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.
> 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.
Is there an uncensored intetnet, because i dont think there is. if there is any, it can be turned off because its being routed on the censored net wrapped in encryption.
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.
It's not black and white though. There's a scale from "easy to censor without collateral damage" to "need to take the whole nation offline to suppress information flow".
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"
As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.
OTOH, third world or dictatorships won’t blink when it comes to turning off an entire country - example is Tanzania in the recent election.. are there solutions for communication when international links are cut? A lan like solution scaled to cities or an entire country that is disconnected from the rest of the world?
You can receive data over radio waves, which would be pretty hard to block country-wide I think. Sending data would be a bit trickier without being caught.
this does require quite some expertise. as u noted sending can be triangulated. Also because this sending issue, it wouldnt really be an internet since only few parties would have the resources for mobile or ship-based transmitting systems that are harder to pin down or stop
> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut
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.
i don't think anyone with enough money for shootin clusters of sattelites into orbit will be a free open internet builder. ofc thats an assumption. This network of sattelites would also need to join in and coordinate with other stuff up there, as far as i can tell its pretty crowded and theres collision risks etc.
As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.
The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?
I've been reading about the early history of the Internet.
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.
Except they're not taking the whole country offline. AFAIK even simple VPNs work without issue. Iran took the whole country offline, because their country barely functions, and still some people managed an external connection.
They managed the external connection because they were being provided with one by outside nations trying to topple the government. They were promptly arrested and the "protests" fizzled out. Trump then bombed them anyway.
Every time there’s a football game? At least that I’m hearing in the case of Spain. No, they don’t throw a switch, but they turn off enough CDNs to effectively turn off the internet.
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
Like most LLMs, the links you cite don't back up what you wrote.
If you don't know the difference between preventing a group of sportsball fans from watching illegal streams and actually taking a country offline, delete yourself.
I absolutely agree, and it isn't even a scale, it's multi-dimensional. There are many different little problems that the internet solves, and they could also be solved with many different little alternatives.
cant you just disable resedential and non critical connections? ISPs etc. know whos who right? no need to take the nation offline. only the people in it (civilians, medium/small businesses etc)
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
Russia is trying that (white lists) and it's proving costly enough that even they have to back off. They'll probably get there eventually but it requires serious investment of money and time and inevitably hampers the economy.
interesting thanks. i guess its a drastic measure, which costs a lot, so there would be some potential tippingpoint in which the risks to the censors or the costs they are racking up by not doing it outweighs the costs of cutting it all off. Also ofcourse, 'they' need their populations somewhat with them. if an entire nation stands up you have a revolution, so maybe its a balancing act to prevent that. cut it here n there but keep the main perception its all temporary or localized etc
I sometimes think mid to end of 90s was peak freedom. Never before had there been so much mostly uncensored world wide communication. Unfortunately most likely there never ever will be
again.
I would argue that.. despite much greater attempts at control, the internet is much more wild now. Not because it is not being surveilled, monitored, botted, manipulated or any combination of those, but because the pace of change is getting a little hard to keep up with.. not just by orgs and govs ( they normally struggle with those ), but by even by above average humans. I miss the 90s, but the feels are the same now man ( minus the hope;p ).
Fuck man, even if you watch early apprentice tv show, it is just different. I initially just thought it was just nostalgia ( I briefly got into old arcade games and VF2 didn't age that well ), but man.. even the stupid reality shows were better.
Before 2021 I hated typos etc but now I like seeing imperfect text in this new age. I wouldn't have considered it could be a bot (and I don't think it is) but it would certainly have worked on me (to what end, who knows..)
People seem to be oblivious to the fact that the internet infrastructure has been government controlled since its inception. No cable laid under the sea between two nations can exist without the government approval and without the governments tapping into the link. IP addresses, MAC addresses, domain names, all managed by "super partes" international organizations swore to neutrality and fairness.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
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).
It really depends on what ypu are dealing with - if you are worried about communication being too centralized and monopolized, it might be a good idea to start building and alternative. Doing that might avoid the situation getting worse, slow it down or even reverse the trend.
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.
Building an Alternative internet seems like a fools errand to me, like building an alternative road network. How are you going to reach a critical mass of users? What should stop the powers that control the old internet from taking off your network as soon as you beat the odds and gain popularity?
That's the thing though, no?
Depending on the use-case, do you >really< need a global network?
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.
this is the thing. an alternative internet is often suggested but whos gonna host a global switching network and put cables in the seasnfor that, and will it be allowed? what about cables in the ground or antenae everywhere to spread the network? it could simply be made illegal if it isnt already
I mean it would be amazing if one day access to the internet could be truly free (from costs for users, and censorship).
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?
It's possible that any such technology would be too complicated to ensure a clean supply chain or have weaknesses that would allow it to be tracked or jammed. Real devices have some kind of engineering tradeoff.
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.)
It's not super stupid, but you'd have to find a quantum effect that actually does this while transferring information. If it transfers information it can't do so over the speed of light. As long as it follows that rule it may be possible, but if we had found anything like that yet we'd almost certainly be using it.
Man, I don't think you've ever actually built free optical laser networks, they are kind of a pain in the ass and everyone is going to notice you've got one stuck up on a pole.
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.
It seems relatively simple to me to detect fibers hanging around cities as soon as the network is bigger than two nerdy neighbors. Same for lasers and telescopes.
Reticulum. Encryption-required mesh-routing alternative to the IP stack. Can route over just about any medium (piggyback IP, Lora, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, microwave P2P, anything). Also future-proofed with support for high-bandwidth persistent connections.
There was, once, but that has decayed rapidly alongside the centralization of the Internet. There are very few websites people even use nowadays, and many of them block legal expressions due to ideological and economic pressures. Payment processors and banks regularly restrict businesses and individuals from legal commercial activities, examples are Pornhub/MindGeek, Steam, and firearm dealers.
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.
In the late aughts and early 2010s I and a few other people came up with the `darknet plan` aka `project meshnet` which was a subreddit and adjacent communities dedicated to creating a completely parallel internet using 802.11s mesh networks akin to the Athens and NYC meshes that span a huge portion of those metros.
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.
I think this this the perfect time to bring back old 90-00s webhosting, web rings and all and get them to be trendy and viral if some celebrity could pull people in and get them off this dirtyweb, bot-ridden and dead-internet-theoried. People have been veered hard into content creation and running their own little merchandise dropship etc businesses and all of the options are dinosaurs now.
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.
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.
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.
+1. I gave a talk in the eBPF room couple years ago and it was an awesome experience. Sometimes I get jaded being a professional software engineer but FOSDEM reminds me there’s a passionate community behind what we do and it’s great to reconnect with that community, and to share some knowledge with others.
Many communities also hold their yearly meetups & dinners there, often the only time people working together daily in the community see each other face to face :)
I can only second that! And it is so relaxed, came and go whenever you want. No hassle to get tickets like for Congress. Of course you will queue - a lot, but consider it part of the experience.
Yes, a few of our like-minded folks are looking to make the trip. We have been collecting travel tips ourselves. If you'd like to discuss FOSS/H or the trip itself, you might like to join us at: https://trustytech.zulipchat.com/join/75pg2qppqdtkndw6lmz3f3...
Most people prefer censored internet as long as it aligns with their political leaning. Maybe that wasn't the case 15 years ago but it's pretty much true nowadays. I myself consider this as a fact.
I agree. Interesting you’re being downvoted. I’ve been using Reddit for 16+ years and have watched it morph from a libertarian, centrist community dominated by developers and geeks, into a very left wing, violent, vehicle to export American political activism to the world. Redditors used to abhor censorship. People would practise debating all kinds of taboo topics because this is how we become wiser. Now just commenting on the wrong community will see you automatically banned from 30 of the largest subreddits.
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.
A true test of one's desire for truly free and open society and speech is whether or not one's willing to stand up and fight for that "other" person's right to say something they hate.
I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.
"Censorship" vs "Content moderation". You can't have online discussions without moderation, and that makes moderation some form of censorship. Thus you can't have online discussions without some form of censorship. Only difference is who is doing the censoring.
The difference between censorship and moderation is the ability to realistically opt-out. Your friends might get mad at your for saying something, but you can choose your friends. Your community might not allow certain speech, but you generally get to choose the communities you are a part of. When the avenues where 99% of all communication go through "moderate" speech a certain way, that starts being censorship.
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.
Those sounds like largely unrelated concepts that just happen to overlap somewhat in practice, and are also very individual. As a private person I don't lose anything at all by not using social media, but if I owned a local pizza shop I'd be losing a ton of business by shunning hat avenue of advertisement.
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.
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.
Platforms naturally coalesce into near monopolies due to network effects. It's far easier to get rid of a government than it is to get rid of something like Youtube at this point.
> It's far easier to get rid of a government than it is to get rid of something like Youtube at this point.
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 ?
YouTube has a moat a mile wide and ten thousand feet deep because their product is insanely expensive to provide. Think about it: they let you upload a basically-unlimited amount of video and then they store it for you forever, for free.
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.
Didn't torrents solve this problem before Youtube was even invented? Also, it looks like Bilibili is going to expand internationally and they have a pretty good chance of eating Youtube's lunch.
“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
Not too sure about that. It seems that stuff that is being demonized in democracies has a better approval rating among the people. For example absolute monarchy, as was exercised by Louis XIV.
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.
Of course you can have online discussion without moderation. In the most basic form: you publish on your site, I respond on mine. No moderator involved
And there are plenty of other differences besides "who", for example, "how".
It’s hard to take down sites on Tor. Usually impossible without the full weight of the FBI/CIA. I agree with the user above: we can do decentralised communication without censorship. Of course if you start from the faulty premise that online discourse needs to occur on one of a handful of censored platforms then that’s impossible.
Yeah, that's not going to solve twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.
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.
LOL
And here, folks, is the problem. This person is absolutely certain the far "right" is the problem ... not his beloved echo chamber censoring totalitarian "left".
> The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference
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.
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
tech evangelist from CIA ?
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.
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.
The big problem with the internet - which is very dysfunctional - is not censorship but propaganda. Everyone on the internet is selling something because that is the only way to pay for being on the internet.
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.
RFC.. but we would have to agree what the ground rules are. I somehow suspect that those will be will be somewhat different ( kinda like some would argue against/for codes of conduct ) person to person. Still, if we could upend at least some of the underlying commercial interest or even the need to rely on advertising, it could be something.
One persons propaganda is another persons truth. Who are you or your task force to decide? The big problem with the internet is it gives dumb people access to each other.
That just points out that another real problem with the internet is that everyone's voice carries the same weight in ways it didn't used to. Every city has a few folks who believe aliens walk among us or otherwise wear tinfoil hats, but their message was limited to AM radio and cable access, and it was clear their content was not of the same journalistic level as the three major networks used to be - used to, because they've also changed. For example, there is conclusive, repeatable and verifiable evidence that the world is not flat, and it shouldn't be so easy to make convincing content that seems like it is.
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 feel like it is generally a flippant but serious comment. A lot of social problems right now are caused by the fact that rather than having to travel to some large city for a meetup with people that have your particular neuroses, against the friction of well-adjusted people in the real world, now there is a fan club one click away that will ratify whatever fake illness/condition/problem that you have with no serious pushback. A LOT of personal, social, and political problems right now basically boil down to this.
"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.
The problem starts, when places like FOSDEM which originally where slightly left-leaning-anarchist (in a positive sense) start talking about censorship but only mention Russia, China and Iran. Maybe you should google for Jaques Baud, who is actually trapped in Brussels and invite him? Yes, yes, I know, Chinese LLMs and Tianamen square. Well, go and ask chatGPT for the crimes of presidents of the nothern area between Atlantic and Pacific... The problem is the global brainwash.
The problem is there are so few uncensored places now that if you do make one you overnight become the sweary nasi/pedo/sexads bar because everything else is closed to them.
funny you should say that. r/jailbait existed for a very long time under the watchful eye of its heckin' wholesome founders.
reddit has been purging even vagueposted satirical wrongthink like r/MillionDollarExtreme and r/frenworld since Americans voted wrong in 2016. the commissars at r/againsthatesubreddits sniff it out, "Anti-Evil Operations" purge. all default and large subs are now moderated by compliant activists. r/videos removed "no politics" and became yet another echo chamber for wholesome folx with good politics. r/europe exists only to promote wholesome civic nationalism and quickly purges and locks submissions about inconvenient happenings. the model subs like r/worldnews, r/news, and r/politics were propaganda outlets even before the bad orange man happened.
so idk what nasi infestation happened in your reality's 2018, but I observed the opposite in mine.
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.
And by blocking certain people, you demonstrate to authorities that you can block anyone you want, and you will be held in contempt if you don't block anyone they want. As opposed to having no technical blocking capability.
>As opposed to having no technical blocking capability.
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.
I mean yes, it is likely there is no other probable outcome.
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.
I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Around the world, people are being silenced, monitored, and denied access to information.
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.
It seems like "censored internet" will be the least of the worries when it comes to agent explosion. Even if your internet is free, how are you going to find it through the slop brigades generating and consuming the same "load bearing" crap. Even if you setup the oracle of the day, and no one stops you, how are you going to filter all the crap out to find it? And how will you afford it when everyone puts up pay gates to deal with the xplosion, leading to only the most valuable aislop being allowed on.
>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.
> If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?
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.
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.
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.
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"
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
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.
On 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?
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...
Iran took their whole country offline because they locked the country behind CGNAT - which is an ideal tech for offlining an entire nation.
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
If you don't know the difference between preventing a group of sportsball fans from watching illegal streams and actually taking a country offline, delete yourself.
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
Do people (and AI bots) think this makes them seem more human? Or is it yet another symptom of civilization in decline?
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
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?
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.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
since the government is too powerful and can enforce its ideas with legal violence
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
> claims china & russia are the biggest threats
Why throw stones when we have plenty of work to do here?
Basically Reddit 2018.
reddit has been purging even vagueposted satirical wrongthink like r/MillionDollarExtreme and r/frenworld since Americans voted wrong in 2016. the commissars at r/againsthatesubreddits sniff it out, "Anti-Evil Operations" purge. all default and large subs are now moderated by compliant activists. r/videos removed "no politics" and became yet another echo chamber for wholesome folx with good politics. r/europe exists only to promote wholesome civic nationalism and quickly purges and locks submissions about inconvenient happenings. the model subs like r/worldnews, r/news, and r/politics were propaganda outlets even before the bad orange man happened.
so idk what nasi infestation happened in your reality's 2018, but I observed the opposite in mine.
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.
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.
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.
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.