Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
einlander@lemmy.world 7 months agoAt that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
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
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
Latency is horrific though.
That’s why I find systems designed for high latency by being “offline-first” interesting. Sync large quantities of information when you can, then consume offline. Like Usenet and email used to be. Most things don’t actually need to be “instant”.
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
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?
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.
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.
But can they only access each other in their own “web?” Can they access the World-Wide Web on their private web? Or does that just expose them to all the other stuff anyway?
You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.
That’s probably a better idea. I haven’t actually looked into how that works.
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.
What’s in a name? Legally speaking, your brain and nervous system would be classified as an ‘unintentional radiator’ (MRIs work because of this fact) and as such would fall under regulated devices if we weren’t legal persons.
I used ‘unregulated’ (errantly if you insist) to mean both unlicensed and also use cases where FCC isn’t actively enforcing the regulations on the books, cause technically virtually everything is ‘regulated’.
Ok, that makes sense. Thanks!
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
Except we'll have to keep using it because the rest of our families and friends are going to still be on there or pester us about why we aren't there with them to share photos of your sister-in-law's baby photos and videos and your aunt Tammy's vacation photos.
Yup
Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.
So what do you propose? People who aren’t able should set up nodes?
Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof
I used to think about this via mesh networks as simply routers, but now with nostr, IPFS, atProto and that new BT messaging stuff Jack Dorsey is on. Technically you could utilize your phone as an access point to the mesh network as you move around the city and load all the comms in the background. The latency would be high, but it could work. Also with 5g tech nowadays long range mesh networks are much more feasible albeit probably expensive for a hobbyist.
One… Disappointing fact is that means at least the Internet will go back to the pre-social media era.
You can feel it here on Lemmy still. It exists.
Yes it has its perks
mitch@piefed.mitch.science 7 months ago
Meshtastic, baby!!