alt Hacker NewsI refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
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Is there an uncensored intetnet, because i dont think there is. if there is any, it can be turned off because its being routed on the censored net wrapped in encryption.
that being said, that makes me pretty interested in this talk. outside of hacking sattelites and such things and/or infra i really dont see any opportunities to break free of the will of corporations as they can simply pay infra providers to do their bidding.
I dont think software can solve all problems because internet exists essentially as informaiton transported over infrastructure. the software surely helps enable that but its a helper not the actual network.
happy to learn otherwise from anyone here ofc :-)
Most people prefer censored internet as long as it aligns with their political leaning. Maybe that wasn't the case 15 years ago but it's pretty much true nowadays. I myself consider this as a fact.
FOSDEM is a great conference!
If you ever get the chance to go, please go! Especially if you're an American I recommend it. It is so different than any other conference I've ever been to in the US.
It doesn't have a lot of sales pitches, the technical content is top notch, and overall it is really fun and interesting to see what everybody is talking about and working on.
Totally with you.
The same refusal/frustration made me start Mother of all VPNs (moav.sh) early this year.
A talk I gave about the experience and what MoaV came out to be:
Rage-coding the mother of all VPNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYygWN1MZDE
> Amidst the Internet shutdowns in Iran, as a technologist and member of the Iranian diaspora, I felt so much frustration, helplessness, and anger because I couldn’t do anything. After a few days of processing the initial shock, I was able to get to work and rage-code MoaV -- still ongoing at the time of writing -- which is a modular anti–internet censorship stack, able to run 10+ internet censorship circumvention tools on a small VPS or Raspberry Pi, with the goal of democratizing VPN provisioning. In the first two weeks, the project received tens of thousands of views on X and gained more than 200 stars on GitHub. This talk will be a case study of the project’s development and how to find these niche corners of the internet that can have massive social impact if done right. I’d like to invite the audience to reflect on the daily challenges faced by people in their countries or regions and how we can use our passion to vibe-code useful tools into existence.
"Censorship" vs "Content moderation". You can't have online discussions without moderation, and that makes moderation some form of censorship. Thus you can't have online discussions without some form of censorship. Only difference is who is doing the censoring.
The chances of China becoming a democracy in the next 20 years are higher than us still being one.
We absolutely should not accept the way the internet has been going in modern times. I personally support initiatives like Reticulum/NomadNet, I2P, the Gemini protocol, etc, and think that we need more large-scale adoption of these types of networks as well as FOSS-based software just to maintain our freedom and keep some semblance of the old internet that I grew up loving in the 90s and 00s. The modern commercialized internet with its increasingly authoritarian government monitoring and control is counter-productive to liberty and individual freedom. Much love to the people who run FOSDEM and things like it, wish I could contribute more but I have a very busy schedule right now and not much time/money to travel to conventions and things. Anyway, mahalo and aloha.
The big problem with the internet - which is very dysfunctional - is not censorship but propaganda. Everyone on the internet is selling something because that is the only way to pay for being on the internet.
If the people who pay for the internet are not the users then who will the internet serve? Not the users. and since corporations are known soully (as in that is their soul) what would you expect? If people who want to profit by targeting people with lies pay for the internet, is that censorship? Well sort of - but maybe worse.
We need a community internet task force. Lets start one. Request for comments.
Ironically this page has censored me, it shows "Please wait while your request is being verified" indefinitely.
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...
The most comprehensive post I've seen on how quickly and totally the internet has changed over the last decade. As someone that got online in the early aughts and hung out on usenet and slashdot, the modern net is unrecognizable.
Digital Dissident
Someone living under an authoritarian regime (Russia Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated
Dude, Zuckerberg is "I am CEO, bitch" of Facebook for 22 years since 2004, and civilization worldview (except a few places) is filtered and shaped through this seemingly benign "digital freedom" ether, and everyone has account tied to email and personal phone number and "People just submitted it." cos "They "trust me"", "Dumb fucks".
The authoritarian regime is what these 'Careless People' do every day, over whole world, and not just over few countries here and there, but you try very hard to brain wash everyone to believing that China or Russia is reason that you algorithmic feed is mentally retarded, or that France is going nuts. Fuck you.
Then there're spam and geo-block problems.
The problem is there are so few uncensored places now that if you do make one you overnight become the sweary nasi/pedo/sexads bar because everything else is closed to them.
Basically Reddit 2018.
The internet is not what’s being censored. The three platforms that everyone on the internet uses exclusively are being censored.
People then say, well, they can still access other websites! Everyone has a web browser!
Unfortunately the way people disseminate those URLs is via the main censorship platforms, and there are dozens or hundreds of domain names that form URLs which you can’t DM on Discord or Instagram, for example.
The internet as we know it is controlled centrally by Meta and Google and Apple and Microsoft and Amazon - what is done at the network layer is largely irrelevant.
The problem starts, when places like FOSDEM which originally where slightly left-leaning-anarchist (in a positive sense) start talking about censorship but only mention Russia, China and Iran. Maybe you should google for Jaques Baud, who is actually trapped in Brussels and invite him? Yes, yes, I know, Chinese LLMs and Tianamen square. Well, go and ask chatGPT for the crimes of presidents of the nothern area between Atlantic and Pacific... The problem is the global brainwash.
As the author pointed out, most soft routers are easily blockable because their protocol can be observed even from an opaque perspective.
Tricks for obfuscation I learned over the years:
- use exfil protocols (e.g. http smuggling via chunked encoding, DNS TXT)
- rotate exit nodes while sessions not only between (ronin behavior)
- encryption is useless with no padding or zero based padding, use one based padding instead
- scatter traffic through peers
- use manual caching everywhere, DNS TTL, HTTP entity based tracking, etc will be automatically unfeasible
- always think about the god's eye perspective of ISPs
One of my working soft router concepts, I've open sourced as Tholian Warps [1]
> refuses to accept internet censorship
> claims china & russia are the biggest threats
Why throw stones when we have plenty of work to do here?
come join us on reticulum
I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Around the world, people are being silenced, monitored, and denied access to information.
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated
The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.
Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.
The want for uncensored social media and without the surveillance is what many are discussing here.
The solution is an application framework that removes the 3rd party between any two users or groups of users. The client/server model can't do that. Other models can.
If Facebook/Instagram didn't meddle with users' conversations at scale, the social climate would be very different today. Not because the users can't think for themselves, but because they can.
These systems are not the internet, they run on top of the internet.
If you have ever used Facebook/Instagram or Twitter or know enough people who have, you really need to see this https://rumble.com/v4dxvjo-ep.75-tucker-carlson-interviews-m...
A distributed application model that provides for all of the cool applications we enjoy today without creating "moderation" hotspots for the "reddit mod" archetype, or the "whole of society" horse shit, is the solution that will give non-technical normal people, a systematically oppressed and marginalized demographic specifically, what they have been wanting for since 2018.
A major part of the freedom multi inter-network that freedom loving people want picture, are networks and inter-networks that can survive government-imposed internet kill switches, the topic of the "darknet plan" mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50235196
I remember r/darknetplan
There are a handful of projects and protocols that are about a fraction of the way to total freedom but they haven't been synthesized into something cohesive yet. What a functioning freedom oriented multi inter-network looks like is a whole different suite of protocols built with a mindful intent to shirk some anti-patterns and ossification of today's conventional web. One key objective is no more Cloudflare shit. inb4 "but how do we deal with bots", different protocol suite model, different "architecture".
About a healthy internet, if you care about that IPv6 with PCP is what you want. CGNAT kills peer to peer traffic, CGNAT is de facto censorship, upstream and at scale. If you care about the internet, then start proactively turning off IPv4 and shunning people who say that IPv4 is "okay". CGNAT can be kludged around with proxies because the internet is so fast but it requires a lot of overhead and leaves a huge vulnerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Control_ProtocolAI will help them to create the perfect cage.
No jailbreak, no exploits
It seems like "censored internet" will be the least of the worries when it comes to agent explosion. Even if your internet is free, how are you going to find it through the slop brigades generating and consuming the same "load bearing" crap. Even if you setup the oracle of the day, and no one stops you, how are you going to filter all the crap out to find it? And how will you afford it when everyone puts up pay gates to deal with the xplosion, leading to only the most valuable aislop being allowed on.
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This a great discussion!
You at least need a talk about the DSA, which has censorship as a built-in feature.
Have you spoken to the folk that didn't get the DEI devroom about censorship?
Whoa. thanks for sharing my content. Let's see if we can get a great speakers lined up, so we can do a small step towards our mission!