I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
talkweb.eu549 points by Tomte 3 days ago
549 points by Tomte 3 days ago
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.
happy to learn otherwise from anyone here ofc :-)
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?
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.
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.
Wow that's fucking dark.
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?
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.
> 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.
> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut?
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
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.
You have to increase the width of the mesh.
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.
Sad, but inevitable.