Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
hisao@ani.social 10 hours agoThis 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!
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.
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
Meshtastic, baby!!
You mean “at which point, people will just say ‘oh,ok’”.
“People” will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
Flash drives of banned foreign films are the one method of accessing foreign media that north Koreans realistically have. It’s extremely hard to prevent people plugging a flash drive into their computer in their home to view some media
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…
At some point you’re just going to need to start shooting the fascists
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?
The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It’s complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they’re a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you’re always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you’ll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.
this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.
You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
To some degree you could, but you’d either rely on Tier1 transits to access the entire internet (costly), or you’d use IXPs (keeping your traffic local to other IX participants).
This doesn’t account for how’d you’d actually go into purchasing a port for your local home, which would probably entail laying your own fiber to a data center nearby.
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.
Meshtastic will never replicate anything like the modern internet. It’s slower than 1980s dialup data speeds. Text messaging, maybe…but you ain’t sending a video through it, that’s for sure.
I didn’t know there were unregulated bands. I thought pretty much everything except 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz required licensing and those two were technically unlicensed, but still regulated.
That’s probably a better idea. I haven’t actually looked into how that works.
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.
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.
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:
Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.
sometimes routers go offline before their routing commitments expire (12 minutes). maybe all your HTTP proxy tunnels got disconnected. Increasing the backup tunnel count could help
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn’t the US hypothetically put a clause in some ‘online safety’ law conveniently deanonymizing Tor given they own most of the exit nodes?
Owning a lot of Tor exit nodes doesn’t automatically deanonymize users. Exit nodes only see the traffic as it leaves Tor toward the clearnet, not the original sender. To actually identify someone, you’d need to match their traffic entering the network with the traffic exiting - a correlation attack - which requires visibility on both ends. The US doesn’t “own most exits” either; the network is run by many independent operators, and the Tor community actively monitors for malicious relays. Even if a law forced US exit operators to log everything, that alone wouldn’t deanonymize anyone unless combined with large-scale surveillance of entry traffic, which is extremely resource-intensive and not guaranteed to work. In practice, governments can make running exits legally risky, but they can’t just legislate Tor anonymity away.
I have absolutely no idea what any of that is after tor
Tor and I2P solve a similar problem (anonymous communication), but they do it in pretty different ways.
Could you be responsible for what someone else does while your using the network then?
Only if you’re deliberately running an exit node (doing so requires special setup).
Me either, so I’m searching up what I can and bookmarking it to read later. There’s always more to learn!
ezyryder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
I’m making a website to aggregate all of this information. Pro net neutrality, anti censorship laymens guide. Still in the works but its called zoracle.life.
apftwb@lemmy.world 24 minutes ago
Confirm your URL?
ezyryder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 minutes ago
it’s still in the works friend!! Making the whole thing from scratch with some cameron’s world esque aesthetics and a unique landing page. I can definitely let you know when its live :) appreciate the interest.