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by M_bara16 hours ago |
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upvoteby 3RTB2971 hours ago|
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To be fair, those are usually cases where the reason they turned off the internet is entirely unrelated to anyone doing something questionable, and more about personal political whims as security theater. As long as you keep the bribes flowing to the dictatorship, you aren't at risk of being shut down for what you're doing.
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upvoteby conartist62 minutes ago|
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Wow that's fucking dark.

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?

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upvoteby Pifanjr16 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby saidnooneever15 hours ago|
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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
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upvoteby setopt15 hours ago|
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> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut?

How far can you scale wireless mesh nets?

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upvoteby kmacdough14 hours ago|
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In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP. It's already a self-building network. The hard part is how you incentivise transit nodes. Currently that's what ISPs and backbones provide. They are incentivised to interconnect because that's their core business model. So a truly decentralized Internet requires a decentralized incentive system.

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.

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upvoteby solyin14 hours ago|
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> In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP.

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.

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upvoteby hdgvhicv13 hours ago|
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You have to increase the width of the mesh.
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upvoteby salawat9 hours ago|
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Someone ends up having to act as a hub. The more you gear for that job, the easier you are to target, and the more worth it it is to target you.

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.

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upvoteby teiferer15 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby brightball16 hours ago|
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This is essentially the case for Starlink
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upvoteby dachris15 hours ago|
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On the one hand, yes. That's why possession of a starlink terminal can get you killed in Iran.

On the other hand, Ukrainians are finding out that someone else is in control of that starlink infra.

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upvoteby saidnooneever15 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby 15 hours ago|
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upvoteby root_axis16 hours ago|
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Except Starlink won't hesitate to censor you as well as the Ukrainians are discovering.
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upvoteby hdgvhicv13 hours ago|
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It’s only censorship when a democratic government does it. When an unelected businessman with no oversight and more power than most counties does it isles just property rights.
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upvoteby Xirdus10 hours ago|
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A lot of people say this unironically about Facebook/Youtube/other social media. As long as it's in private hands, they're apparently free to manipulate information and restrict selected users however they want, regardless of how enmeshed they are in everybody's life.
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upvoteby JuniperMesos2 hours ago|
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In particular, a lot of people say this about major social media platforms when they are censoring content the speaker things is genuinely bad; and then call for government regulation of those platforms in order to prevent them from censoring content the speaker likes and thinks is important. And even if the government did just nationalize Facebook, the fact that it's no longer a private company doesn't remove the political component of the decision - people argue and vote on what they want the government to do, and then sometimes a court rules that it's unconstitutional for the democratically-elected government to do the thing it wants to do.
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