User Controls
An Alternate Internet
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2015-10-11 at 3:28 PM UTCI suspect the landscape of the internet in general is going to change (drastically) for the worse in the next few years - the likely ratification of the TPP is bad enough, but if it passes, the specific language used signals a pivot away from free exchange of information to a paid dissemination platform, starting with the end of net-neutrality and ending fuck knows where.
maybe that's a paranoid interpretation, maybe go fuck yourself.
the point is, how could we replace the internet if it stopped being viable to use for free expression? in the past I've considered shortwave/narrowband radio, but it's not ideal because issues with latency, speed and transmission quality would restrict the data that could be sent/received and the number of parties connected to a session.
we could potentially fall back on the old dial-in BBS model, but it'd be very easy to track and shut down.
could we repurpose old hardware, like decommissioned satellite networks or unused copper that the phone company laid? I've heard ideas like this thrown about in the past, but looking into it, I believe you'd need to set up your base stations, repeaters, interpreters etc. on the line for it to be viable for more than two people only a few km apart.
something I've been interested in is alternate data streams - for example if you wanted to share a file but couldn't use traditional methods for whatever reason, you could potentially record some random voice, encode your file into the audio (possibly in metadata, otherwise you could encode it into the raw audio but that would sound fucked up if anyone listened to it) and stream it via skype to another person (ideally a platform that uses tcp rather than udp).
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2015-10-11 at 3:31 PM UTCWe could all snort a bunch of wellbutrin and connect with each other on the 19th plane of existence.
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2015-10-11 at 3:51 PM UTCI think the idea of a peer to peer internet is the way to go. There just should be a way to properly secure it. Also i don't know if you heard but NASA is teaming up with some other government agency to start to index the deepweb. I hear a lot of hidden services will be migrating to I2P and freenet etc in the event of indexation.
Relevant: http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/08/solutions-greek-community-creates-an-off-the-grid-internet-2745072.html
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2015-10-12 at 1:37 AM UTCI don't see why anything would have to move away from Tor. I2p is cool, but when you use it it's obvious there are way fewer users, it's hard to find anything at all. I'm not totally sure how i2p differs from tor, besides that the users participate in the internal routing, but torrenting is encouraged which is cool. Tor has the advantage of being really easy to use, just download the tor browser, i2p is a major pain in the balls and you have to wait a few minutes to find peers before anything will work. Don't even get me started how tails doesn't automatically include i2p because of bullshit security reasons, but they default to allowing javascript - kind of sketch in my opinion.
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2015-10-12 at 2:05 AM UTC
I don't see why anything would have to move away from Tor. I2p is cool, but when you use it it's obvious there are way fewer users, it's hard to find anything at all. I'm not totally sure how i2p differs from tor, besides that the users participate in the internal routing, but torrenting is encouraged which is cool. Tor has the advantage of being really easy to use, just download the tor browser, i2p is a major pain in the balls and you have to wait a few minutes to find peers before anything will work. Don't even get me started how tails doesn't automatically include i2p because of bullshit security reasons, but they default to allowing javascript - kind of sketch in my opinion.
tor does not seem to be standing up to the intense scrutiny it's recently been subject to well - too many potential vulnerabilities, a few of which could have serious implications. I haven't seen any that reliably attack hidden services though. my main issue with i2p is the java router, I know a c version is in the works but no idea as to how long it'll take.
the TTP contains a clause compelling ISPs to block access to sites or services that are reported by media companies to facilitate piracy... if ISPs are complicit, and assuming they're willing to throw enough money at packet inspection and enhancementing, anonymous network traffic can potentially be blocked or interrupted at the ISP level... -
2015-10-12 at 2:07 AM UTCPacket radio?
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2015-10-12 at 3:24 AM UTC
, anonymous network traffic can potentially be blocked or interrupted at the ISP level…
When that happens, i''ll start a terror campaign complete with bombings and beheadings. -
2015-10-12 at 3:58 AM UTCThey may be able to fuck with people at the ISP level, but then those people can just start providing phony ID to the ISP level when they open the account and still remain anonymous. They can also fuck them for the bill, too, when the time comes.
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2015-10-12 at 3:09 PM UTCthat'd give you some degree of anonymity, but it won't bypass ISP blocks on services that a multinational deems 'damaging to their profits'.
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2016-02-15 at 7:07 AM UTCI don't think what you're saying is crazy at all. In fact, we're in a very exciting time in computer science.
If I would have told you in the 1990s that there was a secret internet, you needed a special browser to access it, and it bounced your IP address across different corners of the globe, people would have been blown away. Nowadays, everyone has access to that technology. Even a lot of Linux packages come with offers to install TOR as part of the basic software. Granted it's not as secure as it once was, but I think people forget that this tool was around since about 2004. I remember using it for the first time when I was in high school.
Aldra is right in saying that the federal government has a lot of power, but something so big moves very slowly. It takes a very long time for them to identify these new technologies, understand them, convince the people in charge that it's a threat which justifies abandoning current affairs to stop the same crimes, raise the money to infiltrate them, and finally compromise them. It's true Tor has been compromised, but nobody is really sure to what degree. I considered it unsafe around 2014ish when SilkRoad went down and a lot of the other websites were getting busted. Personally I always thought that a great strategy for the government is to just to buy a ton of nodes and make them part of the project, because you can basically eavesdrop on traffic if you're an exit-node.
I digress, but my point is that this technology was advanced before it was compromised, and that basically took over ten years. Don't forget, a lot of you older gentleman may remember prior to this the strategy was basically manually doing the exact same thing that TOR automated - connecting to a chain of other computers from varying locations.
There will be new technology. With that new technology will be intelligent, honest people who recognize the need for privacy and will actualize the opportunity. The government will catch up, but the most of the smart people will always be a few steps ahead. -
2016-02-15 at 7:43 AM UTCScary stuff. I like the idea of a P2P network though. I've wanted to build/get a long distance AP and run some type of server on it, just for my neighborhood. Like a small forum or something.
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2016-02-15 at 8:35 AM UTCYour options seem to be between good privately owned infrastructure which, by definition, is beholden to corporate interests, good publicly owned infrastructure which is subject to the same issue in addition to the surveillance issue, or shitty mesh-infrastructure where it takes an indeterminate amount of time to send a packed across the continent. The mesh option means we really once and for all gives up the notion of reliable network communications but then it was an illusion to start with, you can just ignore it before getting to a certain level of ops. Public adoption is the obvious blocker, equipment and slow-as-ass connections don't exactly win over the paying public.
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2016-02-15 at 4:33 PM UTCYou all have slave mentality and can't even comprehend what laser space tech has in store for the humans smart enough to live in space.
European Space Agency[FONT=Source Sans Pro][SIZE=14px] began the construction of Phase One of a data highway in [/SIZE][/FONT]space[FONT=Source Sans Pro][SIZE=14px], by saying a laser-equipped satellite into [/SIZE][/FONT]space[FONT=Source Sans Pro][SIZE=14px] on Friday.The [/SIZE][/FONT]European Space Agency[FONT=Source Sans Pro][SIZE=14px] a new laser terminal into orbit as part of broader efforts to Europe’s first optical communication develop network started to monitor a system capable of natural disasters and other catastrophes.[/SIZE][/FONT]
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2016-02-16 at 8:50 AM UTC
Your options seem to be between good privately owned infrastructure which, by definition, is beholden to corporate interests, good publicly owned infrastructure which is subject to the same issue in addition to the surveillance issue, or shitty mesh-infrastructure where it takes an indeterminate amount of time to send a packed across the continent. The mesh option means we really once and for all gives up the notion of reliable network communications but then it was an illusion to start with, you can just ignore it before getting to a certain level of ops. Public adoption is the obvious blocker, equipment and slow-as-ass connections don't exactly win over the paying public.
I imagine this mesh internet would look like something from mad max. The 2nd movie, not the new one. Imagine leather-wearing packets trying to make their way through the wastelands, having to fight off raiders and radscorpions.
Looking back the early 2000's, I'm amazed at how simple everything was. You didn't have fancy JS frameworks, servers didn't have to handle traffic from xmlhttprequests/websockets/sse's, html documents were really documents - not js applications, people put in a lot of time and effort into making small sized jpegs/gifs/pngs and you only had to take care of 800x600/1024x768 screens. Apart from sounding like an old fart, I mean to say that the way we interact with the web is becoming more and more abstract. 10 years ago you could focus on requests, but now we have this websocket/webrtc/whatever hotness that ensures more performance (for these fucking fat 15mb+ websites w/ ads and shit) and more and more people focus on this higher-level stuff and have no idea about the underlying workings. This feels bad to me because it means people are giving up part of their freedom. Like, you can't make a simple html website nowadays, you either need to learn a lot of stuff or give away your freedom and use super high level libraries/paas like heroku/config management magic. Sure, that automation is nice and all, but only if you know what it's really doing. Yesterday I met a front-end developer who said he's never heard of "sprites", wtf. So we have normal users for whom the internet is pure fucking magic and we have "developers" who have no idea about networks/dbs (backenders) or sop/cors/invalid markup (frontenders). Great.
The outlook is pretty fucking bleak.
I started looking into software defined radio as I think that might be a viable option, but Ive only played around with it. Radio packet network meshes might be where it's at because of how easy it is to set them up and somewhat easy to keep them running. Of course, we'd need good crypto to ensure that even if an enemy controls nodes, the information would still be safe.
Problem here is the radio spectrum is licensed by the state and if we'd have to keep to the 2.4ghz/5ghz open portions of it, that would severely limit the range of each node. I remember reading that we could do internet in the spectrum of the now-free analog tv frequencies and we'd get gigabit speeds easily because the spectrum is so big. It'd also help with range because, if I remember my high school physics correctly, analog tv waves carry energy further and can bounce off the stratosphere whereas the current wifi waves are great at penetrating stuff like walls and doors, but lose their energy very quickly.
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2016-02-16 at 10:44 PM UTCThe power grid itself can be used as a network. It's only binary, baby.
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2016-02-16 at 10:56 PM UTCThis is a good idea for a novel.
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2016-02-16 at 10:57 PM UTCLOL, didn't read the thread. You guys beat me to it.
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2016-02-16 at 10:59 PM UTCThink of it this way. All you need is ones and zeros. A pattern. You can do that though radio waves through the air with just a receiver and a transmitter. You could do it through smoke signals using line of sight. Sure, it'll be slow-ass, but the data will still be moving. There's no way these feds can stop the free flow of information. It's a losing battle right from the get go.
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2016-02-24 at 10:13 PM UTC
Packet radio?
This is kind of an interesting concept. I know that I can use my Raspberry PI to create a radio station on AM/FM. From searching a little, it looks like it's been done for a while. The problem would be packet loss.
This didn't require anything special to get running...
https://github.com/Make-Magazine/PirateRadio -
2016-02-24 at 10:33 PM UTCI'm gonna start a moon based web hosting company with nuclear powered servers bitch how's that for alternate
