This is why it’s perfect time to get some tech literacy regarding tor, i2p, yggdrasil, and shadowsocks. It’s not perfect solution to use tech to circumvent restrictions that shouldn’t be there in the first place, but sometimes it really comes to that point and it’s really nice to have all systems ready!
Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
There’s going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We’ve had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the “Great Firewall of China” and asking themselves “Can we get something like this over here?”
hisao@ani.social 6 hours ago
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 6 hours ago
Arguably though, at some point they’ll just say “if we can’t read your traffic, you can’t use the Internet.”
Which still isn’t a problem, as I’m sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it’s going to take a while.
einlander@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
piecat@lemmy.world 16 minutes ago
All they have to do is send a few crews with log dipoles or yagis. Take a few operators down and charge them with terrorism or something and a critical mass will stop using it.
We have the tech for drones sweeping everything everywhere with sensors. Cameras, radios, microphones, IR…
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
You mean “at which point, people will just say ‘oh,ok’”.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
I don’t know literally ANYTHING, so take that into account when answering this, but why can’t a single person access the “Internet” on their own, without an ISP. Can’t they be their own ISP? Or can’t small groups of people - friends, family, co-conspirators - create their own private ISP?
TeddE@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Like Metastatic on LoRA?
Or maybe we’ll use software defined radios (SDR) to transmit on other unregulated bands (as a hacker, you can often force the software to believe it’s in the wrong region to transmit on bands the FTC didn’t approve, as long as it’s legal somewhere.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 5 hours ago
That’s probably a better idea. I haven’t actually looked into how that works.
hisao@ani.social 5 hours ago
If you mean an HTTPS ban, it’s technically possible, but even mainland China and Russia haven’t gone that far. One major reason is that it would completely undermine basic internet security. It would instantly make man-in-the-middle attacks trivial, letting anyone sniff purchases, transactions, and more. Buying anything online - or using a credit card at all - would suddenly become extremely risky.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
I’ve tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.
hisao@ani.social 3 hours ago
In my experience, if you have anything but “Network: OK” status (for example, “Network: Firewalled”), it’s not working properly. If you’re behind a VPN, you need to port-forward and properly configure a port in I2P config/settings. Another sign that it’s misconfigured is 0 participating tunnels. This is how properly configured I2P network statistics looks like:
spoiler
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.
FailBetter@crust.piefed.social 3 hours ago
The situation does seem quite desperate. I'd like to heed your call. Please advise on most critical systems I should have ready right now today please. I know have a lot of work to do and must stay efficient
hisao@ani.social 3 hours ago
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If the internet were fully controlled, you’d need mesh networks - DIY, decentralized networks using radios, local connections, or other alternative infrastructures. I don’t know all the details, but Yggdrasil is a promising modern project that functions as an alternative “internet” for mesh networks, while also working over the regular internet.
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Within the normal internet, the most resilient solution against heavy censorship is probably Shadowsocks. It’s widely used in mainland China because it can bypass full-scale DPI (deep packet inspection) by making traffic look like normal HTTPS. There are ways for authorities to detect it, and there are counter-methods, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for evading state-level traffic filtering.
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Next in line are Tor and I2P. Both are very resilient, and blocking them completely is difficult. It’s a continuous cat-and-mouse game: governments block some bridges or entry nodes, but new ones appear, allowing users to reconnect.
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Finally, regular VPNs are useful but generally less resilient. They’re the first target for legal restrictions and DPI filtering because their traffic patterns are easier to detect.
Overall, for deep censorship resistance, it’s a hierarchy: mesh networks > Shadowsocks > Tor/I2P > standard VPNs. You can ask chatbots about any of these and usually get accurate, practical advice because the technical principles are public knowledge.
DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 33 minutes ago
Couldn’t the US hypothetically put a clause in some ‘online safety’ law conveniently deanonymizing Tor given they own most of the exit nodes?
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moseschrute@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I have absolutely no idea what any of that is after tor
hisao@ani.social 4 hours ago
Tor and I2P solve a similar problem (anonymous communication), but they do it in pretty different ways.
- Tor is optimized for accessing the regular internet anonymously. It uses onion routing with a small number of long-lived relays, and you exit back to the clearnet through an exit node. Hidden services (now called onion services) exist, but they’re secondary to Tor’s main use case.
- I2P is designed primarily for internal services (called eepsites, torrents, chat, etc.) inside the I2P network itself. It doesn’t rely on exits the way Tor does. It uses garlic routing (a variant of onion routing with bundled messages), and every participant is both a client and a router, making it more peer-to-peer.
other_cat@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Me either, so I’m searching up what I can and bookmarking it to read later. There’s always more to learn!
IllNess@infosec.pub 5 hours ago
If this really about protecting kids, they could’ve done opt in blocking at the ISP level. Just a few new fields with ISPs and they have products that can take care of this already.
This is really about tracking every little thing you do online.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
Eventually it will be about restricting what we can access on the web.
vane@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Country level internet and passport control before you visit another country domain is inevitable. That’s just like people want it or at least sociopaths.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I’ve just been assuming that was the goal all along.
Fifteen years ago, I said on Reddit, “The U.S. is trying to become like China before China can become like the U.S.” Of course, I got buried.