another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is
l can tell you.
It's the internet in its original form. A distributed network of independent nodes freely peering to each other over a decentralized infrastructure.
First to go was the decentralization.
Main knots like DE-CIX are now the central connection points and single point of failure (and intrusion).
Next went the independent distribution with hyperscalers taking over.
Currently the free peering is about to disappear.
E.g. my provider, a major one here in Germany, just announced to completely remove from free public peering and let a private company handle it for him instead.
This company then charges other peers based on bandwidth.
The problem of looming governmental restrictions is just the tip of the iceberg.
The internet is already rotten from the infrastructural core and there is no easy way around that...
Exactly this.
My humble approach to counter this development is self-hosting as much as I can for myself, my family and my friends. That includes everything useful from bookmark managers, media servers, file sharing, photo libraries and even a kiwix server for offline wikipedia etc.
That is great and I do the same (shoutout to my local NAS) and I also try to improve situation outside of my family by running a TOR server since things started to significantly deteriorate 20 years ago or so.
But that are just "waterdrops on hot stones" and have no impact on the 99% of people who don't have the means or expertise to do likewise.
Main focus must be to steer politics away from deciding such laws and to implement regulation against monopolies and closed infrastructure instead. I know that's tedious and probably neverending work, but the only viable long-term option I see.
The Internet can grow from its roots again. It started out with two nodes connecting to each other. Run a link to your friend. Wired or microwave link. In 75 years we might have a whole second internet going on. :D
“An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”. “Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!”
I tried to invent a similar concept before finding out that there are already several implementations 😅
It lacks the bandwidth for actual Internet use unfortunately.
The Internet used to lack the bandwidth for actual Internet use. Let's go back to html and small css files at most for private websites.
I used to do everything on a 2400 baud modem (though admittedly it sucked pretty hard until 28.8k).
Yeah I wasn’t gonna over explain but the intended use here is not live streaming. I’d go for a mesh trickle request and wait for it to download to your local node type of thinking.
Patience.
I suppose the use case would be for journalists, distributing banned books, and so on - pure text-based information. However, video footage is extremely useful in today's media environment - how many current events do we see first from some tiktok or twitter video, rather than nightly news?
Until that gets regulated, too.
I mean I'm all for it but I don't see how it can gain popularity yet remain out of the law's reach.
Meshnet decentralized platforms.
It's as if the USA and UK are locked in a perpetual "hold my beer" moment with their legislation.
Then again, Europe is also pushing some boundaries with it's chat snooping laws.
A bad time to be an internet user really...
I feel like a lot of my European (EU citizen) friends are commentating from some high horse but in reality I feel European lawmakers are just watching how this plays out before deciding to follow suit.
They're trying to introduce backdoors to various chat programs right now, so they're likely going to be guilty of the same invasion of privacy soon.
Better than being dead though.
I think we need some kind of limiting principle applied to restrict what individual jurisdictions can do to fuck up national or global systems.
Overzealous lawmakers in Michigan or Wisconsin shouldn't be able to force global companies to operate their websites differently.
California shouldn't be able to force Glock to discontinue and re-tool its entire product line, etc.
California isn't forcing Glock to do anything. Glock wants the central valley and orange county market so they do what they need to do.
(I actually have no idea about the specifics of this, but I'm assuming it falls in the general shape of California trying to restrict access to murder tools and the murder tool vendor responding by finding ways around the law rather than just admitting their hobby and business kills people)
By the same logic social issues would be distributed to the states, civil rights. Which is what's happening now. The interstate commerce act is a stroke of brilliance tbh, it allows the states to work as a greater system without there being a patchwork of laws and regulations. I don't think dropping it would be wise just because we've reached this level of stupidity... time to suffer consequences.
If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN.
Heavily depends on what "outlawed" means.
I am certainly capable of implementing low cost workarounds to purely technical anti-VPN-measures, but certainly would not risk going to jail just for trying it.
Essentially boils down to the old saying:
"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
The moment billionaires coopted the internet was when it went downhill. They knew the threat it posed, the vision of the early cypherpunks, and made sure the internet wouldn't do that to their power.
Decentralization and accessibility are good things. Elitism and exclusionary practices do nothing good.
Very nuanced. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
Let's be clear here: lawmakers need to abandon this entire approach.
The answer to "how do we keep kids safe online" isn't "destroy everyone's privacy." It's not "force people to hand over their IDs to access legal content." And it's certainly not "ban access to the tools that protect journalists, activists, and abuse survivors.”
If lawmakers genuinely care about young people's well-being, they should invest in education, support parents with better tools, and address the actual root causes of harm online. What they shouldn't do is wage war on privacy itself. Attacks on VPNs are attacks on digital privacy and digital freedom. And this battle is being fought by people who clearly have no idea how any of this technology actually works.
If you live in Wisconsin—reach out to your Senator and urge them to kill A.B. 105/S.B. 130, and if you know someone who lives in Wisconsin—tell them to do the same. Our privacy matters. VPNs matter. And politicians who can't tell the difference between a security tool and a "loophole" shouldn't be writing laws about the internet.
If the government really wanted to protect children from the internet they'd provide locked down devices with spyware to each kid or they'd force parents to buy locked down devices. They'd punish parents if a child used a device that isn't locked down. If they actually cared about protecting children they'd monitor their parents with spyware too. Why stop with government provided safe devices and spyware though, they could install cameras in every house that has kids just so they can monitor kids 24/7.
Obviously they're not going to do any of that. There probably already is spyware in most devices and it's not like they're using it to protect them now. Banning VPNs for the sake of protecting children is just as stupid.
They never fucking do. Governments as they are currently ran are becoming a failed concept
It's only a matter of time before some protocol is invented that bypasses all of this with some simple code or some plugin.
You can't just ban your way to compliance.
There's already several of them. You can even run things like cjdns which is entirely encrypted and p2p routed.
Yes. You pirate anything?
There are ways around that kind of stuff even for the most stringent of governments. Of course inherently there's always a risk you asked me if I'm willing to take it and I said yes.
Fucking idiots!
Hey guys, remember when these same countries ragged on China for being against freedom of expression?
The sad part is, banning VPNs for most users is extremely doable now.
Source: I have been to China not that long ago and VPNs are mostly cooked now :(
Luckily my state government seems to encourage VPN use (despite the federal government's horseshittery): https://www.vic.gov.au/...
Install a VPN to be slightly safer on public WiFi
Nobody's reading tfa. They aren't banning VPNs, they're banning websites that allow access to users using a VPN. Which is stupid, of course, but it isn't going to get in the way of your piracy. 1337x does not care about Wisconsin state law.
Websites subject to this proposed law are left with this choice: either cease operation in Wisconsin, or block all VPN users, everywhere, just to avoid legal liability in the state. One state's terrible law is attempting to break VPN access for the entire internet, and the unintended consequences of this provision could far outweigh any theoretical benefit.
If anything, they're effectively going to build a Great Firewall around Wisconsin. Much easier to just not serve the approximately 10 users from that state than it is to implement the measures they're demanding
This is just step one of them trying to absolutely ban VPNs.
A website can't determine VPN use very effectively, won't be long until they "need the governments help" for compliance.
Edited to add: they aren't going to ban business VPNs people use your critical thinking skills here.
China outlaws VPN use and has an exemption for businesses. It would be easy to follow the same guidelines anywhere else.
Yeah, they'll absolutely ban VPNs and then literally every business that uses them will move out of the state. Do you think VPNs exist only for piracy and bypassing region restrictions??? Like literally every business uses them
You know how the FOIA isn't applied to Congress?
It'll be just like that, but with exemptions for businesses using VPNs.
China literally does this already. There is already a precedent set.
Everyone is always so obtuse when it comes to this discussion like they wouldn't absolutely protect economic interests while fucking over the ability for the common man to use VPNs and similar technology.
I read tfa and banning use of VPNs is, in fact, a possibility to be compliant. Because how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin? The website can't, presumably, trace the user's location (defeating the entire purpose of the VPN), so that leaves VPN providers as the next responsible party.
Nothing in this bill would lead to the use of VPNs being banned. Any given website could hypothetically ban the use of VPNs to access it, but that's not a ban on VPNs the way the headline makes it out to be.
how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin?
It's impossible, which means that in order to be compliant, websites would have to simply stop serving Wisconsin, like they already have with several other US states. There is nothing preventing either you or Pornhub from sending whatever 1s and 0s you want to some random Mullvad server in Canada. They can't even punish Mullvad for this, as the text of the bill explicitly "prohibits business entities from knowingly and intentionally publishing or distributing material harmful to minors on the Internet," and any good VPN has no idea what material you're accessing via their servers.
You're making a very technical, logical interpretation of the bill. The problem is that the bill was written by illogical, naive people. This brand of government has already proven they want to hold VPNs accountable and have tried to force tracking into them. Having a bulletproof defense doesn't mean governments can't try to drag them through court anyway, especially when VPNs have already been publicly vilified as something only bad people use.
Once it happens there they will start copying it to every state they can.
The mythical "they." I can't wait for Kansas lawmakers to see Wisconsin's complete isolation from the rest of the world and think "this will be popular among our constituents"
The "they" in these circumstances are lobbyists, not lawmakers.
lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond (UK). Please specify the place, the world is not us* centred
Didn't we have this discussion like, a month ago, when this happened somewhere else? And a month earlier than that? And another month earlier than that?
Hopefully, the pushback will keep coming alongside with it. That's shitfuckery level of a stupid proposal.
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Rich people want to control everything by locking down the internet. It’s time to create another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is, but it’s the only way to ensure our freedom.
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