> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering".
Regulatory capture at its finest. Such a ruling gives Apple and Google a duopoly over the market.
Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept).
So when are we going to build a new internet? Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?
"Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?"
I'm curious about the 'day after' scenario: what's the move if the state decides to regulate these into "illegality" because they bypass official channels? We have to remember that the devices aren't the problem... the real hurdle is the bureaucratic gatekeeping of communication. The problem are people, not devices.
It could be a difficult battle for them to fight. We'd just have to make it too costly. Make them go hunt down all the relays. Scatter them everywhere. A $5 ESP32 isn't a good relay but they still have to hunt it down and that'll cost a lot more than $5.
So the answer is the same as any war: you make it too expensive to keep fighting. It's the same reason a bunch of barely trained people in the desert won a war against a force with far greater military power. It's the same reason a bunch of jungle people defeated the country that just won a world war. It's also the same reason a bunch of rednecks defeated the largest military in the world (at the time) and were able to create an even larger empire.
It's not hard to make them give up. It's going to be a cat and mouse game but it already is
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but here's a counter-example: .22lr ammunition is also extremely inexpensive per unit, but I can't buy that at all in Ireland without extensive, recurring background checks and a demonstrated continuing need for access. If a government decides you don't get to have something, they are well within their power to effectively eliminate it. I can no more make an ESP32 at home than ammunition. I reckon it's harder, in fact.
[To the government Cornholio reading this and panicking because I mentioned a gun thing: no, I'm not threatening you.]
As long as there's a country willing to build and sell ESP32s, I think it would be fairly easy to get hold of them. How does a customs agent distinguish between an ESP32 and another microcontroller? These things are in every gadget. Is a government really going to ban all electronics?
Just look at how ineffective governments are at stopping drugs. If people are motivated to smuggle things, they will. Is there going to be a booming black market in ESP32s? Probably not. But will motivated people manage to import them? Almost certainly.
The power imbalance is not in favor of the individual citizen. Fairly simple to enact a law saying "unlicenced importation of electronic devices is an offence", only license major retailers, and have Customs seize anything that doesn't come with the right paperwork attached (which they already do). Drugs are far easier to make than silicon chips, despite how clever people like Sam Zeloof may be.
To have a firearms permit here, I need a "Good Reason" - that's the language from the law verbatim. "I like guns" is not a Good Reason. In that vein, what would be your Good Reason for receiving an import license to bring in technology which is apparently widely used by radicals to defy duly-ratified legislation about communications visibility and enable the creation of side channels which break the law and can be used to proliferate CSAM, drugs, and terrorism? I'm sure any sane person would agree that those are bad things which need to be stopped. Perhaps you should take up a different hobby, like jogging.
> despite how clever people like Sam Zeloof may be.
You don't need to fabricate silicon chips to create radio. You need conductors, resistors, and electricity. Almost every person currently alive has several objects transmitting radio signals within arms reach.
> The power imbalance is not in favor of the individual citizen.
Yes it is. Because the cost is so fucking trivial that it costs magnitudes more to send someone to find a transmitter than it takes to make a dozen transmitters.
1. Nobody cares enough to do all this except some nerds on HN.
2. Spurious radio transmissions from your spark gap set will be tracked down in an afternoon by government foxhunters, and then you'll be in jail for breaking the law.
I don't understand why people think they can meaningfully kinetically resist. The discussion now needs to be convincing the random voter why this is a problem for them, or the game is lost.
There's nothing preventing both from happening. By framing it as an "or" situation rather than an "and" situation you are acting as the type of person you're criticizing.
First off, guns aren't a subcomponent of a vast majority of modern items. The ESP32 was an example but the reality is anything with a radio. Be it WiFi, Bluetooth, or anything.
Second off, guns are incredibly easy to make. Easy enough that they make them in prisons and Japan. But you know what's a million times easier than that? Radio. It's a common first electronics project. You can literally make it out of a few resisters, capacitors, and some wire.
Literally the cost of fighting this type of technology is taking down all wireless infrastructure. ALL of it. And even then it's still a god awfully expensive thing to fight because anyone with a hot pointy object, an electricity source, and some things that are slightly bad at conducting electricity can make a radio
> All electronics that can be freely programmed by the owner, not impossible.
I'm not sure that is possible. Most chips are reprogramable. You think your cheap electricians are going to put in high security defenses?
Even Google and Apple can't keep themselves from getting jailbroken. You think that's going to be true about a $5 toy with a WiFi or Bluetooth chip in it.
They have the propaganda advantage (think of the children, those who undermine the system are pedophiles by definition). They have the law (just reclassify such activity as aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography). They have the scare tactics (nobody wants 30 years in prison and an entry on the sexual offender's register).
This war will be won with words and at most a few arrests, just to make an example, just like the war on terror and anonymous financial activity.
Privacy just doesn't matter for 99+% of the population as much as we think, which is very much unlike piracy or drugs for example. If this wasn't the case, we'd all be using Signal and Monero right now.
Anyone remember when the discussions about classifying the internet as a utility and Akit’s stupid Reese cup coffee mug. It feels so long ago given how much has transpired since.
Finally, the year of IPFS.
Government messing too much with the internet will end up pushing people to use more "dangerous" internets that are completely unregulated and that is surely the opposite of the the stated purpose to protect young people.
IPFS doesn't even try to do any kind of anonymity or censorship resistance. In a practical sense it's probably worse than BitTorrent, although neither one of them is up to the task. Actually resilient data distribution is hard, and I don't think there are any systems that have all the needed elements.
... and if you create one, they can, and it's starting to look like they will, outlaw using it, regardless of what you use it for.
There are (to make up a number) ten desirable properties of the modern internet, and so far it's "Pick two", but novel combinations of the things you mentioned offer "Pick three" or possibly "Pick four" if adoption picks up.
For text, phone, and even image communication in urban and suburban areas, it sounds like there's real promise here. But we're not going to achieve parity with a global fiber + datacenter network by any means.
You don't need all ten to, say, organize a revolt.
Hell, I don't know why we don't just start building a guerrilla network around the Bay. Just start gluing repeaters to things. You could do LoRA like in that video but even WiFi has decent range. Maybe not in the km range but it's also a $5 device. And we don't need to limit ourselves to that cheap of stuff.
We don't need to replace global fiber, we just need to demonstrate enough to inspire others. I'd be perfectly happy if we got just an old web text only system up.
Honestly, would be a lot easier if we could get encryption rules lifted from HAM operations. That's what's needed for long range, even if we won't get the high data rates. We don't need a YouTube to make a difference
I would assume it would be not be regulated by government, so without constraints on age, restrictions on what you can do - you know, like reality.
And I know that government attempts to regulate reality too, but if you drive at 35 where the limit is 30, or speak to someone dodgy to get some marijuana or whatever, and get away with these and other heinous crimes, you're good!
The distinction really is whether you bake regulation into the technology or not. And it seems that technology is actually the new legal system. Or perhaps that should be the 'pre-legal system' as it won't allow you to do those things it determines as 'wrong'. Which is absolutely fine if you think government really does know best, or hell on earth for everyone else.
The last 35 years have very vividly demonstrated that there needs to be some adults in the room. Without exception every major tech company has implemented practices so overtly hostile to the userbase that the government has been more or less forced to get involved, mostly in the form of fines that have done very little to disincentivize whatever problematic bullshit the company in question was originally caught at. Suggesting that even less regulation would somehow magically cause tech firms to align goals with their userbase seems baseless to say the least.
You seem to think that government and corporations are on opposing sides. I don't think this is the case. Governments want the data corporations collect. Both are encouraging the other. There are no adults in the room. Having (corporate or government) children in control of that every individual's private information won't help.
I assure you I think no such thing. I am painfully aware of legislative capture. Proposing an environment where we go from shitty, poorly enforced regulation to none at all solves nothing. It's also worth pointing out that government performing poorly is an indictment of the individuals elected to govern, not the concept of governance.
The internet is a global communication system. So to do what? To do exactly that. The difference though is that it isn't controlled by anyone. It doesn't need to be, so no one needs to have that power, no one should have that power. A global communication system where conversations are private by default, just like they are online.
The problem with the current system is that the information was just too free. You could just drop in on anyone's conversation, like it or not. People started hoarding that information and look what we got: surveillance capitalism. The system reinforces itself to watch you, to tell you what to do, what to think, not just what to buy. And the system just wants to keep growing, so it's just going to continue to do that more and more. Sure, there's some nice things we get for the loss of all our privacy, but it comes at the cost of your humanity. They'll be costs to this new system too. It won't be all rainbows and sunshine, but I think it'll be better than this gloomy smog ridden world we have now.
We live in a time where it's actually possible to have a functioning world with no kings. Personally, I'm tired of them, aren't you?
The infrastructure requirements around routing and switching equipment, transoceanic cables, and satellites mean someone not users has always been in control. Barring some form of anarcho-socialist mass movement around DIY long haul networking infrastructure this seems unavoidable.
The problem with the current system is the intersection of human nature and capitalism. Individuals have willingly adopted technology that aggressively surveils them in exchange for notional convenience and by and large are blandly unconcerned with the implications thereof. This also seems unavoidable as long as data collection and brokerage is permitted and profitable, and people value entertainment over critical thinking. This outcome was very accurately predicted by netizens when online advertisements first started popping up and a lot of time was spent wargaming what would happen if mass adoption lead to the net being a viable sales and marketing target.
After 35 years of observation I've had about enough of global communications systems and everything that comes from them. At this point there is very little one could say to convince me that the internet hasn't been one of our species largest fuckups.
On one hand, I agree with you; The internet, in its current state, has probably more negative aspects to it than positive ones.
But, on the other hand, I don't think that I can completely ignore the good it has brought to the world.
If a person is motivated enough, he can pretty easily navigate through propaganda simply by choosing to consume information from different sources (for example, reading about the us from both the us perspective and russian or chinese perspective).
Of course, the main reason there aren't many people who do that is both simple but also complex. People don't have enough time at which they aren't either exhausted from work or life in general; or stressing about something that has to do with capitalism (either money, wars, work and etc).
So at the little amount of free time that they do have - they aren't going to challenge their beliefs (or at least, the beliefs of those who surround them); It's exhausting, and it's easier to just read the propoganda, feel better about yourself because a good propaganda always have someone else to blame - and continue with your day to day life (if one can even call that life; because to me it seems more accurate to call it "existence").
But in any case, what you've said reminded me of this post and how the internet positively impacted one person; so even though I doubt it'll convince anyone of anything - it's still a very heartwarming story:
<https://jimmyhmiller.com/raised>
* English isn't my first language so I apologize if there's any grammar mistake.
It's not other operating systems fault that they failed to invest into security. They should try and catch up instead of blaming people for not trusting their security on "regulatory capture".
Buddy, you're on HN. No one is going to buy that bullshit here. Thanks for the laugh, but seriously, don't insult us like that again. We may be dumb, but not that dumb
Which is exactly why I have to advocate for it here. There are literally people on this website who think their operating is secure, but in actuality they are one curl | bash or npm install away from having all of their login credentials stolen. No matter how smart they think they are in being able to avoid malware, that strategy does not scale.
Your argument is not sensible as usage of curl | bash doesn't scale. Your argument is people should stay locked up to not be endangered through freedom. There is no intelligence found here.
It is the easiest cross platform distribution method between macOS and Linux. It actually does scale in that regard which is why it is so popular.
People are not locked up. Apps and their secrets are. The idea that any app should be able to read the secrets of any other is not essential for user freedom.
Your argument is not sensible as usage of curl | bash doesn't scale. Your argument is people should stay locked up to not be endangered through freedom.
And if competitor locks were unpickable it wouldn't be regulatory capture to require unpickable locks for people to store valuables in a home. Just because people got away with bad locks for many years, that doesn't mean we have to accept that level of security.
Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept).
So when are we going to build a new internet? Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?