- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
www.stopkillingtheinternet.com
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
They do what they have always done, gain control and shape it in their own interests, regardless of the cost to others. This is endemic to businesses itself. Business the the root cause of all market enshitification.
Corporations like Meta, Apple and Alphabet are closing off the internet. Governments are just woefully underpowered against these companies who make internet addiction their business.
See you guys in I2P.
Always good to have a place to escape to - but we need to regain people’s power over the mainstream Internet.
This is where most people will remain, this is where you’ll have to go to stay in touch, this is what influences public opinion on policies and actions. This ground cannot and should not be given up.
Kind of interesting to read something that so clearly isn’t critical of the system but is advocating for something that would fundamentally require systemic change. Liberal movements to further police the internet at a state level is constructed here as the selfish acts of self-interested politicians who are simply using the system wrong, not the inevitable consequence of a system that relies on the subordination of different groups of people and therefore must control the means by which people communicate. The internet is a problem for colonialism and capitalism, full stop. They aren’t citing youth wellbeing and ignoring them in legislative decisions because they forget or they are particularly inconsiderate, it’s because they know the child represents the continuation of this system and they are evoking an ideal innocence associated with children to construct the internet as a corrupting force on society. They know they don’t have to actually think about the kids because that would mean anything else is valued over capital.
It talks about addressing the root causes for the disingenuously cited problems that unregulated internet access poses, but then ignores the fundamental role that corporations have played in facilitating those issues exactly because the internet was inevitably commodified under this system. The fact that there is one video platform controlled by one of the largest corporations in the world that reliably kneecaps any competition was what, not an issue? That these corporate entities are beholden to the interests of almost exclusively Americand and European imperialistic interests is not a coincidence, and until quite recently their transnational operation allowed for a significant amount of informal influence on colonized spaces. The only reason they’re doing this is because they know that people within the empire have effectively used it to organize resistance, and that this is avoided in this mission statement speaks to the dissonance between “democratic” internet movements and the reality that the internet exists in.
“Liberal movement to further police the internet” it sounds like that’s a liberal thing to do, but it’s actually restricting rights => not liberal
Oh, well that’s very convenient. I wonder who would promote an understanding of liberalism wherein it is inherently anything that doesn’t restrict people’s autonomy. These must be countries with very low rates of systemic violence both today and historically.
I think this greatly undermines the weaponization of the internet from other governments. Society is currently so plugged in and we’ve known that subliminal messaging is a real psychological problem for close to ~100 years now. Free and Open internet is cool, but not for the masses who cannot combat this kind of psychological warfare.
We have to reign in both Corporations and external entities trying to influence a Nations populace. Some how, some way.
I literally just referenced that. When I say, that Europeans and Americans have been afforded, “a significant amount of informal influence on colonized spaces,” I’m talking about how they weaponize their domination of the internet to promote their shared interest with the corporations they are partnered with. Yes, they have been applying similar tactics for over a century, but you seem to be more concerned about how it effects them than their targets.
I didn’t call it “external entities” or “psychological warfare,” against these imperialists because, quite frankly, I don’t care about how empires attack each other as much as I do how they attack colonized peoples. With this in mind, when I’m talking about the systemic causes of these issues, I am directly referring to EuroAmerican settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. Their attempt to control access to the internet within the metropole is in fact their way of interrupting communication between the imperial peripheries (colonized spaces and peoples) and that population in the metropole; their concern over “foreign actors” is more about their people developing empathy for the victims of their way of life than it is what you seem to think; which I am guessing is something along the lines of “Russian bots?” You think it’s a coincidence this crackdown comes within years of popular resistance against EuroAmerican facilitation of Palestinian genocide?
You should work on formatting if you want people to read that.
What do you mean by formatting? I just read it and it is fine. And if its about length, I was able to read it during my shift, I think pretty much everyone could do easily.
I’d say the comment is readable, but could benefit from formatting and some more concise expressions on some places. Using words whose meaning is not universally understood by people with average to mid-high education is counterproductive to spreading a message.
I can’t express in words how incomprehensible it is to me that you’d suggest I edit my comments for accessibility on something like Lemmy. I don’t care if people who would already get mad or offended by this have an easier time reading it, and people who are curious can ask questions if they please.
Don’t elevate this place to a level that demands unpaid labour. It gives more legitimacy to the libs and chuds that dominate it.
I just started to relate the other guy. Find sone grass and step on it.
You made a spelling error, I better see an “Edited” icon soon.
I’d argue that someone who doesn’t understand all the words in that post received a lower than average education. What specific words do you think wouldn’t be universally understood by someone with an “average to mid-high” education?
And about the words you choose, I hope you don’t use this language in your daily life. You would make a terrible friend for everyday conversations
If two paragraphs is too much for you, I don’t care if you read it.
A little too corporate friendly here.
Not that I oppose the idea, but also, Big Tech wants a kind of narrower censorship… so they can be the defacto gatekeepers, and no one else.
Government has to be the wall between corporations and the general mass populace. The general population just does not have the media literacy or means to effectively combat corporations influence on everything in society. Something needs to be that barrier.
I mean, I think there should be a medium. Governments don’t need that power either.
In other words, I think this movement should be placing more blame on corporate lobbying and monopolies, too. But not let up on the censorship efforts from govts.
I can’t think a non-bias medium guardrail system hasn’t eventually fallen under Government control. Government has just as much of a need to protect their interests from external sources as anyone else. It really is a National Security Issue for every Nation, not just EuroAmericana.
And then we barrel towards regulatory capture, as the very biggest corporations can just lobby to their benefit.
The page touches on this:
When the YouTuber who exposed predators on Roblox brought them to light, the response was not to go after the predators, but to go after him.
We know these problems. If a YouTuber can find them, why can’t a company with billions of dollars, armies of engineers, and full control over their platform?
So I think govt should go after the most manipulative corporate offenders, but not create a situation where they can have so much control over individuals. In other words, no one should have that kind of manipulative power, and its the govt’s role to break it up wherever it pops up, not take control of it.
I mean, some entity has to control it.
Even if we reign in Corporations, there’s still external governments trying to stir trouble and influence the popular opinion. We can’t realistically stop them from doing this, but have to defend against it. So some entity has to be in charge of that.
I think you’re right though, we have to reign in Corporations first. If each Nation cannot do that, then there’s not much difference between Government and Corporate Interests. This is a problem that isn’t going to go away even after we fix it either - something we’ll have to figure out as a society how to handle.
my new hobby post-internet will be flock camera vandalism, perhaps a little data centre arson… the great outdoors
I would rather different countries wall off their internet than try to force their version of censorship onto what people post in western countries. I already think the UK should wall off their internet instead of trying to punish people online for breaking their stupid laws.
Walling in an already dead zombi
I’m sorry but we had to support the 23 year old content creator who makes Garfield comics and earns $10/month. That was more important then anticipating the threat of artificial Data scarcity threat that everyone warned about 20 years ago.
It’s cool though, that artisanal comic is going to really make me laugh as the authoritarians go door to door looking for undesirables
turns out china was just a little bit ahead of everyone huh
I’m starting to be a fan of countries walling off vs the alternative. To be clear, I’m not for it. I would prefer open internet. But what’s worse is countries trying to project their jurisdiction across the globe.
If you don’t like that I don’t comply with the laws of places where I don’t live, block my site. I don’t block you. You block me. I shouldn’t even have a responsibility to know what your laws are to know if I should block you. It’s your laws, your job.
And if a country finds it easier to block off the whole external internet, fine. That’s still better than someone who I didn’t elect thinking they can tell me how I must do my job. Certainly better than 152 different governments and municipalities trying to do it at the same time.
So we should make it clear. When someone in a foreign country visits your site, you are not operating in that country. The user is visiting yours.
It’s more like some people saw an opportunity in selling China-style online censorship to other governments. They just needed convincing stories to sell.
Stories of children being groomed with internet porn and calling for mass censorship. Stories of the stars of internet porn regretting it and calling for mass censorship. Stories of terror attacks being organized on the internet. Stories of awful chatrooms.
So now anyone wanting to oppose your censorship is a nazi islamist pedophile jerking off to CSAM in their mother’s basement.
And it won’t end with banning the most disgusting and gory lolicon hentai. It won’t even stop with banning porn. It will end with things being banned because some Trump, Orbán, Putin-class dictator didn’t like it, and the chatbot spat out some reasonable sounding argument that supported it beyond “the glorious leader didn’t like this”.
An argument can be made for anything
As I said a few months ago, don’t be shocked if the usa pulls a ‘great firewall’ out of its ass soon. They saw China’s social credit system and decided they wanted that for themselves
Imagine being so stupid you fall for that astroturf nonsense.
Europe has been working this protecting children from predators angle for at least two decades, to weaken any sort of encryption or anonymity and allow more state surveillance.
This isn’t something new, it’s just that now they think they can get away with doing their worst, knowing just how fucked our voters are in the head as their political parties are all captured by oligarchs.
Yep, nothing new, just more of the same shit. https://youtu.be/gmqwn4Gx_fw
Yeah, absolutely. Every Nation should have something like this unfortunately.
I think it makes sense for techies to be able to breach the walls and reach the open internet, tunnel into other countries nets, but the general populace just cannot unfortunately.
Tor, i2p if you still have access to TCP and reticulum to bypass TCP entirely.
Edit: I should have said bypass TCP/IP because you need centralized infrastructure to use TCP IP because of the border gateway protocol and routing.
With Reticulum, you self-assign a destination hash using your public and private key pair and then announce that destination hash over whatever connection to the Reticulum network you happen to have. Whether it be Bluetooth, LORA, TCP/IP, serial cable, whatever.
Can those tools be used to post memes about beans and moths?
I don’t see why not.
So how do we bring moderation to these sites we can access using tor. Need to make sure people aren’t just doing whatever they want. That would be insane
Moderation is if you don’t like what somebody’s doing, you block them.
What if we can anointed a single small group of young people and PR team interns that can just dictate to us what we can and cannot do with these spaces. Blocking others also works. Being able to ignore problems is best.
Still don’t understand wtf do you want people to do with Tor if Tor itself gets blocked (yes, their obfuscation methods are also very trivial to block), not to mention the reality of some countries not allowing any cross border traffic.
Russia seems to have a lot of problems blocking Tor if it’s so trivial to block their obfuscation methods.
If no cross-border traffic is allowed at all, that’s where reticulum comes in. Radio doesn’t respect borders, and if you want to kill the ability to use any kind of radio communications to get out of the country, then you have to jam the entire radio spectrum as well as the light spectrum to avoid using point-to-point laser communications.
I can’t tell its I can’t find anything worth visiting on i2p or there is just nothing there
Compared to the open internet and the slightly dark parts of the internet, there is nothing of great interest, except the fact that no one can easily hunt down what you did while you were there.
The real problem is, by the time you actually want to be there because there is no anonymous access to the real net, they’ll ferret out people running i2p at all and block them from doing so.
The real problem is, by the time you actually want to be there because there is no anonymous access to the real net, they’ll ferret out people running i2p at all and block them from doing so.
Correct. Its terrifying to confirm my fears with others. Protocol blocking, ddos attacks on the networks, etc…
I’m mostly worried that at some point they’ll fire up a client, note the nodes it’s connecting to, send police to their locations, nested wash rince repeat.
I was actually kinda stoked at AI because we could have it locally write semi-plausible fiction with digital payloads embedded. And all of a sudden our social media is based on a database hidden in bad vampire fan-fiction.
There’s a few places… Torrent tracker. Could use a lot of improvement though, yes. It’s always been that way unfortunately. TOR is larger but that makes sense due to gov origination and its associated money.
Wait until it’s one of the only private places to go.
Already is more or less, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to stay anonymous. Cloudflare is utilized by %20 of the internet. They no doubt have databases full of device identifiers and associated ip addresses. And thats ignoring the rest of the neo axis of tech companies with their own data pilfering setups and various law enforcement agencies. Can’t do shit without verification these days. Can’t even spin up your own servers without a cc. I mean technically bitcoin and xmr exist but between KYC laws and ddos attacks against the xmr network… Lol. Don’t let the bastards grind us down, but they sure as hell wish to succeed.
I had the same problem, then I decided to do something about it
I’ve totally wanted to do something neat with Reticulum; we just lack a way to communicate video speeds over long distances without last-mile service providers. I’m sitting on a pile of HaLow / meshtastic gear, but I’m too broke (and close to an airport) to put up a good mast and I live far enough in a hole that I can’t get to the main artery of RLOS.
I send up mesh nodes on a drone once in a while and I can see a hell of a lot of net.
I2p and Reticulum scratch the general area of the privacy itch, But I worry that the government will decide that pricacy is treason, start a client and start going node to node dropping the hammer on people.
Even though you can’t put up a mast and are currently isolated from the rest of the mesh, put up a node anyway, and then add yourself to one of the maps with, say, a quarter mile of inaccuracy.
If somebody was to drive to the location you have your node pinned at, with a quarter mile of inaccuracy, they would still be able to communicate with your node.
A node on a mast is great. A node on your roof is good. So, if you can’t have great, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good and put up a node on your roof. Your house is still probably around 30 feet tall, so that’s still 30 feet of height, and somebody will eventually be able to communicate with you.
Otherwise, you get the chicken and egg problem, where a new person turns on a mesh core node and sees nobody available, so they turn off their mesh core node and put it in a drawer, and when their neighbor gets a mesh core node and turns it on, they see nobody there, so they turn off their mesh core node and put it in a drawer, not knowing that their neighbor has one, and if they had just left it on, they would have someone to communicate with.
As for the government making their own client and trying to hunt people down, you can make mesh nodes out of a lot of things because it’s so small and low-powered. I’ve seen people make security cameras into mesh nodes or solar lights into mesh nodes and when you mentioned this my thought went to a mesh teddy bear. I’ve never seen anybody create a mesh teddy bear, but I don’t see why you couldn’t.
I have. Threw an external antenna on my roof just peaking above the crest (HOA hasn’t noticed yet). I Keep nodes set as router-late in my car so when I go driving I can see other people exist.
TBF, even when I’m out, I’ve never made contact on the mesh. There are a dozen meshtastic nodes here and there, best I can tell it’s just a couple other hams, no real comms going on. Even the VHF Ham scene here is mostly dead.
My actual goal was to get a half-decent signal for my kids’ bus route and school. The school is only a mile away, but it’s not like i’m going to throw a $300 aprs radio in his bag, a $30 LoRa capsul though, sure!
Have a look at both meshtastic and meshcore. You say you’ve already seen some meshtastic nodes, but a lot of people are moving to meshcore, and so you might have better luck there.
Also, with your node antenna up at the crest of the house roof, I would think a mile should be doable to your kid’s school.
It may not work while they’re in the building itself, but if they are outside, then I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
There is 0 meshcore anywhere near me. I drove heltek v3’s around my beltway, nada.
I would think a mile should be doable to your kid’s school.
Nope, tried it, no radio line of site. it’s a little hilly here and there’s a shit ton of old-growth forrest in between.
I’ve been trying to find a tree tall enough to repeat with clear solar from the south, that’s not on someone’s property, The only good options are in the middle of a swampy run.
Ah, gotcha. Well in that case meshtastic is definitely your best bet for now and as for getting a node up into the tree I’m not sure unless you’re willing to go swamp bogging
If I weren’t so close to an airport, I’d do a tethered balloon. I do have a drone so i could lay paracord over a high branch and hoist it up if I had the gear to not get bit by something nasty. If I wasn’t so worried about the cost. I could just strand a solar node up there with a long break-away line and just write it off when it needed batteries.
ELI5, why bypass TCP? I’m looking this up, but an answer might help me and others understand this better. :D
The protocol is reasonably private. Trying to find exact sources of a piece of traffic is about as hard as it can be. Reading the contents of the traffic is also at a very high bar.
The downside is, it still needs visible nodes to connect to, and the VAST majority of us only actually have access to TCP routed networks for that purpose. The only way you’re talking to that reticulum node in Norway from California is because BGP is delivering your crypto stream for you.
If you have a small neighborhood and you’re all like-minded, you could use reticulum over HaLow or LoRa network adapters to create a private, IP-less mesh and it could go as far as you can find more people willing to run the hardware. HaLow has enough bandwidth to stream video, LoRa is mostly only good for text. Of course, If someone is doing something like video, it won’t take much to saturate everyone’s connection. It’s not like someone could run a Plex server and everyone could be watching it in the neighborhood at the same time; that 30MBPS can only handle a couple of decent-quality streams.
The big problem with TCP IP is that it requires being assigned IP addresses and the border gateway protocol and other such infrastructure, which is not usable as an individual.
In Reticulum, you self-assign a destination address using your public and private keys and then announce that that service is available to the rest of the network through whatever connection you happen to have to the rest of the network.
Ok, that sounds brilliant! Thank you! :)
It’s also pretty misleading.
Yeah, it’s actually pretty badass.
I think once the user experience gets simplified down, Reticulum will be an amazing piece of technology. But right now, it’s just not very user-friendly with the user experience.
I can use it, and I bet you can use it, but I don’t know if my mom would be able to use it right now, as is.
I’m convinced. I’ll check it out. :)
It’s not really a “you need to bypass TCP” and more of a “TCP traffic could be censored”… just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.
Reticulum isn’t necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn’t something who’s failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).
For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else’s LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it’s picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn’t strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they’d be cut off)
Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don’t block TCP traffic, then you still have options.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and it’s difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.
If I remember the documentation properly, Reticulum is capable of 40 mbps maximum throughput speed. That’s over Ethernet or serial links or high-speed wireless networks such as Wi-Fi.
Over LoRa you get quite bandwidth constrained, but you also have a lot of resiliency.
With that said, you can have high bandwidth, but high latency as well because of needing to hop multiple piers to get to your destination.
Once you make the connection though, you can download at a pretty decent clip if all the nodes in the middle can support that bandwidth transfer.
Edit: I should already mention that there is a way to access HTTP webpages over reticulum. Look up rserver and meshbrowser. The webpage is accessed like http://destinationhash/, similar to http://longtoraddress.onion/. Since reticulum is end-to-end encrypted, there’s no need to have HTTPS.
Once you make the connection though, you can download at a pretty decent clip if all the nodes in the middle can support that bandwidth transfer.
Of course, while you’re doing it, you’re maxing out the connections in between, too. It has problems with scale and bandwidth segmentation. Once you take it off the mainstream internet, you’d be lucky to keep a large neighborhood mesh working :(
I think it depends on how those nodes were communicating. If they were communicating via low bandwidth LORA, then yes, I could absolutely see that. But they could also be communicating over point-to-point laser links, in which case you could still maintain a very large connection pipe.
I do see your point, though, in that in order to have a more decentralized infrastructure, we are going to have to accept lower bandwidth than what we are currently used to on the centralized internet.
Considering I already route most of my internet connection over Tor for most day-to-day things anyway, this is something that I am already accepting and getting used to. So the transition won’t be as hard for me as it would be for some others.
I feel ya, I leave I2P running just to support the cause.
If you want a fun side project, you could pipe reticulum over I2P, there are at least a handful of nodes out there.
That does sound fun. I currently have Columba (android lxmf/nomadnet browser) set to go tcp to mishmesh, but i have a tor/i2p client called Invizible installed that I use to route most of my internet traffic over Tor on a normal basis as is and I could just turn on I2P and see if I could get Colomba to route over it.
I see, thank you. :)
When your current hardware fails and the only devices you are allowed to purchase anymore are walled garden tablets?
How will you communicate however you want then? Will Elon make a Tor client available on xAI cloud? Will Anthropic’s store have I2P?
Do you think Microsoft gives a FUCK about Meshtastic? Or Linux?
We dared to speak out against our overlords and now they are taking the toys away if we do not stop them.
If it comes to that point, there will still be ways to get software that gets around it. It might require a physical transfer from somebody, but they can’t ever cover 100% of the options. Black markets will always exist, and Anarchist or hacker groups would probably help you for free.
We need the open source hardware movement to be faster as well. RISC V CPUs are already a good step in the right direction, but we do need more.
Better get to making the most of it.
Some of us bought our hard drives before OJ Simpleton got elected. Fill em up now or regret it later.
Ebooks, 100%. Information density first and foremost, then comics/manga, then movies and sure, some TV, a copy of wikipedia, linux isos and tools, more isos, more tools, a few containers and a virtual machine disk of your choice - went with Debian.
Future’s fucked. I do my part to donate to whoever I think will turn the tide anyway, but… have a plan B.
You know, every country has a blacklist of websites it doesn’t allow access to. Has been that way since the 90s. It’s also part of law enforcement.
What’s more there are things organisation like the IEEE don’t allow. So there’s a central authority involved.
All in all what we call the Internet isn’t the most free protocol we have. It’s just the one that got popular.
“And it’s not a Democracy it’s a Democratic Republic!” /s
Oh okay.
That still really sucks you know, all the same.
Dumb.
Nothing is new here guys!










