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Comment by Borg3 | Hacker News Reader

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the battle. Just wake F*ing up...

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Continuing on your suggestion.

There could be open source tooling to create custom private "closednets", with

- trust ring mechanism to allow invitations, flagging, banning, and banning those that invite people who were banned

- the rules of the closednet

- search engine with opt-in scraping

- portal (remember the 80s?) with all the registered nodes, perhaps by service category such as public git repo hosts, web sites etc.

etc.

The first closednet could be Hacker News.

I just used a VPN yesterday and the NY times blocked me because they think I look like a bot. It gave a couple possible reasons, one being "a bot was also using this IP address".

VPNs are great for torrenting but any serious website like an online bank or web email provider will turn you away. They claim it's for bots but really it because they only want customers they can track.

You're conflating a VPN as in a virtual private network, with a VPN as in Nord/Atlas/ExpressVPN, which use the same underlying technology in a different way.

I think you'd struggle to keep LLM bots off the network unfortunately.

If it had any real value, anyway.

Small, truly private communities could be an interesting thing though.

How I can strugle to keep them off? To peer to network, you need to talk to human. Arrange L2 connection, assign IPs (only static). If its leaf node, we are done. If its another network, we need to form BGP connections to exchange routing.

Yeah, Network by Humans for Humans. Thats why Im not interested in all those IoT/Auto networks when you just connect and stuff automagically configure. It looks nice at first glance, but you loose control. F2F works way better in that matter, like RetroShare, but I never investigated it much.

It doesn't have to be an IP-layer network. A website that you need to log in to view works just as well.

Nah, it needs to be IP. IP is well estabilished protocol, everything speak it. Once you set it up, you can use it whatever you like. Web pages, gaming service, IRC, Mail, P2P confereces, everything. Everyone will bring it own slice to the pie. You love networking, became PoP and peer and provide access. You just want content? Connect to closest PoP, get IP + DNSproxy and vioala.

The networking part exists, it's called DN42. But it's hard to set up. I don't see why you'd use this instead of an application layer password.

I know DN42, but this network is more oriented toward R&D and experimenting. Yeah, its not for your avarage Joe. But your avarage Joe can buy connection from VPN provider and use it, and so we can provide user friendly PoPs with minimal skills needed to setup, supporting different VPN software.

or you put a password on a website

Spoken like a true websurfer. You know, networking is not only about WWW.

You can also put passwords on things that aren't websites.

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