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"
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
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.
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.
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.
And there are plenty of other differences besides "who", for example, "how".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically Reddit 2018.
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.
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.
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.
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