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"
Does the tech industry still even see technology as a source for good in the world, or do we now see ourselves as the dictators' keys to power.
What future do we have if we have become totally cynical and Amoral?
How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?
This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.
I'm sorry, that just wrong. Gupta-Kumar capacity scaling law (2000) says that as you add participants, each participant gets less bandwidth, until it becomes impractical. Imagine a room with 10 people talking in it. Easy. Now imagine 10,000. Hard to have a conversation if it's still all ad-hoc.
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, you have to remember that all tech is predisposed on a functioning society with cooperative people to move your packets from A to B.
Tech cannot solve the problem of Trust. Quite the opposite. It amplifies to immense degrees. In short, if you're looking for tech to save you because your Government is doing something shady, you're at the wrong level. Tackle the government.
Sad, but inevitable.
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 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...
The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?
In both cases this is not taking the whole country offline, and for both of them you can easily bypass the "block" by using any other DNS provider. You don't even need VPN/TOR or anything else complicated.
i want to read more
i think tech ceos might also have benefit from uncensored internet because they can build more accurate profiles of the masses to target their products etc.
Spain: https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/18/in-spain-football-matches-knock-thousands-of-websites-and-services-offline
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France
: https://codekhabar.com/post/france-orders-isps-to-ready-dns-blocks-for-major-social-platforms-on-oct-24
it might feel like the internet is off depending on which services, but you can still find eachother and use internet if these services are down aslong as ISP networks and core routes/switches still work. if you have an IP,.and your friend has an IP and the network in between routes those,.that is the internet. If you host a website on that IP, that is a service _on_ the internet..
its distinct and an important distinction.
Again, no personal experience, but have heard enough from folks here to believe it.
This is your country. This is your country on intellectual property rights.
Iran took their whole country offline because they locked the country behind CGNAT - which is an ideal tech for offlining an entire nation.
u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic
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).
You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.
So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.
Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)
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.)
this got downvoted, ofc because i know nothing.
Glad some people do like to be smart rather than smug, and provide the link :)
The next time its foggy or raining a tuned photon sensor to the spectrum that these devices run at will light up like a Christmas tree. If you're really intent on catching said people, you'd have drones flying around sprinkling light chaff and detecting where it detects optical scattering.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
https://meshcore-analyzer.eu/#map
Quite active here in Czech Republic for example.
As for the IP protocol - maybe its too much overhead for this use case ?
MeshCore uses PKI and public key prefixes as addresses & for routing/repeating.
In the US apparently 433 MHz is used instead.
- LoRa has actually quite a long range if done right (tens of km, upt to hundred+) so you would have to jam all that.
- This kind of jamming would be actually illegal, so you would have to make it legal first/tollerate it & expend non-trivial respurces to jam tiny repeaters from Aliexpress on random trees.
- The 868 MHz hand is actually used by a lot of IoT stuff like sensor networks, water/gas/electricity meter monitoring, some alarm systems - so if you did effectively jam the band, those things would break as well.
- Also if things went as far as active jamming being used, things might be heated up enough that whoever is running the mesh won't be playing by the reules as well - like, using a different, notmally ilegal fregvency or even triangulate and attack the jammers.
I am part of a Wireguard private VPN network with friends and family
But I mean we are almost all hardware/software engineers or office power user types familiar with VPN use
Just start generating shared keys amongst each other and go 'round swapping IP over signal and such
Like turn making key-share friends into real life Pokemon Go
The bulk of the people with skin in these companies are 55+ and excluding everyone younger
But the younger crowd outnumbers them
We could "meet the moment" and just stop using their services
It's not like a black hole will swallow humanity if we stop listening to an aging minority
Do people (and AI bots) think this makes them seem more human? Or is it yet another symptom of civilization in decline?
but what if they could... they dump chaff in the air
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.