I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
talkweb.eu
talkweb.eu
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 :-)
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"
There are, but currently the most promising one is under control of a very rich and very politically opinionated person who is not afraid to use that power in any way he pleases.
A truly distributed version (with multiple tech stacks, ownership and control) would be the real solution but I don't see any way this could ever manifest.
Does the tech industry still even see technology as a source for good in the world, or do we now see ourselves as the dictators' keys to power.
What future do we have if we have become totally cynical and Amoral?
Can the dictator turn off the power? Turn off the phones? Turn off the internet? Close the ports of entry? Hold food hostage? Hold your shipment hostage? Stop fuel imports, production, and distribution? Nationalize anything and potentially everything? Run off or genocide entire ethnic groups? Yeah. And it happens often enough that examples are easily found of most of these (note: turning off power and stopping fuel imports are possible, but would simply piss people off, so it's usually bad politics).
Not sure what's dark about how the world works. Doesn't make it right or just, but that doesn't mean it can't be how things are.
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.
I'm sorry, that just wrong. Gupta-Kumar capacity scaling law (2000) says that as you add participants, each participant gets less bandwidth, until it becomes impractical. Imagine a room with 10 people talking in it. Easy. Now imagine 10,000. Hard to have a conversation if it's still all ad-hoc.
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, you have to remember that all tech is predisposed on a functioning society with cooperative people to move your packets from A to B.
Tech cannot solve the problem of Trust. Quite the opposite. It amplifies to immense degrees. In short, if you're looking for tech to save you because your Government is doing something shady, you're at the wrong level. Tackle the government.
Sad, but inevitable.
Now if you have too many leaches and not enough contributors then you get a problem, but that’s not the same as a single point of failure.
Why do you need an AR-15On the other hand, Ukrainians are finding out that someone else is in control of that starlink infra.
The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?
In both cases this is not taking the whole country offline, and for both of them you can easily bypass the "block" by using any other DNS provider. You don't even need VPN/TOR or anything else complicated.
The first ARPANET link to the United Kingdom required an exception to UK law. The traditional interpretation was that the state telecom monopoly (the General Post Office) had a monopoly on data transport. It was assumed that national governments have an absolute sovereign right to inspect data packets at the border, just like they do mail and parcels. That includes searches and seizures of foreign propaganda, material illegal under domestic law, etc.
> In early 1971 Larry proposed to break the circuit and connect in the NPL network to the ARPAnet. Unfortunately for that plan (but not for me), at this time the British government was trying to get the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC governments, particularly France, were in any case suspicious of U.K. links with the United States. It was therefore politically impossible for NPL to be linked directly to a U.S. defense project. [1]
But the Internet was an experimental network. An exception could be made. Everyone would pretend that they were inside the United States legally speaking. This sort of worked when everyone was an academic restricted by network access policies of their institutions.
> I set up a Governing Committee, with the funding partners on it: Ann Letts represented the BPO, Donald Davies represented the NPL, and I was the Chair. Because of the questionable legality of what we were doing, all proposed users had to be approved individually. I put in security procedures so that all users had to log-in, with a password, on our relay.
[2]
This is related to the protocol wars of the 1980s. The X.25 protocol that was supported by all the established telecoms providers, included mechanisms for packet authority, automatic packet billing, and political boundary packet inspection mechanisms. [3]
X.25 was decried as too centralized, too complex, and too centred around the interests of the established telecoms. (Which it was.) TCP was better for both technical and political reasons. But the Protocol Wars were not a permanent victory. It was a wonderful moment in world history but the underlying tensions have resurfaced.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224386328_The_early...
[2] http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/darpa/internet-history.htm...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-OSI_Standard_War...
i think tech ceos might also have benefit from uncensored internet because they can build more accurate profiles of the masses to target their products etc.
Spain: https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/18/in-spain-football-matches-knock-thousands-of-websites-and-services-offline
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France
: https://codekhabar.com/post/france-orders-isps-to-ready-dns-blocks-for-major-social-platforms-on-oct-24
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
This is your country. This is your country on intellectual property rights.
i want to read more
Iran took their whole country offline because they locked the country behind CGNAT - which is an ideal tech for offlining an entire nation.
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
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...
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).
If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.
Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.
Don't get me wrong, an uncensorable and free internet for everyone is something I am very much for, but when we start to talk about nations limiting access while information has to flow, the question is not about mass-adoption anymore, but rather seeing the right tools reaching the right people.
A good example of this, imho, is the situation in Iran, when they cut off the internet. Some people were able to help themselves thanks to VPN-like apps and outside help, but that is not the majority of people.
But as the world is now, it's not feasible in any sense yet.
The current internet is the best we have and it >can< work, we have to find solutions inside the current possibilities until tech is advanced, cheap and accessible enough for everyone interested to easily host their own infra.
But this is not easy, because what is the real goal... really?
It feels like most of the internet is about making money or involving money, even from the end users. Is there even something to fix when most people don't care enough to ditch knowingly harmful products like Facebook, TikTok, etc?
In some places these mesh networks have nodes that offer paid gateways to the conventional internet.
Writing user-facing social/messaging applications that can work seamlessly between emergent mesh networks and the conventional internet, using cryptography based zero-knowledge tricks to preserve privacy, is necessary for these mesh networks to gain traction outside of just tech enthusiasts.
Some rural areas centered around some small towns have already done this but have kept it to themselves (understandably so).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns
https://reticulum.network/You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.
So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.
Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)
But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.
but in the scifi mindset, what if you have an entangled ram bank with someone else. i write to mine and they can read it from theirs. that could create a sort of entangled ram bank mesh network network? (i know, maybe super stupid thought.)
this got downvoted, ofc because i know nothing.
Glad some people do like to be smart rather than smug, and provide the link :)
The next time its foggy or raining a tuned photon sensor to the spectrum that these devices run at will light up like a Christmas tree. If you're really intent on catching said people, you'd have drones flying around sprinkling light chaff and detecting where it detects optical scattering.
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.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
The network infrastructure makes it possible to exchange privileged information and tunnel it through insecure channels. That is who we do banking on our phones while using the trains wifi (I would still not recommend to do that). Or generally establish VPN connection. Real data privacy is possible without a physical network.
I disagree with the parent, there is an uncensored net. Most people aren't interested in it for convenience but we should be quite happy it exists.
https://meshcore-analyzer.eu/#map
Quite active here in Czech Republic for example.
As for the IP protocol - maybe its too much overhead for this use case ?
MeshCore uses PKI and public key prefixes as addresses & for routing/repeating.
In the US apparently 433 MHz is used instead.
- LoRa has actually quite a long range if done right (tens of km, upt to hundred+) so you would have to jam all that.
- This kind of jamming would be actually illegal, so you would have to make it legal first/tollerate it & expend non-trivial respurces to jam tiny repeaters from Aliexpress on random trees.
- The 868 MHz hand is actually used by a lot of IoT stuff like sensor networks, water/gas/electricity meter monitoring, some alarm systems - so if you did effectively jam the band, those things would break as well.
- Also if things went as far as active jamming being used, things might be heated up enough that whoever is running the mesh won't be playing by the reules as well - like, using a different, notmally ilegal fregvency or even triangulate and attack the jammers.
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
Do people (and AI bots) think this makes them seem more human? Or is it yet another symptom of civilization in decline?
The occasional typo has always existed and is fine. The new trend is a noticeable increase in occurrences.
The original point is that it's exactly what an LLM would do to appear human.
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.
but what if they could... they dump chaff in the air
Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.
Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.
I would expect most people to not have much of an opinion on what other people are allowed to talk about when they're not around.
Example: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/04/24/free-expressio...
They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...) It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.
Boomers today would much rather squawk about threatening lawsuits or getting other people to do the work for them. The ones alive today feel confident in their command of the legal system to get what they want. During the 1960s, how many young Boomers and Silent Generation protested against the Civil Rights movement? Literal bombings and terrorism took place. One black family moving into Cicero, IL led to a violent mob of 4,000 people where it was also young Boomers that shouted and held up swastikas and eventually firebombed the building where the family was going to move in, leaving many other residents of the same building out on the street. -- https://allthatsinteresting.com/anti-civil-rights-movement
Yes, there were obviously not the same people protesting against the war in Vietnam. But, to their credit, Boomers used to turn out for protests back when they were 20.
If you asked Boomers this questions when they were 18-25, I expect their opinions would align pretty close to Gen Z in this survey.
Reddit anecdotes and surveys don't currently reflect reality.
The far-right is responsible for *actual* violence by a large margin in recent history. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...
Over 80% of real world politically motivated violence between 1990–2020 is from far-right actors. Left-wing violence has increased over the past 5 years, but is still completely dwarfed by right-wing violence.
You can look up the stats for these yourself, there's other studies too.
The study you provide isn’t related to my comment but if you’d like to shoehorn it into future discussions you should at least read it first. That paper is widely criticised, and is, ironically, the kind of thing shared on Reddit. I’ll just copy and paste existing academic criticisms of the paper because I don’t really think you’re going to take the time to seek this out yourself.
1. Inconsistent data collection: The far-right data came from an established extremism database, while the far-left data had to be assembled separately because the database did not routinely track most far-left extremism. This creates a potential sampling bias, with no demonstrated guarantee that both sides received equally comprehensive coverage.
2. Serious numerical inconsistencies: The study counts 168 deaths from the Oklahoma City bombing but reports zero far-right bombing incidents. It also contains basic arithmetic errors, including percentages totalling 110%. These inconsistencies raise legitimate concerns about data quality and the reliability of the analysis.
3. Subjective ideological classifications: The study uses broad political definitions and includes homicides with weak evidence of ideological motivation. Without a fully accessible case-level audit trail, independent researchers cannot easily verify whether incidents were classified consistently or accurately.
4. Unsupported statistical conclusions: The author suggests far-left attacks are more likely to cause multiple fatalities, but the reported difference is not statistically significant (Fisher's exact test, p ≈ 0.22). Drawing substantive conclusions from this difference is therefore questionable.
5. Disproportionate influence of one attack: The Oklahoma City bombing accounts for approximately 32% of all far-right fatalities in the study. Removing that single incident reduces the far-right-to-far-left fatality ratio from 6.7:1 to 4.6:1. The overall disparity remains, but its magnitude is significantly influenced by one exceptional event.
6. Selective historical timeframe: The study begins in 1990, excluding the 1960s–1980s, when far-left revolutionary movements were especially prominent in American domestic terrorism. This timeframe may be appropriate for the research question, but it makes broad claims about political violence across modern history misleading.
7. Conclusions beyond the evidence: The study examines ideologically motivated homicides, not political violence generally. It excludes non-fatal assaults, riots, intimidation, arson without fatalities and other violent offences. Using its findings to claim that the far-right is responsible for most actual violence is therefore a substantial and unjustified extrapolation.
Notably, the time frame used doesn’t reflect reality today, so it cannot be used to make normative claims about which ideology is more violent right now.
Your points about the data from this study are valid if there weren't multiple other studies that reach the same conclusions. The data still rings true.
You kinda undermined your own original argument by wanting to include non-fatal crimes and violence from the 60s-80s, when I thought we were talking about modern trends and as such is why I picked 1990 onwards.
RE: 5, as you said... when you remove the huge statistical outlier right-wing violence still outpaces left-wing almost 4.6:1. You took proved the point, the right wing is far more violent.
RE: 7, more people die at the hands right-wingers than left. I count death as a higher degree of violence; whereas I've seen you consider a survey response to be violent... so we might be at very different ends of the agreement there.
Anyway, this has been fun and I think we've both reached as far I'm willing to care about. Have a good day.
Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.
- [circa 2020] Do you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should be stopped by force?
- Do you think that a police officer should be able to physically prevent burning of the American flag?
etc
> Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.
That is direct result of practicing taboo topics like violence and normalizing them. A lot of effort was put into making them more aggressive, so success. Mostly on the right, contrary to what you are trying to imply. The violence aggression and censorship are much more common there.
The libertarian view is generally that the people should have the monopoly on violence.
Seems like this is a direct result of being more exposed to the internet. I'm not sure it's their fault when they are raised with ipads in their lap and multi-billion dollar corporations are shoving propaganda (both sides) down everyone's throat 24/7. I wonder if boomers and gen x would feel the same if they grew up the same way.
> It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
Not sure making people experience authoritarianism is the best way to make people remember why free speech is important. That seems more extreme than anything I've read on Reddit lately. Surely there are better solutions.
I can see why people don't value free speech anymore, when the speech had become mostly astroturfing curated by algorithms.
Censorship is the wrong direction, but I see where it coming from emotionally, mass Internet today is an abomination. It wasn't like that when I discovered it.
If you ever get the chance to go, please go! Especially if you're an American I recommend it. It is so different than any other conference I've ever been to in the US.
It doesn't have a lot of sales pitches, the technical content is top notch, and overall it is really fun and interesting to see what everybody is talking about and working on.
It's a very crowded conference at a university campus a few km outside the city centre, in not exactly my favourite city in Europe, but don't let that put you off. Roll up your sleeves and embrace it!
Just think of the beer and waffles!
And there are plenty of other differences besides "who", for example, "how".
That's a big negatory.
>you publish on your site,
And your site gets a takedown for illegal content, or cops show up at your door and drag you out while beating you.
Life is heavily moderated in a million different ways. What we're talking about this point is just moderation or unjust moderation.
I'll make my position clear: many parties try to influence people, and quite a few of them do so with grave consequences. The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference. In the words of the article: it's already not "technology serving people", but rather "controlling" them.
If extreme right (or left) parties come to power, your freedom of speech and privacy is over. So it's either moderate moderation, or authoritarian moderation. And if it's up to me, it's not your choice.
It sounds like that would precisely be a solution to the problems of using these platforms.
So? If you can disengage from them, then your problem is solved.
> and also that a personal blog is not a solution for the vast majority.
It's not reasonable to presume that any specific thing is the best solution for the "vast majority". A healthy ecosystem arises when lots of people with different use cases and preferences build the optimal solutions for themselves; when people try to build universal solutions based on speculation about what's optimal for "the vast majority", that's when things start to go off the rails.
I think blogs are quite viable for many more people than are currently using them; on top of that, the emerging "fediverse" is increasingly replicating the UI and functionality of social media platforms without the centralized middlemen, and if amidst this rapidly diversifying set of options, some people still choose to use centralized social media, then that's their prerogative.
Correct, specifically, Elon removed widespread (and thoroughly documented) left wing interference on Twitter.
Unfortunately he did eventually add back his own (in the form of boosting his own account), but it's much freer than it was, and for whatever reason Zuck decided to follow suit.
The difference is somewhat part who is doing the moderating, but it is far more important the ability to opt-out without significant negative impact.
Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.
It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.
We don't need conspiracies, people stink at this to begin with and most DO NOT CARE. The tech world is a bubble, we are less than 1% of 1%.
This happens, btw, when there are the most rules and heavy-handed moderation. Places that are less moderated, this rarely happens because people will directly call this behaviour out and the moderators are only intervening on important stuff, e.g., threats of violence, illegal material, etc.
It's a universe-sized difference though. If a platform owner is doing it you can somply go to another platform. If a democratically elected goverment is doing it you can change the government though it's much harder. Or at least you can soothe yourself that it's being done for the benefit if the people as "the people" sees it. And if an authoritarian government is doing it, you are screwed.
"The family had a lot of buffers."
Because this was definitely happening during COVID.
the weird thing is that ironically, the people hurt by "youtube" (whatever "youtube" is, i'm not referring to youtube.com specifically) are often the ones both complaining and keeping it alive.
talking about youtube.com specifically, i've seen many complaints about it over the years, yet essentially only two guys (Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere from Linus Media Group) are actually developing an alternative platform (https://www.floatplane.com/).
Essentially all other youtubers are still begging you in tears to "hit like, subscribe and ring that bell icon".
the same also happens for other platforms. it's so... weird ?
Every competitor which has tried to do this has been eaten alive by the costs of bandwidth and storage, even if they have a deep-pocketed corporate backer (e.g. Twitch will not let you store unlimited VODs like YouTube will). Some companies have managed to flank YouTube and carve out a little niche like short-form video, but I think building an actual YouTube competitor with the features people demand (again, unlimited uploads and eternal storage, for free) is more-or-less impossible.
I’m less familiar with bilibili, but afaik it doesn’t do many of the revenue-sharing programs that YouTube does, so might have trouble attracting the same creators. They also have so far been pretty regional and so I’m not sure if we can use them as a sign of success yet.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S. Lewis
Democracy sucks pretty hard. No one is held accountable for failure. Puppets with no real power get blamed and replaced to placate the population. If your pockets are deep enough you can buy laws.
RIP Tumblr
since the government is too powerful and can enforce its ideas with legal violence
The last sentence of your comment, therefore, is manipulative. It's like saying "ice is a form of water, so you can't have drinks without water, and the only difference is who waters down your bourbon".
Censorship is when Mallory decides that Alice is not permitted to talk to Bob.
Moderation is when Bob does not want to hear from Alice and Mallory blocks her for him.
The difference is on who's behalf the blocking is being done.
The same refusal/frustration made me start Mother of all VPNs (moav.sh) early this year.
A talk I gave about the experience and what MoaV came out to be:
Rage-coding the mother of all VPNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYygWN1MZDE
> Amidst the Internet shutdowns in Iran, as a technologist and member of the Iranian diaspora, I felt so much frustration, helplessness, and anger because I couldn’t do anything. After a few days of processing the initial shock, I was able to get to work and rage-code MoaV -- still ongoing at the time of writing -- which is a modular anti–internet censorship stack, able to run 10+ internet censorship circumvention tools on a small VPS or Raspberry Pi, with the goal of democratizing VPN provisioning. In the first two weeks, the project received tens of thousands of views on X and gained more than 200 stars on GitHub. This talk will be a case study of the project’s development and how to find these niche corners of the internet that can have massive social impact if done right. I’d like to invite the audience to reflect on the daily challenges faced by people in their countries or regions and how we can use our passion to vibe-code useful tools into existence.
Basically Reddit 2018.
Hackernews and Lesswrong (whatever you think of Lesswrong is irrelevant) seem to be free from chuds because they don't really appeal to them. The barrier to entry is too high. You have to care about topics that are boring to most people. Styleforum is like that too. I guess these places do have some moderation, but it seems much less intensive than what is required of reddit.
People seem upset that forums are gone, but if you want sanely/laxly moderated places, a forum seems a good call imo.
Part of the problem here is there are people that think any kind of censorship or moderation is wrong. I will not make any universal statement about the correctness of their position, but I will make a personal statement about their position. "They are fucking crazy".
Now, every once is a while you need a bit of fucking crazy to shock you out of the position you're in and reassess what position you should hold.
I mean, this may have worked a decade or two ago, but if you built modern software this way the same government is going to toss your ass in jail.
"Oh no, I built a murder machine that I can't stop, I guess you can't prosecute me for that, it's out of my control".
You can only get away with that now if you're a billion dollar AI company. Otherwise the judge is going to halt your efforts and prosecute you for contempt and stupidity.
People then say, well, they can still access other websites! Everyone has a web browser!
Unfortunately the way people disseminate those URLs is via the main censorship platforms, and there are dozens or hundreds of domain names that form URLs which you can’t DM on Discord or Instagram, for example.
The internet as we know it is controlled centrally by Meta and Google and Apple and Microsoft and Amazon - what is done at the network layer is largely irrelevant.
Well there's that thing with some countries blocking like all of Cloudflare during sportsball matches, since Cloudflare deliberately makes it impossible to block only whichever of their customers are serving unlicensed sportsball streams.
And I think the "Great Firewall" is still a thing.
And IIRC there's a couple times I've heard about countries taking down connectivity entirely during civil-war / major-unrest type incidents.
If the people who pay for the internet are not the users then who will the internet serve? Not the users. and since corporations are known soully (as in that is their soul) what would you expect? If people who want to profit by targeting people with lies pay for the internet, is that censorship? Well sort of - but maybe worse.
We need a community internet task force. Lets start one. Request for comments.
edits abound
This is some good brainstorming on the matter:
Was this a serious comment? It made me realise that prior to the Internet, information flow was controlled by journalists or through peer reviewed papers and academic forums. People without advanced education would, generally, be limited to people in their local area.
I agree with some of your points, but, who on Earth is getting convinced that the world is flat?
"We"? I think you can look to the history of the 20th century for your soul mates. The kind of thinking you express in your comment always ends with wholesale murder and mass torturing of innocent people to death.
I tolerate the freedom of speech of neo-Nazis and cyberbullies because it's the same freedom of speech I use. but they're awful people. FOSDEM is free not to associate with them.
You don't have to like them, 4chan doesn't, but both of them just won for everyone worldwide by proving OFCOM has no right to police others outside their own country.
Awful people exist everywhere regardless of a site documenting what people willingly post. Because this allows others to see past the facade they get a lot of hate and unproven claims believed true. People prefer easy, which is fine, and don't typically verify leading to it being exploited by awful people.
> Not a single journalist seemed willing to do any homework beyond copying the work of other journalists before them. In the end, the “three suicides” caused by Kiwi Farms ended up being two misrepresentations and one uncomfirmed case.
https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
Destiny is apparently a terminally online full-time Twitch streamer who keeps getting caught doing child porn, child grooming, revenge porn and more. Not sure why we should listen to that guy.
The most comprehensive post I've seen on how quickly and totally the internet has changed over the last decade. As someone that got online in the early aughts and hung out on usenet and slashdot, the modern net is unrecognizable.
Tricks for obfuscation I learned over the years:
- use exfil protocols (e.g. http smuggling via chunked encoding, DNS TXT)
- rotate exit nodes while sessions not only between (ronin behavior)
- encryption is useless with no padding or zero based padding, use one based padding instead
- scatter traffic through peers
- use manual caching everywhere, DNS TTL, HTTP entity based tracking, etc will be automatically unfeasible
- always think about the god's eye perspective of ISPs
One of my working soft router concepts, I've open sourced as Tholian Warps [1]
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated
The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.
Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.
> claims china & russia are the biggest threats
Why throw stones when we have plenty of work to do here?
If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?
>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.
As a parent you'll punish or otherwise teach your kids not to lie. Really quickly you'll find yourself punishing them for telling the truth, but not the full truth.
No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.
> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?
The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.
Digital Dissident
Someone living under an authoritarian regime (Russia Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated
Dude, Zuckerberg is "I am CEO, bitch" of Facebook for 22 years since 2004, and civilization worldview (except a few places) is filtered and shaped through this seemingly benign "digital freedom" ether, and everyone has account tied to email and personal phone number and "People just submitted it." cos "They "trust me"", "Dumb fucks".
The authoritarian regime is what these 'Careless People' do every day, over whole world, and not just over few countries here and there, but you try very hard to brain wash everyone to believing that China or Russia is reason that you algorithmic feed is mentally retarded, or that France is going nuts. Fuck you.
No jailbreak, no exploits
One of the big problems with the HN rugged individualist types is they think they'll get to have awesome unlimited power at their broke ass individual scale and that somehow people with millions or billions of dollars aren't going to use said power fully to their advantage while crushing anyone that stands in their way.
More so they think that power seeking type people and organizations will not quickly adopt this technology and spend massive amounts of money to entrench their legal position while weakening everyone else's rights.
As much as technology may free us, it seems even more probable that it will put us in the perfect cage as you say, or just completely end us all. There is no universal law that says technology cannot power scale way beyond humans ability to remain chemically stable. If we fly too close to the sun our wings will melt off.
The solution is an application framework that removes the 3rd party between any two users or groups of users. The client/server model can't do that. Other models can.
If Facebook/Instagram didn't meddle with users' conversations at scale, the social climate would be very different today. Not because the users can't think for themselves, but because they can.
These systems are not the internet, they run on top of the internet.
If you have ever used Facebook/Instagram or Twitter or know enough people who have, you really need to see this https://rumble.com/v4dxvjo-ep.75-tucker-carlson-interviews-m...
A distributed application model that provides for all of the cool applications we enjoy today without creating "moderation" hotspots for the "reddit mod" archetype, or the "whole of society" horse shit, is the solution that will give non-technical normal people, a systematically oppressed and marginalized demographic specifically, what they have been wanting for since 2018.
A major part of the freedom multi inter-network that freedom loving people want picture, are networks and inter-networks that can survive government-imposed internet kill switches, the topic of the "darknet plan" mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50235196
I remember r/darknetplan
There are a handful of projects and protocols that are about a fraction of the way to total freedom but they haven't been synthesized into something cohesive yet. What a functioning freedom oriented multi inter-network looks like is a whole different suite of protocols built with a mindful intent to shirk some anti-patterns and ossification of today's conventional web. One key objective is no more Cloudflare shit. inb4 "but how do we deal with bots", different protocol suite model, different "architecture".
About a healthy internet, if you care about that IPv6 with PCP is what you want. CGNAT kills peer to peer traffic, CGNAT is de facto censorship, upstream and at scale. If you care about the internet, then start proactively turning off IPv4 and shunning people who say that IPv4 is "okay". CGNAT can be kludged around with proxies because the internet is so fast but it requires a lot of overhead and leaves a huge vulnerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Control_Protocol- commerce
- surveillance
- platforming voices for states and the wealthy