Hello ,
As the title says what happens if theUK requires age verification for VPN’s or makes it illegal to use them?
Does that mean everyone will move to tor or I2P?
It seems if the UK gov keep pushing their agenda under the guise of protecting children people will increasingly go dark .
I guess what I’m asking is how does everyone think this will unfold?
M
Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good. I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff. But the original principles of the internet and a Cipherpunk approach is on the way .
@mysticmartz@lemmy.world
Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.
Unfortunately, it’s like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.
In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, “tampering-proof” or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.
Not to mention how “easy” is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do “wardrive” scanning in order to seek “irregular transmissions” (not just those disrupting others’ transmissions, but anything they could deem “irregular” because they’re the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed “irregularity” could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).
This takes me to another point from your reply:
It’s worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn’t exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.
I mean, you’re not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it’s inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.
Problem is: there’s no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.
And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.
For authorities willing to control everyone’s lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as…
This is almost the argument behind EU’s “Chat Control”. And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution regarding “disgusting and concerning stuff”, but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.
Just wait until they mandate embedding some sort of hardcoded device identification into LoRa devices.
I don’t think I2P can hold anything. It’s just anonymization through multiple hops, not a network within the network, no?
I don’t know. I’ve not used I2P before but I heard it was a decentralised internet just on a smaller scale like a WAN
Reading about it further, I was completely wrong about it. I2P is entirely self contained and exit proxies are not really a thing.
Your concerns may be warranted.