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Other than VPNs and Tor (which can be blocked), how would people circumvent the fact that the pipes are still owned by the same players? We can't physically lay
by _bxg1 8y ago
Other than VPNs and Tor (which can be blocked), how would people circumvent the fact that the pipes are still owned by the same players? We can't physically lay out "another internet". Maybe there's potential in radio mesh networking, but the wires we have are the wires we get. As depressing as it feels right now, I think the only real option is to continue pushing in the democratic channels we have. Governments can stop anything if they care to; we have to work with them.
- gpm 8y agoEven if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet it wouldn't matter with respect to things like this. It would still be subject to the same laws. The same applies to radio mesh networking.
- tachyonbeam 8y agoWhat if, you had a worldwide mesh network of internet satellites, too many of them to take down...?
- Daniel_sk 8y agoCountries could jam the signal or find you easily since you would also have to transmit data to the satellite.
- karoofish 8y agolaser uplink.
- naniwaduni 8y agoArms race against state-level actors is not a good position to be in.
- avmich 8y agoRight, but not unwinnable. George Soros vs. Bank of England comes to mind as an example, but you can have other options, if, say, you have a technological edge (easier for you to "attack" with data than for them to "defend") and a sympathetic population. Doublespeak could be popular under less than free regimes.
- hokus 8y agoThe postal service can send a box with say 10 * 6 TB hdd quite fast. Say 2 days for delivery. 480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.
- kortilla 8y agoHigh throughput but extremely high latency networks are significantly less useful than current networks.
- lstodd 8y agoFidonet worked and many an offshoot were spawned. I fondly remember conversations on AmiNet - an Amiga - dedicated FTN network. That was all done over PSTN with 9600 - 19200 bps modems. Latency was days. All this didn't preclude massive amounts of collaboration over it. I'd rather question if lower latency delivers any benefit.
- groestl 8y agoYet, notably, copyrighted material meant for human consumption is exactly the kind of content that aligns best with high throughput/extreme latency scenarios.
- dTal 8y ago>you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel I imagine that in practice the postal service may start to decline your custom somewhere around the quintillion-box mark, or perhaps even before...
- stcredzero 8y agoEven if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet What if a billionaire launched a constellation of low earth satellites which provided Internet?
- extra88 8y agoHow are satellites different from the radio mesh networks they already mentioned? They're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad.
- stcredzero 8y agoThey're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad. What if this satellite Internet service is a multinational corporation, with the directly owning entities based in Russia and China? Or perhaps Sweden? Part of a conglomerate under the ultimate control of a corporation on Mars? I think we'll definitely have crossed some threshold when we have our first extradition from a different gravity well.
- gpm 8y agoI think one piece of context that your missing is that the people targeted by this law aren't the people running the wires, it's the people running the servers behind the wires. Today, if people in Russia or China run the servers there isn't much the EU can do (see: scihub and the US, for a long time piratebay too). You don't need a massive indestructible satellite constellation for that. I'd also add that a billionaire isn't the criteria you're looking for here even if it was a policy targeting the people running the wire. It's a foreign government with sufficient military power to deter the US from arresting you, and sufficient technological power to set up such a network. Maybe it's a Russian Billionaire who launches them in your hypothetical, but it's the Russian government who provides the security that allows him to do that.
- cwkoss 8y agoMost content doesn't really need low-latency. If we can develop a good protocol/UI for 'hours-to-days' latency or 'offline' networking, we could just pass thumb drives between ourselves and probably accomplish all of our data transfer needs. Swapping hard drives with a buddy twice a month can be more bandwidth than most mobile contracts.
- _bxg1 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror%27s_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror%27s_Edge
- lstodd 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
- meshman 8y agoThat's effectively the network setup I have. A long range radio link to a farm in the area that then has an upstream link (again via radio) to a residence that has a fiber connection. The latency can be huge when we have less-that-optimal conditions. Since the throughput is low and the latency high, it's not streaming-video capabl. A buddy downloads a load of movies to an ssd and drops that off every now and then. For real-time news I use an actual radio. There are some good news and music stations in the area. I have an offline copy of the spanish language wikipedia.
- cwkoss 8y agoVery cool. I would love it if there was better tooling for using a kbps connection for download/searching file lists and making a 'drop drive request', so you could use your low speed connection to decide what you want on the drive, then buddy could basically just get a list of files to curl, throw em on the drive with new indexes of available file directories.
- philpem 8y ago> Swapping hard drives with a buddy twice a month can be more bandwidth than most mobile contracts. Sounds like the 21st century version of Samizdat :)