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.
sssilver · 2026-10-25 17:58:43 UTC
If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?
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.
mixmastamyk · 2026-10-25 18:54:16 UTC
It’s not about refuting random collections of words, but rather that lies spread faster than truth.
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 20:02:08 UTC
Do you have kids?
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.
nondrool · 2026-10-26 02:18:45 UTC
Not for nothing, but lying by omission is still a lie.
pixl97 · 2026-10-26 12:51:57 UTC
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.
QuantumNomad_ · 2026-10-25 18:46:00 UTC
> 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.
im3w1l · 2026-10-25 19:00:46 UTC
I agree. They are fighting the last war.
croes · 2026-10-25 17:56:28 UTC
AI will help them to create the perfect cage.
No jailbreak, no exploits
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 18:12:43 UTC
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.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 18:03:53 UTC
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 :-)
ThrowawayTestr · 2026-10-25 18:17:32 UTC
Do you consider removing illegal content censorship?
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 18:21:56 UTC
You might be confusing two different things.
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.
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 18:35:44 UTC
Of course it's censorship. In china you can't talk about a certain quadrangle, and when they remove content about it, that's censorship.
commandlinefan · 2026-10-26 14:05:22 UTC
That's the definition of censorship, so yes.
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 18:18:45 UTC
> informaiton transported over infrastructure
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).
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 18:34:58 UTC
Or, hear me out, optical laser mesh
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 18:37:04 UTC
Very easy to detect and deal with, especially when you're talking about fixed positions like your home.
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 18:38:54 UTC
But impossible to detect if you aren't standing in the beam path. Or use fiber, and it's impossible to detect if you don't trip over the fiber.
adrianN · 2026-10-25 18:42:04 UTC
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.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 18:45:37 UTC
ud need tons of beams tho do maybe its easy enough to segment the network badly by finding bunches of them?
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 19:09:55 UTC
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.
m4rtink · 2026-10-25 18:46:04 UTC
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.
adrianN · 2026-10-25 18:51:24 UTC
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?
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 18:56:31 UTC
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
ciefa · 2026-10-25 19:05:34 UTC
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?
jon128 · 2026-10-26 13:27:35 UTC
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.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 18:46:32 UTC
i like this idea. it does sound scifi, maybe quantum entanglement? i know nothing about this stuff tho :)
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 18:59:39 UTC
this got downvoted, ofc because i know nothing.
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.)
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 19:12:16 UTC
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.
NetOpWibby · 2026-10-25 19:18:12 UTC
this got downvoted, ofc because i know nothing.
It’s the StackOverflow effect. If you aren’t an expert you’re punished for having the audacity to ask questions.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-26 06:12:14 UTC
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 :)
Vaushite · 2026-10-26 08:56:56 UTC
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.
root_axis · 2026-10-25 19:50:02 UTC
It gets downvoted because it's a common trope that is explicitly impossible.
Hence one of the key points I stated that whatever effect cannot work FTL.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-26 06:09:14 UTC
thank you, i wasnt aware this is interesting ^^
TJSomething · 2026-10-25 19:12:22 UTC
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.
nirui · 2026-10-26 00:22:44 UTC
> sci-fi technology
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 :)
aktenlage · 2026-10-25 18:20:21 UTC
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"
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 18:34:40 UTC
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.
M_bara · 2026-10-25 19:27:41 UTC
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?
brightball · 2026-10-25 19:37:36 UTC
This is essentially the case for Starlink
root_axis · 2026-10-25 19:47:14 UTC
Except Starlink won't hesitate to censor you as well as the Ukrainians are discovering.
hdgvhicv · 2026-10-25 22:25:50 UTC
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.
Xirdus · 2026-10-26 01:51:51 UTC
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.
JuniperMesos · 2026-10-26 08:59:07 UTC
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.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 20:11:38 UTC
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.
dachris · 2026-10-25 20:24:55 UTC
On the one hand, yes. That's why possession of a starlink terminal can get you killed in Iran.
On the other hand, Ukrainians are finding out that someone else is in control of that starlink infra.
Pifanjr · 2026-10-25 19:38:13 UTC
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.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-25 20:10:13 UTC
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
iamnothere · 2026-10-26 11:57:26 UTC
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.
setopt · 2026-10-25 20:10:31 UTC
> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut?
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
kmacdough · 2026-10-25 21:40:42 UTC
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.
solyin · 2026-10-25 21:53:52 UTC
> 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.
hdgvhicv · 2026-10-25 22:24:22 UTC
You have to increase the width of the mesh.
salawat · 2026-10-26 02:35:18 UTC
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.
hdgvhicv · 2026-10-26 18:02:19 UTC
Not the hub. A node in a mesh. Remove yourself from the mesh and traffic reroutes.
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.
wvh · 2026-10-26 12:24:02 UTC
If operating a (even encrypted) wireless mesh net gets you gulag or death penalty, not very far.
jon128 · 2026-10-26 12:48:12 UTC
Why do you need an AR-15
cowlevel · 2026-10-27 16:44:31 UTC
People do illegal things all the time. The FBI can't even get very much of the dark web.
teiferer · 2026-10-25 20:46:02 UTC
> 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.
3RTB297 · 2026-10-26 10:51:11 UTC
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.
conartist6 · 2026-10-26 11:52:05 UTC
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?
grafmax · 2026-10-26 12:51:10 UTC
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.
cowlevel · 2026-10-27 16:43:51 UTC
btw the US isn't the only country that does this
3RTB297 · 2026-10-27 14:15:25 UTC
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.
NooneAtAll5 · 2026-10-26 12:34:04 UTC
I'm glad you counted Spain and France as "third world or dictatorships"
Arodex · 2026-10-25 19:46:25 UTC
What are you talking about? When have Spain, Italy and France cut their Internet?
mikestew · 2026-10-25 19:50:31 UTC
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.
Galanwe · 2026-10-25 20:36:53 UTC
Some folks on internet are not representative of a nationwide issue...
cowlevel · 2026-10-26 01:28:41 UTC
They cut the whole country's internet when people are playing football, to make sure nobody is live pirating the football
This is your country. This is your country on intellectual property rights.
Galanwe · 2026-10-26 15:29:01 UTC
Yeah right, they also eat the dogs.
cowlevel · 2026-10-27 16:45:29 UTC
No, they don't eat the dogs but they do cut off the internet during football.
I haven't been keeping up with Italy, so you can look that one up yourself.
watwut · 2026-10-25 19:49:44 UTC
At this point, I worry about censorship of American Tech CEOs a lot more. Because it is both very real and deliberately destructive.
saidnooneever · 2026-10-26 05:53:24 UTC
we could all start using huawei :').
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.
retrac · 2026-10-25 20:19:37 UTC
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.
You can run tcp over ax.25 with a 20$ walkie talkie and a software modem btw. Loading the google search page takes about 30 minutes
lesspassiveobse · 2026-10-26 09:14:35 UTC
The google login page is 3MiB of bloat to show a textbox and a button. I don't think that's a good indicator.
wafflemaker · 2026-10-26 11:22:34 UTC
When on very bad connection, the only internet that works reasonably well is hacker news
taneq · 2026-10-26 12:27:11 UTC
Or bash.org :)
cowlevel · 2026-10-26 12:34:01 UTC
That died ages ago and it doesn't look like someone resurrected it. If they did, it would be a domain squatter anyway.
armchairhacker · 2026-10-25 20:36:53 UTC
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.
WarOnPrivacy · 2026-10-25 20:44:47 UTC
> Iran took the whole country offline, because their country barely functions
Iran took their whole country offline because they locked the country behind CGNAT - which is an ideal tech for offlining an entire nation.
GeorgeWBasic · 2026-10-25 21:06:40 UTC
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.
reaperducer · 2026-10-25 20:59:44 UTC
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?
SahAssar · 2026-10-25 21:45:14 UTC
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.
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 22:11:37 UTC
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
Comments
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.