I’m sure I’d be preaching to the choir if I told you that it’s time for us to immigrate from übercorp owned social media and services. All of you have done so, so that’s not the point of this post. Even though we are on these new platforms, the fediverse is still sensitive to requests from governmental bodies and organizations. Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same. Due to the size of Matrix’s biggest homeserver matrix.org, the admins of said homeserver are beginning to follow the OSA and have already raised their minimum age to 18+. And instances who don’t follow the Act could be subjected to insurmountable paperwork and even blocked from the UK, Australia and other countries enacting these outrageous laws soon.
Blocking UK users to avoid this is almost a necessity, and as Labour is attempting to get lawmakers to outlaw VPNs, we could be seeing the equivalent of the UK Great Firewall soon. However, it will take significant amounts of time, money and paperwork to outlaw VPNs and to get ISPs to block sites and protocols. This is where federated and open source platforms have an advantage, without being shackled by bureaucracy they are able to quickly adapt. But this is not sustainable, and eventually the UK will become even more overreaching in order to gain more control over people’s Internet usage.
Darknets such as Tor, I2P and Yggdrasil are a potential solution, however they have multiple issues. Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load. Yggdrasil is alpha software and requires IPv6, which in many countries is simply not possible to use. Whilst these darknets are extremely resistant to censorship from other countries, with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet, they still are not capable of handling modern Internet usage.
We might need new completely independent mediums seperate from the Internet to avoid this. Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up. All I know is that governments will not stop here. I might seem like I’m overreacting here, but we need to be prepared for what is coming.
CORRECTION: I was told by a peer that Yggdrasil peers must have IPv6, however one does not need an IPv6 enabled network to use it, they just need an IPv6 operating system/device, which virtually every modern operating system including Windows and Linux does. Yggdrasil is actually Beta software.
Due to the size of Matrix’s biggest homeserver matrix.org, the admins of said homeserver are beginning to follow the OSA and have already raised their minimum age to 18+.
You can always host your instance.
Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users
Host your own.
From the picture I’m going to say it should be the great wall of politicians. It may take a while but If pile enough of the up and cement them together one way or the other things will improve.
What about LokiNet ?
with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet
I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.
Tor is slow
It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation
and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers
This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.
Back to printing presses
geocaching + memory sticks
I just jack off into the camera every once Ina a while in case any government agent is watching. I don’t have to do it. But they have to watch it
Hate being assigned to this guy
Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there’s still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.
We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.
I don’t know enough to know whether this is a dumb suggestion - but could web3 / blockchain hold some of the answers?
The irony of Lemmy not letting me post this until I turned off my VPN 😖
In the future new technologies will maybe bypass internet but right now the best thing to do it’s to start being less internet dependent: archive stuff for your home server, buy physical media, preserve what you’d need and like.
Or start selfhosting.
The UK moves are very worrying. We’re trying to help people to move away from big tech at our site https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/
We recommend fediverse protocols wherever possible - so I’m interested in the comments here about how that is affected
This site would be more compelling if it didn’t look so much like a you wouldn’t steal a car ad.
Thanks for this post and thanks to all the commenters here for great suggestions. Definitely commenting to remind me to come back here and add some of these awesome resources to my home lab.
I strongly encourage everyone to protect the things they love, download all of Wikipedia, screenshot & download all the things. It’s a little paranoid, sure, but between all of us downloading & saving all our little pieces of the web & all its information, we effectively safeguard most of it from digital terrorism, tyranny, erasure. It costs very little, relatively speaking. Do your part & I’ll do mine.
I’ve often felt that the web should work more like Git, so you can keep the content locally and just pull updates when you need.
I have Kiwix (offline versions of Wikipedia and other online resources) and Linkwarden (preserve specific websites in multiple formats) running on my home server.
record scratch
I was under the impression linkwarden just saved… links.
Entire webpages? Do tell!
Yes! It saves it as HTML, readable HTML, PDF and image.
Results can vary a lot depending on how the page is implemented. Sometimes most of the formats are empty or broken, but I always got at least one that’s usable.Can you use it to search for old versions of web pages too?
Unless I missed that feature, no, you only have one version.
But it creates a link to archive.org so you can see if there’s older versions there.
Is there an ELI5 of how Kiwix works? I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around it.
You have two things, the application and the libraries.
The libraries are files with the data you want to host (wikipedia, stack overflow, etc).
There’s a lot of applications for different platforms. Some allow to download the libraries directly, otherwise you can download them manually into a folder and tell the app where to find them.It’s kind of like a PDF of a web page. But it’s functional You don’t have to load the whole site at once and links take you from page to page just like it did in the original website. The content is stored in monolithic ZIM files and you can get a decent selection from archive.org. But it’s mostly reference material and the content is quite static.
We need to start our own Internet with black Jack and hookers.
I2P is basically this
Yep, the answer to many of these problems is I2P.
TOR was invented by the US Navy, roughly 1/3 of major entry/exit nodes are estimated to be comprimised / run as honeypots by various LE / Intel agencies, and said LE and Intel agencies also know how to, and have deanonimyed various people and groups on TOR that they really wanted to go after.
TOR ain’t it.
I2P is a lot closer to ‘it’.
The other part of the answer is:
Well, now it turns out data hoarders were not just paranoid weirdos, they actually had foresight.
If you can host your own at least several terabyte mini/curated backup of the Internet Archive, and plug that into I2P, then congrats, you now are the backup plan for when, not if, they get massively purged of even more of their content than has already been taken out in the last ~2 years.
The old cyberpunk line holds true in another sense of meaning:
The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.
I think he said that’s Tor.
you know what, forget the Internet!
You can’t have hookers without copious amounts of cocaine.
Your proposal is acceptable.
Tor is not that slow for normal internet usage. You can even watch videos in SD.
you can at it’s current usage level, if new limits spark new usage, we’ll need a lot more exit nodes.
Tribler has inbuilt onion routing. If I understand it correctly, tribler <-> tribler connections don’t need exit nodes and it’s fast enough to stream video
I have always wondered about distributed hosting, like BitTorrent, but for websites. You go to a webpage, and it gets seeded from however many people host the file. It should be harder to take down. I do not code at all. Is that a thing? Why not?
Tenfingers does distributed sharing, it’s basically your folder(s) in the cloud but decentralised, so it could be your website by just publish the html and the rest.
That has already been done: https://zeronet.io/
So like IPFS?
I tried really hard to use IPFS. I set up a syncthing and did some auto-publishing scripts.
It’s slow AF, and unless you pay some big player to pin your files there’s only about a 1 in 10 chance of it actually being available everywhere. I had to actually peer my computers together to get sure fire access to my own data.
Then there’s very little in the way of privacy. I did some JavaScript crypto self-decrypting archives that was kind of fun But with the distribution problems it just became more of a hassle to use than anything.
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.
It sucks that literally using something that should be the default, truly protecting privacy, has such a bad reputation because… well it protects privacy.
Paper money is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.
A lot of inert things are used in bad ways.
Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you’re using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that’s even more streamlined, and then come and find you.
Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than “the dark web” is. That’s just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it’s a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because “terrorism!” or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.
I dont think most people need a security model that is fed proof. Thats a pretty extreme level of privacy and most people would break it by yappign about their life to much.
Well, but we’re talking about how to prepare for the future where it does need to be fed proof. At some point, I think pretty soon from now in some places, it’s going to become necessary to either break the rules of the internet in ways that can actually get you in trouble, or accept that you have to do things like upload your ID to all these places, agree not to access certain types of content the government doesn’t want you looking at, not say certain political things on social media or else you’re going on a list, things like that.
I think option A is probably better and it probably makes sense to start to think about, how are we going to do that and not have the expanded-and-mission-creeped version of ICE showing up at your door for it to give you a citation or worse, a year from now.
Right now, yes, a VPN is fine. But that’s only true for as long as the government doesn’t strongly dislike anything that you are doing.
Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web.
That tends to be more due to bad opsec than Tor itself, though.
Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone’s ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.
It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn’t figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.
Not all VPNs store enough user info for feds to be able to find anything useful on their servers.
I’ve literally never in my life heard of “this person was doing (whatever), but they were behind a VPN, so we had to do (whatever elaborate sting operation) instead of compromising the VPN.” I’ve heard that many times about Tor.
It’s possible that no one’s ever done something significant enough to make the feds interested from behind a VPN, just always used Tor, but I feel like it is unlikely. I feel like it’s more likely that they either have the ability to force the VPN companies to comply with some legal structures that give them the info they need, or else just wiretap the pipes going in and out of the VPN servers and can sort things out pretty straightforwardly if they really start to care about it.
VPNs are certainly useful; they make it a lot more difficult for non-law-enforcement people to know what you’re up to, which is a significant gain, and they are faster and generally more convenient than using Tor. But if you’re actually concerned about the government, I would use Tor 100% of the time over a VPN.
That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.
Oh they’re all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that’s the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.
Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that’s not really a coincidence.
This is honestly the best reputation a technology like this could have imo, because it very clearly shows that it does work
