general they’ll sit there and scream into the void looking for other nodes. Messages sent are like “Tell John I say hello. Pass this on Three times.” If your node hears that message, it will automatically transmit “Tell John I say hello. pass this on Two times.” So in that way, nodes can automatically act as repeaters.
So they have astonishing range for their band and power, and the automatic relaying of messages means a message can propagate pretty far. Mind you, it has limitations similar to old school SMS; a message is pretty strictly limited to something like 288 characters, including emoji.
Many “nodes” don’t have much of an onboard UI; some do but the main intended way for the user to access a node is over bluetooth from the Meshtastic app running on an Android or iOS device. Some units do have onboard UIs or can host a web interface accessed via wi-fi or ethernet.
Meshtastic essentially forms an ad-hoc off-grid SMS-like service. The bandwidth is simply too low to allow anything like web hosting, audio or video. At a ham convention, several hundred nodes saturated the available bandwidth just with procedural pings leaving no room for actual traffic.
Encryption is permitted on this network, I wouldn’t exactly plan a coup over Meshtastic but I think I could coordinate meeting friends at a restaurant without being stalked.
If your project is to abandon the internet, this may be one of many tools necessary.
Woah thats insane, thanks for the summary. The stuff I had been reading about it was a bit dense for me as someone with 0 background in radio.
Maybe I’ll get one and become a node
Yeah I hold a general class amateur radio license, and that’s helped me wrap my head around how it works. And I’ve still got a lot of "somehow"s in my understanding.
deleted by creator
