Now if we solve for the real issue - lack of freedom because of a ruling class, the technical issue goes away. There's nothing to solve if you can't be oppressed, and if the ruler has no way to oppress, they'd have no way to block your ISP in the first place.
The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed. Even in a democracy, the oppression of you can simply come from a majority (EU citizens have no freedom of speech) or large minority (magats prosecuting women and doctors for murder because of a life-threatening abortion).
There is no answer, because many people want to control and silence others who don't agree - or to compensate for lack of control of their crap lives by controlling other lives. Take a look at this site, and most social media sites. Tiny-dick big-belly mods shadowbanning, the other users downvoting, making comments gray so you can't read them.
Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
The only way that can be done is by reducing the cost and technical ability needed to connect to the internet with fewer intermediaries that can be wrenched by governments.
Nobody wants to be oppressed. A large portion of the population often wants to be oppressors themselves. They are addicted to controlling others. This might be raising tax on X group, or criminalizing Y minority.
Many people don't like voluntary association and choice. They want compelled behavior that conforms to their expectation.
The only way to combat this is to establish a baseline respect for individual autonomy and choice as long as it doesn't harm other people.
Most people are hesitant to allow this because they don't like the choices that others make. Either that or they define harm as doing anything which they don't like.
my wife is a chinese xpat who got her master's here and stayed. when we go to visit her old parents who have a picture of mao on the wall, half the sites she visits are blocked. She can't get to the things she spends half her free time on. But it's "good that youtube is blocked, there's bad stuff on it."
Most of that country is like that. The millions you see protesting on the street - there's over a billion who are against them and love their firewall which keeps out western propaganda. and when they get their door nailed shut from outside and die of starvation? we don't talk about that, that didn't happen, gramma just died of old age.
i have friends who live in moscow. lots of people - way over half, support the war. when their son gets drafted, given a non-working rifle with no bullets, and shot, and they don't get paid as promised - they get mad at putin for a day. they next day though, they blame the Ukrainians and support the ugly little bald troll even more.
trust me - you are very wrong. probably not in your local social circle - but that has a huge selection bias. go to the DMV, sit there for an hour, and just listen to people talking.
being under the boot is safe, you don't have to make decisions, you don't have to thing as your opinions are provided - as is at whom you should be angry. it's paradise for many a housecat.
>Mao
>...it's paradise for many a housecat.
Feels like a non-sequitur to compare opposition to state controlled medical coverage to the charmed life of house cats. People often opt to euthanize their aged pets. Animals which misbehave or become unmanageable are sent to shelters where they are euthanized. On the other hand, concerns about death panels and eugenics are laughed away.
Otherwise I agree somewhat with your sentiment. The two goal posts of tribal affiliation are pitted against each other. Authorities take their free kick.
The description of, "lower middle-class rednecks who form the republican party" reads exactly like the kind of partisan 'othering' you describe.
>being under the boot is safe
Do they want oppression or safety?
“Bless the king, for I can do X,” “The leader knows how to stop Y from harming us, and knows what we need,” “Damn the council, I get that I must go through them to do toys safely, but it’s so tedious,” etc. You may have never heard any of this, but it’s rather common all the same.
This doesn't make them good people. Good intentions mean very little when weighed against the outcome.
This is why I hate all republicans
>yes, they do want to be oppressed - but by their own people. not by your people.
This is a half truth. Nobody wants to be oppressed, but they will choose the boot they think is lighter on them or heavier on others.
You may have been around a lot of different people, but I don't think you actually listened if this is the conclusion you are drawing. You can take that as a comment from someone who identifies more as a "middle class redneck" and then the equivalent alternative.
Nobody is clamoring to have their medical and retirement benefits taken away, but they have been sold on the idea that the alternative is to pay for both their own and that of other people. They are picking the less oppressive option as they understand them.
You can ask your in-laws what they think the alternative to Mao was. You can ask the Russians what they think the alternative to Putin is. Both will provide you an alternative that they think would be worse.
People will accept some oppression if they think it is the Lesser of two options. They don't actively seek it out
- A way to post a video of injustice without being traced back
- A way to shoot a video without others knowing
- A way to prove you aren't just a troll or foreign agent
- miniaturizing hardware like your dish so that they can be hidden easily
This is hyperbole. A dictator might have the tools to shut off a couple of dissident. But if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.
> Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
That's a bit contradictory to what you said a few sentences before. Most people like to be the oppressors but not oppressed.
if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.
A counter example is the CCP backing down from the Covid restrictions under popular pressure. If enough people put pressure, the government will react.
> Dictators will massacre their own people
You have to be reminded that the government (and the army) are themselves made of the people. This has the interesting consequences that the most brutal ones are actually oil-funded (because they can outsource security) or countries that have a racial/cultural divide (because they can rally one segment of the population against another, ie: Syria).
Mao did kill off millions in the Great Leap, with no dissent.
Mass starvation.
Source: I worked for a company that had an office in China, and was responsible for maintaining the Chinese servers. In that case, I had to troubleshoot multi-hour MySQL replication lags. Solved by switching the TCP implementation to BBR, because it is resistant to packet loss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/books/review/1000-years-o...
The solution is not technical. My dad had a TV sat dish during the communist regime. He was scheduled to be arrested in '90, but the regime fell during the winter of the previous year.
It is illegal to bring them into the country, and if you get caught doing so it's jail time. That is true today of drones and any sat communication system in many, many countries.
Even in North Korea, this process takes place. It's just that much slower and riskier, and when lots of controls are slapped on people become too destitute to buy product. But the letter of the law is ultimately just a "threat" in your SWOT analysis when you're able to tempt people with personal gain.
What good governance ultimately does is to enable everyone's indifference on these matters: the rules are out in the open, nobody's keeping secrets and blackmailing their rivals, and the result is sufficiently fair that going against it is a position only a tiny minority are inclined to take. Once everyone's in circumlocutions about their actual position because the politics have gotten out of hand, you have the kind of confusing, hysterical mess that would move someone to turn off the Internet rather than let any more rumors spread.
Thus, this kind of tech - anything in the realm of decentralized communications - is easiest to access in the places of the world that need it the least.
I drove my own vehicle across the land borders into Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, DRC, Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Egypt and about 40 more countries.
You DO NOT want to bring sat communication equipment into countries where it is strictly prohibited.
Some of those countries won't even let you bring 2-way radios in (military tech)
There, you nailed it. I wish I could give you +10 ;)
Not you though, right?
European countries have different levels of restrictions on the US, more lax in some areas, tighter in others. The main difference with the US is that the EU doesn't pretend they have unlimited free speech, the US does.
These kinds of laws are only possible because we have less strict and explicit rights to free speech in our constitution than the us.
Yes, sure this is a bit of dark spot for freedom of speech in Germany. From what I'm seeing though pauli zoo got suspended from twitter afterwards and there has been neither suit nor countersuit in that case. So maybe there is more hidden detail here than is publicly known.
The leader of my state (Berlin) is a cheater (proven; plagiarized heavily in her diss) and I strongly dislike her. I'm also positive she's exactly the kind of petty and vindictive person to go after random people insulting her.
A police raid in itself is a huge punishment already. Your home gets violated, lots of stuff destroyed and in this case, all computers and hard drives taken away. If that happened to me, it would be months of absolute pain to return to normality.
First, technically there are no EU citizens, only citizens of EU member states. Speech is handled at member state level (e.g. hate speech, as in inciting violence against an ethnic or religious group, or displaying Nazi affiliation will be handled very differently in Portugal that never had direct Nazi rule, Germany that is doing it's best to make sure there are never Nazis again, and Poland that suffered centuries of massacres from violent oppressors, including the Nazis) so it's even less correct of a saying in this case.
Second, just because it doesn't fit your ideal of free speech, it doesn't make it non-free. Free is directional (from or to), on a spectrum and a matter of perception.
There are no public places on Earth with absolute free speech, and the vast majority of people prefer it that way.
Are you saying that's something that has happened? Do you have a link?
Many women with life threatening conditions get stuck waiting for the inevitable because they have already created evidence by going to a doctor. If anything happens to the baby without evidence of natural causes, they can be prosecuted. This has put women in a tough place.
This is a story that might help you understand
https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-do...
1. an abortion to end a pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother
2. an abortion to end a pregnancy where the fetus's life is already threatened
3. an abortion that threatens the life of the mother
4. an abortion that threatens the life of the fetus
Your first link only matches meaning 4. But meaning 4 is tautological, so I'm not sure it makes sense.
In the second link no one was prosecuted.
In neither link was a doctor prosecuted.
I was thinking exactly that the other day, while watching a TV show on national publicly funded television, where a variety of pundits where discussing the first year of the present term of the ruling president, and the on-set comedian summed up the situation : "the panel and the country is split in two : those that don't like the ruler, and those who hate him".
The youngest panelist (a twitch political streamer) argued about constitution changes with an older panelist (journalist in a far right newspaper). The table was filled with various levels of right center, vaguely socio democrats, a few has been still stuck in the 70s, etc...
Everyone talked very loudly and eloquently.
We may lack direct power, direct control over our institution, we may live in tight societies with few chances of social mobility, we definitely have press ownership issues, etc...
But for one think, i believe we have _some_ freedom of speech.
No, I'll leave the floor to those who define "free speech" as "the freedom to insult" :P
The "sway" that social media platforms have over public discourse is often vastly overstated for political ends, certainly compared to that of governments (as the argument is often made that social media platforms are more powerful than governments, to make them seem more threatening.)
And the real problem is, if you consider the ability of social media platforms to moderate content to be harmful, the only solution is to have government limit the free speech of those platforms and those who participate on them by coercing them into publishing speech they don't want to, which cedes power to a potentially even worse entity. People are so terrified of the perceived power social media has now (to the point of wanting to make "algorithms" illegal) that they're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Facebook can ban me from their platform but at least they can't send goons to my house and ban me from life.
They are very few (read: "none as far as I know it") people jailed in the EU for having said that vaccines were "dangerous / ineffective / a plot by the governement to inject 5G chip / insert theory here" - neither for writing it on social media, nor for telling it on broadcast radio / TV.
However, and sorry for the cliché, there seems to be some places where you can get in jail for calling a "special operation" a cat.
Speech, like pretty much every other freedom, is restricted by laws. And, we do have a pretty decent level of separation of powers as far as "putting people in jail" is concerned; so, to put you in jail for a long time, the "insult" has to be recognized by lawmaker, judges and governement.
(The situation is more troublesome for "putting you in jail for a few hours after a demonstration". But the forerunner for "repression" on this front at the moment in Europe, is, ironically enough... the UK [1]. So, good for them that they're not under "EU tyranny" anymore, I guess ?)
Europe has a troubled history on this front (we had certain issues for letting certain people "freely" explain why certain religious minorities had to be "dealt" with). So some countries passed some laws barring some discourse about race, slaverly, discrimination, etc... that would be protected by free speech laws in other countries.
(And, contrary to one pervasive piece of "free speech", there is not yet a "global goverment" enacting the same laws everywhere. Go figure.)
As for free speech on social media platform, that's a different topic. But my very personnal opinion to think that "insulting people while protected by putting the blame on twitter" is not a fundamental right. Open a blog, become a "publisher" under "freedom of the press" laws dating back to the late 1800s. Then, bear the consequences of your speech. (Neither is twitter's right to earn money from publishing insults while claiming they're not a publisher.) But, just my 2c, and I agree to disagree.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/08/labour-urge...
Societies stood, jails are not flooded with opponents, I get the weekly interview of an antivax/covidsceptic/whatever on the radio because they're on the "right" political team, the governments are paying the political prices of their handling in the ballot boxes.
This is not perfect and never was meant to. Sorry if you were told otherwise.
Tides turn. People you agree with will be in the ruling majority some day. This will hurt even more ;)
< People you agree with will be in the ruling majority some day. This will hurt even more ;)
In fact, I am psat that, because this was exactly what happened to me. We had a coalition between center-right and the green party. Even the socialists turned up and everyone seemed to unite into a coalition to divide the people. I am lacking the eloquence in english to explain myself fully, but the lesson I got, sadly, was that you really can not trust anyone to not corrupt and try to control you.
Even if this would be absolutely true, it would not undermine democracy. It just would proof the need to have build in mechanisms to keep the people in power in check. Exactly because you cannot trust people 100%. And mechanisms like this exist and are in place, but I agree, they should be improved.
As an aside, to be honest, I've always been undecided about demonstrations.
I dread for the day were they will be systematically forbidden or brutally repressed. And then again, I live in a country that is in a perpetual state of strike and demonstrations, but we're it's cool and fashionable not to vote, because, "it doesn't change anything".
I love the creativity that comes in cardboard slogans. (I want to meet the person who invented "16-64 : it's a beer, to a career" during this pension reform season.) And yet, I always feel uncomfortable about being in the same crowd as other, much less original and much more simplistic slogans.(sorry, but I _saw_ the posters explaining that every single person wearing a mask or getting a jab was a fascist decrebrated sheep. Or that COVID was just a trick from the <insert your favorite scapegoat here>. I would not have like walking behind this, sorry.)
Also, at how many people does a demonstration starts to represent "the will of the people" ? It seems like any cause can summon 500.000 people in the streets in May, provided the weather is good. 1 million people is almost a "revolution".
And yet, 1.000.000 people gets you less than 5% of any election with a decent turnout. Should that matter ?
Also, to be clear : I'm frailed or not particularly brave. The idea that "just because you're a big mob, and you can threaten to break stuff, you're right" is frightening.
I supposed I would be even more frightened in an "actual" dictatorship. So, plenty of cognitive dissonance to deal with, hey ?
Maybe I'm just enjoying the privileged position of a country where we get elections that are not entirely tricked (source : my perversion is tallying votes on Sunday nights. Cool kids don't do that, but they don't vote either - They get ready for the next demonstration.)
I hope that, if we ever loose that, I'll get the courage to demonstrate.
Although this is not a EU thing, thus varies country by country, that’s something I’m not happy about the European approach to freedom of speech.
It’s usually the Nazi stuff and defamation that is not allowed, so it doesn’t affect most people but still is in principle I would prefer the absolute free speech. The American approach is better on this.
It is not if you're the victim of the so called "freedom of speech" of others and can't do anything about it... The US also doesn't have absolute freedom of speech, just a different set of rules that makes them believe they do.
1) Certain speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" has long been considered illegal.
2) The US has much more expansive laws about "conspiracy to..." which make it illegal to have certain conversations.
Oh, those don't count? Not real speech. Sure, why not.
3) Most people will experience very real economic consequences for a very wide range of speech. We're not all yeoman farmers entirely independent of paid employment.
That presumably doesn't count because only governments can restrict liberties? Well, have it your way but I would regard losing my job due to speech as a pretty severe restriction on my liberty.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:2bf140bf-...
It seems to me that if I were an EU citizen, the EU would be the ones who had to remove my citizenship, and that would be a very controversial step. I don't recall long winded speeches in the UN denouncing the EU for forcefully removing the citizenship of millions of people, which leads me to think that it's not a "real" citizenship.
"Nigeria citizen" == "Nigerian nationality"
"EU citizen" != "EU nationality"
This was a serious curtailment to free speech. "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a euphemism for telling people to dodge the draft during WWI, making this restriction an overt curtailment of free political speech. Thankfully though, this was overturned several decades ago. The current standard is that you can't "incite imminent lawless action", so for instance it's not legal to say "Hey everybody, let's lynch Mvandenbergh from that tree right now!" But to your point, this is still a restriction on free speech, it's not an absolute right in America. You are correct on that point.
I would rather suggest that this is a education issue, mainly on how to widespread behavior that favor common goods and reciprocal mutual help as the basis of every single human out there. That is, methodologies like Marshall Rosenberg worked at disseminating.
Any other option is a race to the bottom of the rawest brutality.
>The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed.
Should I be haunted with so awful thoughts, I wish some people could help me to find an effective mental healing process, really.
Life is hard, and people having to struggle with of all sort of issues will certainly take what seems on the moment to be the easiest path to bring a bit more stability in the mess they are going through. But in no case that mean that anyone is deeply craving for oppression.
>many people want to control and silence others who don't agree
Well, that doesn’t reflect my own experience of interacting with many people. We agree that some people can be animated with that kind of despicable mindset. And we agree, certainly, that some of them can successfully gain significant political/social power. A very small minority of people like that is enough to engender nation wide desolation.
>Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
Maybe try to go in different social circles out there. You might be positively surprise.
Counterpoint: guns, doors, wrenches and jails are tools as well. So, I don't buy this notion that technology can't solve societal issues.
It's like saying you can't fix a leaky faucet with a wrench because the real problem is that the pipes are old and rusty. Sure, the root cause may be a societal issue, but that doesn't mean we can't use technology to mitigate the problem. I mean, imagine telling a doctor not to prescribe medicine to a sick patient because the real issue is poor lifestyle choices.
I'd go as far as saying, technology is by far most likely to solve societal issues, but it usually happens indirectly, in ways not easily predicted.
To use your example:
> It's like saying you can't fix a leaky faucet with a wrench because the real problem is that the pipes are old and rusty.
Yes, and technological solution for this ends up being... all the metal pipes getting replaced with plastics, because plastics are that amazing and petroleum industry made them cheap as dirt. There are many "technological solutions" at play here, most of them have nothing to do with plumbing, but together they both make the plastic pipes possible, and through economics, make them suddenly appear in everyone's houses.
(The whole setup of course comes with new problems in other areas, but that's almost always the case with any solution to anything.)
> I mean, imagine telling a doctor not to prescribe medicine to a sick patient because the real issue is poor lifestyle choices.
This is what a good chunk of the world believes, and tries to tell the doctors and patients alike. I consider this to be "fuck you advice"; "poor lifestyle choices" are usually not actually choices, and lifestyle changes are much, much harder to implement (often impossible in practice) compared to a medical intervention.
As a EU citizen, I really have no clue where you pulled that from. We must have a very different definition of freedom of speech.
I can criticize my government openly and as much as I want but I can't call for a genocide or do a nazi salute. Most of us are perfectly fine with that, but thanks for your concern about our freedom.
They have to catch you first.
What if every computing device sold in the West came as standard with built in, secure mesh networking and ability to uplink to satellites?
Then governments like Pakistan would have to use those computers, and lose the ability to control what their people say.
Alternatively, they could:
(1) not use computers, dooming their country to perpetual poverty
(2) come up with their own solution, and they're too small an economy to come up with one that isn't backward
(3) buy a solution from another autocracy, such as China -- and doom their country to be forever controlled by China
The problem with this idea is that the West doesn't want every compute to come with built in secure mesh networking, because they want to snoop on their people too. But if they did go for this idea, because they're a freer society than their competitors (China and Russia, mainly) it would give them a massive advantage.
> the oppression of you can simply come from a majority (EU citizens have no freedom of speech)
That's a gross over-simplification. EU citizens have a good deal more freedom of speech than in most societies that've ever existed; and in every society there are things you might say that will get you in serious trouble.
> There is no answer, because many people want to control and silence others who don't agree
A lot do; these people are stupid and if they were more sensible they would realise that among societies, there is a strong correlation between amount of freedom of speech and how nice the place is to live in.
> Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
They imagine they will be the person wielding the fist and not the person being punched by it.
In truth it will be the ruling class doing the restrictions on freedom. And because power corrupts, even if the ruling class start off as perfectly moral and just people (ha!) they won't stay that way for long.
One of the most effective ways to maintain an authoritarian regime is to proactively prevent a critical mass of revolt from forming. You just need to keep a steady low volume of arrests and disappearances going for people who express discontent. If not enough people are actively expressing discontent, you fill your quota with members of a group or area that you see as a risk. History shows that your people will stay silent and meek, clinging to the belief that they personally have done nothing wrong.
A means of communication which authorities cannot snoop on is absolutely essential for any oppressed population that yearns to breathe free.
Everyone knows what is going on and keeps the status quo, but a shock (often external) occurs to ignite the dry wood, and disruption erupts.
Demonstrations and riots can be healthy releases of tension in democracies. Bottle-in the regular microquakes, and you get devastating earthquakes instead.
I would say Russia, China, and North Korea (all well-known to disappear people) have been incredibly stable. Even countries that were quite liberal (e.g., Iran, Myanmar) have worn their populations down into compliance in their major cities. Even the liberal West is borrowing from the same playbook (e.g., police raids on investigative journalists, politically motivated prosecutions).
The strategy works, but as you imply, maybe there's a breaking point... or maybe totalitarian states have figured out how to get as close to that line as possible without crossing it.
That said, I find FreakWAN [1] (from the creator of Redis) a very interesting low-cost, low-powered communication protocol that can go VERY far[2]
The real question is how you do this in a way that doesn't encourage one-sided propaganda, sybil attacks, etc.
I'm reminded of systems like Secure Scuttlebutt and the Othernet satellite transport. https://othernet.is/
I know the internet is fundamentally two-way. It seems there's always a few competent users who know how to get information out of a conflict zone or disaster area... getting information in beyond a few choke points seems to be the hard part.
It's a social one, because social means are what are used to enforce the lockdowns - and those social means exist because of socially justified purposes in the societies.
Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).
A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic.
> and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit.
Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
"Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
- Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment.
- 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see.
- An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable).
That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever.
Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway. They’ll just knuckle under the societal rules which forbid it, because the cost of doing it in a way they won’t likely be caught and imprisoned isn’t worth it to them.
Most people just care about having food in their belly every day, feeling safe and loved, and being able to believe that what they’re doing is okay day to day and will work out to be all good in the future.
Doing what you’re proposing doesn’t really help them with that.
Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future.
SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted.
Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.
You say ‘robust’ for societies as if it’s a given positive, but there is an implied statement hidden there.
Robust against what?
Robust against censorship is rarely desired by the majority (and certainly not openly), because the censorship is with the consent (and often at the request of!) the majority.
Just look at the CSAM/Kiddie Porn discussion in the US.
At least as long as the majorities interests and the gov’ts interests align enough, which is usually for far longer than anyone wants to admit.
So as long as it doesn’t step on the majorities ability to get what they want when they want it more than they are willing to tolerate, robustness against it will always be a feature with a limited market and a lot of opposition. An anti-feature in some ways, or at least it will be spun that way.
We may consider robustness against this good - and I personally do - but in my experience that is far from a common attribute, especially if you boil it down to specific examples.
Should Pakistan be able to robustly send how to bomb US targets + propaganda to everyone? Should someone be able to do the same with child porn? Or anti-Islamic rhetoric? Or anti-women’s rights? Or anti-free speech?
I think I explained "robust" in the post above pretty well. It's about making a network that works and delivers information even when things go wrong or when there's not much infrastructure available.
Primarily for the use case where there's just not much reliable infrastructure. I like the idea of getting a local snapshot of news, important source repository updates, and other things important to me during little snippets of connectivity.
But this also makes things useful for the case where the infrastructure is impaired. Perhaps by natural disaster. Perhaps by state interference. Perhaps by individual commercial actors.
Yes, "how does one determine what the network distributes broadly" is a complicated question. It should be democratic and resilient to being coopted. I understand this is very, very hard. But I don't think it's intractable, and even without it the other building blocks of a network like this are attainable (general resilience and reliability).
If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow.
Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.
Yah, these types of things would be hard to detect (just point an LNB at the southbound sky... no dish... cheap electronics...)
What it's not is turnkey or filled with a good feed of information that people would want at baseline. There's no adoption model besides being a dissident, and people tend to start planning for that too late.
It is receive only-- not an uplink.
(I'm sure a tiny bit of RF leaks out of the LNB, but that could be mitigated as it is not designed for stealth).
definitely not solving the same ‘problem’ at all though.
Any receiver using the heterodyne principle (this includes most current digital radio modems) is trivially detected by its local oscillator, often to some considerable range (potentially hundreds of metres).
In the UK, the BBC used to exploit this, with radio detection vans patrolling the streets for unauthorized receivers, to fine people for watching TV without a license. So did the USSR with shortwave receivers, where the penalty was potentially more than a fine. A satellite receiver is the same, in principle.
I'm sorry. This is not intrinsic; this is a design choice. Yes, most LOs just care about getting under legal emission masks, but there's nothing to prevent one from bringing it much lower.
Further, as I explained: the LO frequency of the LNB for the first conversion is often the exact same frequency as you'd use to downconvert digital TV broadcast.
> In the UK, the BBC used to exploit this, with radio detection vans patrolling the streets for unauthorized receivers, to fine people for watching TV without a license.
They never found anyone in a way that could be used for prosecution. "A freedom of information act has revealed that TV Detector vans have never to date provided evidence to be used in court against the TV Licence Non-payer, and have therefore never succeeded in enforcing the TV licence."
Better testing to compliance standards has pushed LOs down way lower than they were in the 40s-60s. We have relatively cheap high quality spectrum analyzers and big integrated measurements. So-- kinda everyone pushes things down pretty low now.
> My point was merely that with an average radio, which was designed to just not be harmfully interfering, such as typical satellite TV receiver?
Yah-- this LNB looks just like a satellite TV receiver, with the exact same LO frequency. So your rogue downlink looks exactly like something that there's hundreds of innocent versions around.
Then a SDR inside your house chooses a different signal from the transponder and gets the data.
[https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/government-bans-imp...]
Of course, so are most drugs in the US.
Point taken though!
I mean, I guess it's possible. But probably not your top priority during a time of potential unrest. And it probably won't work that well as a way to find people with the links.
Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable, though, so you'll need to hide it, possibly inside some innocuous-looking other device or enclosure.
The whole setup becomes somehow more involved, but still cheap enough.
Yes-- and every piece you mention is "quality radio design 101".
> Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable
I'm not sure about that.
The biggest most suspicious thing is, if they're resourced to investigate everyone with a piece of coax going outside-- where does yours plug into?
Of course, if you're really dedicated-- get a satellite TV receiver, empty out the nice metal box, put the receiver inside ;).
People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t. They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and easier to distribute in a censorship-resistant manner. That’s why Tor is much more popular than high-latency censorship resistant networks that share static blobs, even though low-latency networks are relatively insecure and much easier to block. The question then is not how to save $3 of storage media: it’s whether you can simulate the interactive experience of the Internet in a satisfying way without a reliable low-latency network connection. Maybe the answer is no, maybe it’s yes. Imagine a really high-quality future LLM that you can actually interact with and ask questions about specific topics, maybe even using voice communication, and that can play games with you and generate other types of “web like” experiences. Is that really less compelling than a download of Wikipedia?
Now imagine the hardware that you'll need to run that high-quality future LLM. How many Kiwix hotspots could you set up for the same money?
Mind you, I'm not saying that there aren't compelling use cases for LLMs. It's just that it's a thing that's nice to have after you have Wikipedia etc. Indeed, ideally you'd want to have Wikipedia indexed so that the LLM can query it as needed to construct its responses - otherwise you're going to have a lot of fun trying to figure out which parts are hallucinations and which aren't.
There are places where Internet access and compute resources are fundamentally limited by lack of infrastructure. Talking about LLMs in those places doesn’t make sense. But on the trajectory we’re currently on, those places will likely become more rare while political Internet filtering will become more common.
Currently only works in Europe and North America, but nice to know there's a middle-of-no-where service that doesn't require a sub that gives you some barebones info from the outside world.
There's a post a couple posts below on their forum with someone that put their system on the internet so you can see what it pulls in: https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2
Yup! I'm looking forward to them having equipment available again (so I don't need to homebrew).
> Don't even need a big dish.
With a decent LNB, you don't need a dish at -all-.
Just FYI, somehow I'd been ending up on this page: https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board
And believing it when it said it was not available yet.
Maybe a Starlink status feed. I can imagine some Starlink customers not having any back-up link to the world in some places.
Text weather forecasts.
CBC news feed if it can fit: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks
Maybe just include in the North American feed.
For the rest of the world, especially countries like Pakistan, solar power or a battery backup is out of reach for the majority of the population, so they won’t work.
That's because people in the US rarely, if ever, lose power, so there's no need for backups.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?location...
[2] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/22/asia/pakistan-power-outag...
I think some countries do have more backups as they have more outages. They just have to be in the range where some can afford the backups.
solar adoption in the country is very low
North India has so many power outages that it is normal to have very large batteries in your house to ride them out.
There exists a similar situation with water supply. What started out as 24 hours running water back in 1970s has ended up as supply at low pressure for < 1 hour once or twice a day. As a result everyone has built additional storage water tanks and added in line pumps to suck water when the supply is present. The in line pumps are illegal, but everyone has one.
getting back to topic, India also has the government frequently shut down mobile and broadband internet to control communal riots and anti-government protests.
This just isn't true. I had regular power outages when I lived in the US. Usually they'd only last some hours and usually they were caused by weather (the midwest has storms) or animals. This could have been solved by burying the cables, but that probably wouldn't happen any tine soon. In more than one location, it would have been helpful since the no power meant no water from the well.
Weather causes a lot of power outages - thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat, and icestorms cause this. In other areas, the electrical grid is barely holding up and just can't always take the demand well. (Example: Hot areas during the summer)
Losing power happens regularly.
Most people can't afford to have a backup system, and a good chunk of the folks that can have a backup simply can't install such a thing in their rental or the apartment they own.
And I have never had an outage in the 20+ years I've lived in SF (except for the one time they were doing maintenance and had announced the outage days in advance).
See? Anecdotes prove nothing. Remember: I wrote "rarely". I would say 99.9999% availability (for me) is pretty good.
It doesn't help that even if app sideloading was made possible on iOS, the significant drop in installations will still happen once the apps are pulled from official stores. Most people are not familiar with installing apps from outside of their phone's sponsored ecosystem.
1. How do you access said apps? There has to be some repository storing the apps.
2. Certain regions can straight up ban sideloading by only allowing pre-approved app stores (eg. Mainland China). Ofc there will be technical ways to bypass this, but you are limited by technical knowhow and internal intelligence agencies abilities to find those people.
3. You could make using certain apps with such capabilities illegal. People may try to use it, but if found among a small set of protesters, they can just be "isolated". How do you prevent that?
Sent to you via bluetooth file sharing (an OS feature) by someone else who already has it. Or tor, vpn, etc.
What if Bluetooth File Sharing is disabled via a region lock? (Eg. China)
What if the only VPNs allowed are those that have prior approval from an Interior Ministry?
What if a country initiates Internet Whitelisting at the ISP level for "national security reasons" and requires every user to maintain access logs?
In addition, certain countries may require you to run approved Roms, and if you don't you can face prosecution.
This has been done in action in India with ISPs like Jio to block TPB for example.
Remember - any traffic over the internet can be logged by your service provider (eg. ISP, VPN, etc)
Mass File Sharing Blacklisting has been enforced by Indian ISPs since 2019
VPN+ISP traffic log sharing has been enforced in Kazakhstan (along with SSL stripping)
Blocking Tor downloads has been implemented already (with varying levels of success) plus attacks to deanonomize Tor have started occurring since 2021.
Turkïye has implemented ISP Whitelisting ostensibly for Children but the same core technology can be extended to everything - https://internet.btk.gov.tr/guvenli-internet-hizmeti
App Store restrictions and region locks have existed in Mainland China since the early 2010s.
It's very easy to tamp down and censor internet based communications. Individual corporations have the capabilities to apply such censorship if they wanted to, let alone ISPs.
I'm not raising the bar btw, I'm just someone who works in the intersection of cybersecurity, government, and business.
How do you pay the satellite provider?
If you think such a complex and broad question can be distilled to a pithy HN comment, go right ahead - why demand that I do it?
I pointed OP to the words that best enable them to find their own answers. That's not a waste of time, it's useful information that they seem to have lacked.
If you don't think that's useful, fine - offer your own answer.
It can be civil (friendly arguments resolved directly to lawsuits) or it can be violent (cartels dissolving people in barrels of acid), but it always has the same problems - who has control/sets the rules. Those almost always include control of the money, control of women/men in their respective domains of producing kids/violence, and the definition of 'the truth'.
Sure thing. All you have to do is to come out in big numbers, beat your fucking rulers into submission and replace them with do good types. Easy peasy. If not they'll get you no matter what tech you use.
Encryption is great but some of its proponents seem not to grasp more concrete realities.
Jokes aside, corporations are no better than governments when it comes to censorship. They're corruptible, centralized points of failure.
Been to Pakistan lately?
Also, consider that ratio triangulation is a century-old technique. It seems exceedingly unlikely that a hostile government would forget this and not take out the transmitters.
https://wccftech.com/starlink-turns-on-laser-satellites-for-...
For most people, it's entertainment. And before the internet, we had newspapers and television and radio and telephones, much more easily blocked by authoritarians than the internet.
I work with many that live out of the city. They're good people.
who's hacking StarLink?