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Comment by ruthmarx | Hacker News Reader

We desperately need more work done on a separate internet that by design cannot and never can be censored.

I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.

Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.

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If you take wikipedia rogue and only accept crypto donations, the budget will take a nosedive. And the project will lose all relevance once the non-tor mirrors are blocked in the big countries.

I wasn't talking about Wikipedia directly, but the net as a whole.

I agree if you took wikipedia rogue it would take a nosedive, but what I would expect would happen is the rogue Wikipedia would not try to duplicate Wikipedia's article, bur rather just have uncensored versions of articles available which is a much more feasible project.

This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.

The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.

As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.

> This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.

The reason it works is because there are numerous ways of hiding traffic at various layers.

Eventually it will probably be feasible to do DPI on every single packet and prevent that, but at the moment it's quite doable.

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