alt Hacker NewsIs 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 :-)
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I sometimes think mid to end of 90s was peak freedom. Never before had there been so much mostly uncensored world wide communication. Unfortunately most likely there never ever will be again.
Yeh; internet is just passing network traffic between each other
I am part of a Wireguard private VPN network with friends and family
But I mean we are almost all hardware/software engineers or office power user types familiar with VPN use
Just start generating shared keys amongst each other and go 'round swapping IP over signal and such
Like turn making key-share friends into real life Pokemon Go
The bulk of the people with skin in these companies are 55+ and excluding everyone younger
But the younger crowd outnumbers them
We could "meet the moment" and just stop using their services
It's not like a black hole will swallow humanity if we stop listening to an aging minority
> 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).
People seem to be oblivious to the fact that the internet infrastructure has been government controlled since its inception. No cable laid under the sea between two nations can exist without the government approval and without the governments tapping into the link. IP addresses, MAC addresses, domain names, all managed by "super partes" international organizations swore to neutrality and fairness.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
What about a solar powered mesh network build on commonly available LoRa chips and micro controllers ?
Why is the prevalence of typos increasing in the past year or so? I don't mean to single you out; your comment was just a convenient example.
Do people (and AI bots) think this makes them seem more human? Or is it yet another symptom of civilization in decline?
Reticulum. Encryption-required mesh-routing alternative to the IP stack. Can route over just about any medium (piggyback IP, Lora, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, microwave P2P, anything). Also future-proofed with support for high-bandwidth persistent connections.
they can't block the ionosphere
but what if they could... they dump chaff in the air
There was, once, but that has decayed rapidly alongside the centralization of the Internet. There are very few websites people even use nowadays, and many of them block legal expressions due to ideological and economic pressures. Payment processors and banks regularly restrict businesses and individuals from legal commercial activities, examples are Pornhub/MindGeek, Steam, and firearm dealers.
There is also now a precedent for T1 ISPs to block whatever legal websites they wish, and there is little recourse to be had there either. Not to mention arbitrary legal pressure for ISPs is also precedent now due to Judge Katherine Polk Failla.
On top of that, several EU countries have been using DNS blocks to prevent piracy and access to “bad” websites for ages, which has further been eroding the Big-I Internet into various separate internets.
https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police...
https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-will-leave-franc...
In the late aughts and early 2010s I and a few other people came up with the `darknet plan` aka `project meshnet` which was a subreddit and adjacent communities dedicated to creating a completely parallel internet using 802.11s mesh networks akin to the Athens and NYC meshes that span a huge portion of those metros.
The movement eventually got coopted by the CJDNS project and its fans. Instead of a completely separate internet they were advocating more of an overlay on top of the existing internet (because that didn't require solving interurban/intercontinental backhaul), which to my mind addresses essentially none of the problems we set out to solve, so I eventually lost interest.
But today we have things like LoRa and a greater hacker community around the ISM bands, which might be just what's needed. I have hope one day we can achieve global interconnectivity without rent-seeking ISPs.
I think this this the perfect time to bring back old 90-00s webhosting, web rings and all and get them to be trendy and viral if some celebrity could pull people in and get them off this dirtyweb, bot-ridden and dead-internet-theoried. People have been veered hard into content creation and running their own little merchandise dropship etc businesses and all of the options are dinosaurs now.
Wordpress is getting its popularity nuked from orbit, there is definitely room for another "internet" that isn't walled garden social media app slop. Might even get kids into computers again.
But in this admin, economy and no startup capital and a million other things going on right now I don't think it will ever happen.
Do you consider removing illegal content censorship?
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"