- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.
The social non-profit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.
You must log in or # to comment.
There’s going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We’ve had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the “Great Firewall of China” and asking themselves “Can we get something like this over here?”
This is why it’s perfect time to get some tech literacy regarding tor, i2p, yggdrasil, and shadowsocks. It’s not perfect solution to use tech to circumvent restrictions that shouldn’t be there in the first place, but sometimes it really comes to that point and it’s really nice to have all systems ready!
Arguably though, at some point they’ll just say “if we can’t read your traffic, you can’t use the Internet.”
Which still isn’t a problem, as I’m sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it’s going to take a while.
If you mean an HTTPS ban, it’s technically possible, but even mainland China and Russia haven’t gone that far. One major reason is that it would completely undermine basic internet security. It would instantly make man-in-the-middle attacks trivial, letting anyone sniff purchases, transactions, and more. Buying anything online - or using a credit card at all - would suddenly become extremely risky.
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
You mean “at which point, people will just say ‘oh, ok’”. (Assuming they even notice)
“People” will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it
Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.
Like Metastatic on LoRA?
Or maybe we’ll use software defined radios (SDR) to transmit on other unregulated bands (as a hacker, you can often force the software to believe it’s in the wrong region to transmit on bands the FTC didn’t approve, as long as it’s legal somewhere.)
Meshtastic will never replicate anything like the modern internet. It’s slower than 1980s dialup data speeds. Text messaging, maybe…but you ain’t sending a video through it, that’s for sure.
I don’t know literally ANYTHING, so take that into account when answering this, but why can’t a single person access the “Internet” on their own, without an ISP. Can’t they be their own ISP? Or can’t small groups of people - friends, family, co-conspirators - create their own private ISP?
The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It’s complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they’re a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you’re always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you’ll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.
this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.
You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
