RetroFedAre you ready for the day the internet splits?
shortwavesurferAre you prepared for the day the #internet splits?
On the clearnet you will be
Unable to watch porn.
Required to give your real name and ID in order to use social media.
Arrested for “mean tweets”, “anti-government views”, “liking subversive memes”, etc
Only be allowed to use approved applications from Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc
On #Tor and #I2P you can still be free.
What you can do to prepare
Set your downlink speed to 10-15mbps to acclimatize yourself
Encourage app developers to host their applications on Onion and Eepsite domains. (Git repos, fdroid repos, linux distro repos, etc)
Run all applications that support SOCKS5 over the Tor SOCKS port (9050) (#Fdroid, #Signal, #SimpleX, #AntennaPod, etc)
Use bookmarks or password manager notes to have the URLs of your commonly used programs, services, and repos (#Monero, #XMRBazaar, #Pitch, #Dread, etc.)
Get used to text messages instead of audio or video calls. (Audio and video use UDP and generally give your real IP to either a central STUN server or the other peer. (it may be possible to force audio and video calls over TCP exclusively, but the latency would be high and therefore make the call unenjoyable.)
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I urge users to become participants and contributors. As Kongar has written, we have access to sophisticated hardware, but we’re not deploying it. If mobile-computer operators contributed to a mesh-network we’d be in a position to discard subscriptions for telecommunications access. Before this can happen the expectations of users needs to shift from contributing capital (paying for a mobile plan for instance) to contributing resources: running voluntary software on their machines.
The requirements needed to participate in mesh-networks are not just technical knowledge. If a user deployed a program like Briar they’d notice something rather swiftly: participating in mesh-networks demands more resources than not participating. The most obvious effect of this is that the mobile-computer’s battery will drain faster. Carrying a spare battery seems to be common already and that’s without participating in a voluntary mesh-network. The users’ expectations would need to shift before they could adopt such software.
I’ll refrain from commentary on Apple’s iOS (though I expect it to be similar), but Google’s Android is hostile towards user-software that needs to run constantly in the background. It will terminate those programs, even if the user has granted it ‘permission’ to run in the background.
Desktop and laptops provide a much more fertile environment in comparison. It is the norm to have long running user-programs. Even commercial operating-systems do not find anything amiss because it is the norm here. For the user in such an environment I do not see any possible objection to running such programs other than an increase in data usage, but even then these programs often allow for deployments that have a fixed quota.
Why then do we not see mass adoption of software like i2p, hyphanet, GNUnet and so forth? I exclude tor because it reinforces the status quo that must be changed. It allows its users to exit the tor-network and access the web. It’s a good technical precaution against network surveillance, but the majority of that network’s userbase want to exit the network. To contribute to the tor-network is to run an exit-node and that is not financially feasible for the vast majority of internet users. It is not democratic, but exclusionary and elitist. User-contributed nodes that run on the hardware they have, with the data connections they have, will see their nodes deprioritized in routing if not outright dropped. The other projects I’ve listed do prioritize peer-to-peer communication whilst tor’s network has just become a way to access the web anonymously. I2p is technically superior to tor’s for in-network communication; it supports tcp and udp. You can torrent within i2p’s network. You can not torrent in tor’s: you lose udp.
In my eyes the major issue of the current ‘web’ is the rent-seeking economy that upholds it. Technically we all have the tools to self-host a blog, e-mail, lemmy instance or whatever it is you want to share. We have a glut of cpu-capacity, storage and bandwidth. The hindrance isn’t in the property we own, but in the capital expenditure demanded from a perpetual rent-seeking economy that’s evolved around the ‘web’. Users are behind cgnats and need to rent whitelisted servers. Users aren’t allocated a static ipv4 address and need to rent one. Users then need to rent domain names and before Let’s Encrypt they had to pay for a SSL certificate that had an expiration date–a perpetual expense. Completely arbitrary, artificial scarcity to create an economic system of rents. It’s all absurd.
Software like lemmy isn’t revolutionary either. It’s retroactive. It wants to shift conditions back to when web-masters had privileges. Privileges that were taken away by the new-style of business that superseded them. If you want to run lemmy you need to pay your dues to the domain registrars and whitelisted server admins. The revolutionary act is to run i2p or gnunet and do whatever the fuck you want, but once you realize Alice and Bob can communicate with one another without paying tolls to DNS registrars or whitelisted server-admins nor subjugate themselves to that third-line–the forum administrators–lemmy becomes superfluous.
Users shift responsibility to the server-admins that run the lemmy instances they interact with. In exchange they give them all their content. That content has value. Lemmy is still a value extraction mechanism because everything on the ‘web’ has devolved into economic rent-seeking. To exist on the web is to participate in that system. It is the ‘web’ that needs to be ditched. Of the alternatives GNUnet is the design that makes the most sense, though it is still juvenile.
Nothing useful to add, but man, what a banger of a comment.
I mean, it’s always been this way on the internet. Somewhere in the mid to late 90’s, a language and communication program (http and web browsers) became very popular and synonymous with “the internet.” But us old farts remember when Usenet, gopher, ftp, fsp, irc, etc. were all used daily. As the World Wide Web enshittifies, people will either stay or move elsewhere, just like they always did.
The real question in my mind is more akin to the movement between physical networks - such as when we moved away from bbs, to college proprietary connections, and ultimately to the internet. I often wonder why - with all of the portable WiFi radios we all own - why hasn’t anyone created an encrypted protocol and software where we all join our personal hardware into one big giant mesh network? I don’t even live in a city in an apartment and I can pick up 4 neighbor’s WiFi signals, never mind all the cell phones and whatnot passing by my house. You’d think we could have an encrypted and robust way of sending packets to each other by now over our personal private hardware (albeit slow and probably prone to buffering as nodes move in and out of connection range).
Oftentimes I think that’s the next frontier.
Take a look at MeshCore and LoRa. Also Reticulum
Meshtastic instead meshcore. The former is pure mesh the latter needs repeaters.
…which has its own advantages
First, great username, absolutely love it. Second, from what I understand the two share way more than not and are both functional, just with slightly different use cases. Two cool projects, two slightly different views, but not mutually exclusive.
Which prebuilt Meshtastic hardware gives most bang for the buck?
It doesn’t absolutely require repeaters. There is an off-grid mode.
Plus, repeaters in meshcore are more like client base in meshtastic. You’re meant to put them up at your house. Is it good to put them on tall towers and mountains? Absolutely. But if you can’t do that, then you can put it at your house at, say, 30 feet, and it’s just fine. Because even with the 3-byte IDs, you still get 16 hops.
What’s wrong with me if all I read was “rectum”.
it means that we think alike and should be friends. lol
Mellon🧙♂️
Rectum? I hardly knew ‘um.
You’ve been on the internet too long, as have we all.
Reticulum is awesome, I just wish it was more widely available. The way it can use any configured transport medium to do directed mesh network is really good. My only complaint is that anything involving group messages just kinda sucks and I haven’t figured out how to do it better.
I’m working on several RNS projects currently, one of which will hopefully be a fault tolerant emergency dispatch system (think GoodSam cross ATAK) with panic alarms. If that comes to fruition, it’ll automatically give a familiar usual experience with totally off grid fallback.
It doesn’t exist (in practice) because nobody cares. And if a significant proportion of population did then the government would do everything in their power to shut it down or take control of it (and most governments have the means to do that, eventually, no matter what naive American/European armchair “freedom fighters” think).
There is some politics that has to be played. There HAS to be some reason for the powers to be to see benign neglect as beneficial or some power brokerage built on top of it.
They did. Welcome to the rabbit hole that is LoRA, Mesthastic and ESP-32 devices.
You’ll have a blast. They’ve even recreated BBSes and IRC.
I’ve got two devices online and I have no idea what’s next. Nothing ever happens on the network.
Same. Nobody listens to his radio 24x7. Hardly anyone ever responds to “Hello, World!” messages in real time. We do see nodes located far, far beyond the horizon. On a good day, there are way over 150 nodes operating, which is enough to keep channel utilization above 10% without any traffic beyond NodeInfo, Telemetry, or Position.
I don’t know what it’s all for. A couple of friends keep nodes charged and on the air locally. We expected to be able to exchange off-grid text messages, but, on a bad day, only about 2/3 of our messages ever go through. We need more LOCAL nodes! It’s difficult to imagine how to advertise though.
I suspect the agenda of Ham-Radio Operators with regard to Meshtastic who had nodes up before we did was just to dabble with the technology. Their agenda with regard to emergency preparedness is much more robust. For example the list of certifications required of Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network volunteers is (long):
“All SATERN Members • Must be a FCC licensed amateur radio operator • Must have an up to date completed volunteer profile • Must be credentialed and have an ID badge • Must follow the amateur radio operators code of conduct • Complete Safe from Harm training • Complete Introduction to Emergency Disaster Services training • Complete FEMA ICS-100 and ICS-700 • Complete Salvation Army SA-200 Incident Command System Training • Be proficient with net operations • Be proficient with the ICS-214 form • Be proficient with the ICS-309 form • Understand the ICS-217 and ICS-205 forms • Be proficient with the ICS-213 message and ARRL radiogram • Must have an understanding of how to report and/or halt any unsafe operations.
“TYPE FIVE Shadow Communicator, TYPE FOUR Canteen Communicator, & TYPE THREE VHF / UHF Communicator
“In addition to the general training and proficiencies above: • Must have a Technician Class License or higher • Recommended Completion of FEMA AUXCOMM training • Be able to program their radio equipment in the field without the aid of a computer • Know their radios’ capabilities and limitations • Arrive equipped to meet the needs of the team typing • Be able to function in high stress environments and in adverse conditions • Be able to serve as a net control operator • Be physically fit and able to walk for 10 minutes or more to serve as a shadow • Be able to lift 50 lbs as part of a canteen crew. • Type Three must be qualified to drive a Salvation Army vehicle (must have a valid driver’s license and be a Salvation Army approved driver)”
+ https://salarmycentral.org/edsdirectorsmanual/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/05/SATERN-Application-2020.pdf
… so, if Meshtastic node owners aspire to having any role to play in emergency preparedness, then just operating a $50 LoRa radio probably isn’t going to cut it. Understanding how to keep out of the way of the folks doing the heavy lifting is important, too. Meshtastic Users’ getting the cold shoulder from anyone else having the least familiarity with emergency services is surely plausible.
except that laws about social media usually target any online service regardless of technology
I would say that isn’t going to happen, if we don’t stop fighting.
I live in the European Union.
So you are likely already experiencing most if not all of the above issues with the clearnet.
i think it depends on where.
the uk or germany or scandavia: yes
i’m actually planning on getting some big hard drives soon whenever i can afford it.
You might like this, then
https://zimit.kiwix.org/#/
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/applications/kiwix-server/
yup. one of the things i’d love to host!
Alternatively, create your own private intranet and/or become a P2P node in something like YaCy, peer tube etc.
You can self host a lot (and I mean a lot) of what people think of as “the internet” using a busted $20 laptop and some decent storage.
I’d say you can get a really decent slice of the internet in 10-15TB of storage if you have the technical know how.
It would be very private. I’d be the sole participant.
Could be. No more or less than a very large library of books.
Plus, you wouldn’t have to be 100% Robinson Crusoe-ing . Peer-to-peer networks, mesh radio and sneakernet would still exist in that hellscape.
Still, for nerd fun, I paper-napkin’ed the maths last night with the aid of clankers. Here’s how I’d make an “internet in a box”.
Reference: 1–2TB
Zimit might fit roughly 100,000 ordinary web pages into 100GB. Kiwix server could serve the ZIM archives (inc websites), while Recoll could provide Google-like full-text search across the wider library of websites, books, manuals and documents.
Other Software: 1–2TB
Media and education: 5–10TB
AI and search: 100–500GB
Community and nerd nonsense: 100–500GB
(That last category has little survival value, but probably considerable morale value)
So, roughly:
Twelve to eighteen terabytes would give you a decent slice of “the internet”. Get a 3D printer while you’re at it for the ultimate off grid chic.
This seems very plausible. Wouldn’t say I am ready but will be prepared to adapt when the time comes .
if you tweet, I would rather you were on a different internet, or preferably on a different planet.
It’s weird how many people mix up the clearnet with platforms.
I2P is a fully connected network where everyone is a relay, a UDP transport exists iirc, and there are many other significant technical differences.
And if you’re dreaming of significant masses moving to the shadows, you might as well dream of them using distributed solutions. Otherwise, the monsters will simply find and shutdown the hosts/servers of whatever the good kids are consuming.
There is a connection between August and freedom. Do you know what is it?
Good guide. Its 100% coming to this in 10 years. Or less. We will all be “criminals”.
The same people selling the clearnet will be the same people who will never let the existing stuff die, so they can sell the problems, the “solutions”, child-porn, and most stupidly, considering they seem to honestly believe they want to force this on the rest of us, to feel they are “above the law”, and not confined to the bounds of their own machinations.
I’m not convinced more than maybe 5 or 10% of people will ever actually use the clear-net, or even be able to afford to either. The same idiots trying to force it are populating their new “walled-garden for the rest of them” with, basically, AI spoofs of the rest of the population. They are already huffing their own farts the the point they won’t be able to tell the difference, like an artificial resurgence of The Bicameral Mind for “the ruling class”.
If you want to know where this is all going, look at the Internet in Russia.
If you think you will get away with using either of those things on the internet once all that other shit happens, I’ve got a paramilitary police squad to sell you
3 I know very little about Tor, although I am running a bridge to help out people in Iran and China. Is configuring individual apps to use the Tor SOCKS port the same as if I do it on my router (so that everything in my home network goes through Tor)?
If you have it set up on your router so that everything goes through the network, then you don’t need to do anything on your individual devices unless it’s going to be on your phone, which would be off of your Wi-Fi network sometimes and on cellular.
In that scenario, you’ll want an application to act as a local VPN tunnel such as the Tor VPN app or Invizible (fdroid)
Thanks!
Fascists set up clearnet rules like that.
The problem with everyone being identified is that fascists will also out themselves because they don’t find hate speech punishable online. However, they will find that it is fully punishable in the real world where their real fleshy bodies are doxxed by default.
There are WAY more anti-fascists than there are fascists offline.
Reticulum
Wut. My home network requires all traffic to go out through a VPN, and I run Tor ontop of that for most everything else.
Who raw dogs on the internet??
Almost everybody who’s not you, lol You and I are basically the exceptions to the rule
I don’t think so. Definitely not in China, where almost everyone has a VPN.
And since about 10 years ago, the EFF said that Trumps change that allowed any ISP to sell their user’s activity meant that effectively it created a VPN privacy tax for all Internet users in the US. Since then, I think a lot of folks have been using VPNs. That’s like like 10 years ago.
And all these new countries pushing age verification will mean their citizens will join the ever-growing set of people who need to have VPNs just to sanely use the internet
Ask the Chinese.
The tools are already there, the change is just cost optimization. Your age, post code and your buying and traveling habits identify you anyways. I remember from “Little Brother” how they identified people with the way they were walking. Protagonist was putting some pieces of paper into his shoes.
As far as your buying habits, you can help to obscure this by using Monero.
Checkout SplinterCon if you think about this seriously.
It’s my understanding that Tor is primarily a way to access the clearnet while darkweb access was added as an afterthought. I don’t see Tor solving the problem of I.D. verification on social media, for example.
I2p was designed as a completely separate network. Haven’t used it myself but this seems the way to go for most day to day activity.
Torrent the porn. I’ve seen plenty on offer at TPB.
Have your own domain from https://njal.la/ bought with Monero and create a single user instance for Lemmy or Mastodon should allow you to remain anonymous and avoid being arrested.
Will Tor and I2P be approved by Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc? There will always be FOSS and there will always be a way to install alternative OSs on computers.
I’ve heard I2P is fairly quick, torrenting is encouraged.
Been doing so for years. You might have a hard time finding someone in the privacy community that doesn’t do this.
Messaging via Signal is my go to. Rarely do I even have my voip app active.
It does by disguising the location you’re accessing the website from, which may or may not have such laws.
A VPN does that as well without the issue of being blocked very often.
True, that usually costs money though, while Tor is free.
I already download all my media so I have offline access.
I’m honestly sick of social media. I mainly just view it as a news source, only commenting on
RedditLemmy threads because its convenient to do so.How is #4 going to work if I use Linux on my primary devices?
If you’re running Linux, you’re probably not going to be affected by number four.
Yeah if porn is at the top of the list, you have a problem.
There is a song from a musical called Avenue Q and the line goes, “the internet is really really great, for porn. I’ve got a fast connection so I don’t have to wait, for porn. There’s always some new site, I browse all day and night, It’s like I’m surfing at the speed of light, for porn.”
You’ve not experienced Avenue Q until you’ve seen it in the original World of Warcraft machinima.
20 years ago!! thank you, that was a great watch