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.
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+.
You can always host your instance.
Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users
Host your own.
From the picture I’m going to say it should be the great wall of politicians. It may take a while but If pile enough of the up and cement them together one way or the other things will improve.
Back to printing presses
geocaching + memory sticks
with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet
I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.
Tor is slow
It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation
and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers
This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.
In the future new technologies will maybe bypass internet but right now the best thing to do it’s to start being less internet dependent: archive stuff for your home server, buy physical media, preserve what you’d need and like.
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 😖
Thanks for this post and thanks to all the commenters here for great suggestions. Definitely commenting to remind me to come back here and add some of these awesome resources to my home lab.
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
Tor is not that slow for normal internet usage. You can even watch videos in SD.
you can at it’s current usage level, if new limits spark new usage, we’ll need a lot more exit nodes.
Tribler has inbuilt onion routing. If I understand it correctly, tribler <-> tribler connections don’t need exit nodes and it’s fast enough to stream video
I have always wondered about distributed hosting, like BitTorrent, but for websites. You go to a webpage, and it gets seeded from however many people host the file. It should be harder to take down. I do not code at all. Is that a thing? Why not?
So like IPFS?
I tried really hard to use IPFS. I set up a syncthing and did some auto-publishing scripts.
It’s slow AF, and unless you pay some big player to pin your files there’s only about a 1 in 10 chance of it actually being available everywhere. I had to actually peer my computers together to get sure fire access to my own data.
Then there’s very little in the way of privacy. I did some JavaScript crypto self-decrypting archives that was kind of fun But with the distribution problems it just became more of a hassle to use than anything.
That has already been done: https://zeronet.io/
If doing an overlay network (network on top of the Internet), you probably won’t be able to do much better than Tor or i2p.
We confirm the trilemma that an AC [anonymous communication] protocol can only achieve two out of the following three properties: strong anonymity (i.e., anonymity up to a negligible chance), low bandwidth overhead, and low latency overhead.
https://freedom.cs.purdue.edu/projects/trilemma.html
This applies to all types of anonymous networks as well (BT, Wifi, etc).
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.
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?
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…
Visual regonition on image coming from many stream most of them having nothing to actually recognised as text is much harder to do than analys text in computer text format than come right to you.
I also presume some level of common-sense. Don’t do it near cameras, destroy the notes immediately, etc… It’s not air-tight, but it’s a surprisingly useful approach in many contexts where very expensive technology can fail.
Outlawing VPNs? Good luck doing business with the rest of the world
Good point. How tf are they going to work remote?
