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This should be a lesson for all of us. We should start building and maintaining lightweight mesh networks, just in case. We shouldn't take the world of cooperat
by agnishom 9mo ago
This should be a lesson for all of us. We should start building and maintaining lightweight mesh networks, just in case. We shouldn't take the world of cooperating ISPs and Meta and Cloudflare and Google and AWS for granted.
- 0xEF 9mo agoBut we won't, because those are hard to maintain versus the convenience of letting providers do it for us, hence why we keep getting suckered into handing over control to these centralized powers.
- elAhmo 9mo agoGiven the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.
- aduwah 9mo agoWhen did CF do this?
- cirelli94 9mo agoA week ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-pull-servers-out-of-italy-over-order-that-it-block-pirate-sites/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-p...
- countWSS 9mo agoHow much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.
- jonasdegendt 9mo agoAbout 20% of sites, and there’s some big services behind Cloudflare so that percentage doesn’t even tell the full story.
- immibis 9mo agoWhen Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
- oarsinsync 9mo ago> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them. Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain? Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.
- saghm 9mo agoIf the sports league is influential enough to have a standing court order to be able to unilaterally block IP ranges for the entire country, I'd imagine that organized crime might take an interest. I have no idea if it's the case but when something already seems to have an outsized influence it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that others interested in that power would also take an interest. Moreover, I think the point of the parent comment is that they're blocking quite a bit more than just football games. It sounds like the claim is that the blocking is willfully broad because of other influences, not necessarily the the purported more narrow intent is necessarily from those influences.
- immibis 9mo agoWhich directly contravenes the Digital Services Act. And is only in place because LaLiga has strong ties to the mafia.
- anthk 9mo agoMore than mafia, ex-francoists oligarchs. And these could be stomped down tomorrow from CF by cancelling all the tangent services for those, even for Spanish banks and related industries (tourist and construction avoiding both attacks and serious disbalancing harms). The Ibex 35 would near collapse overnight and Tebas being kicked out from their own people.
- Findeton 9mo agoIt is more about government tax warfare. They fined CF because it didn’t censor what the italian government wanted them to censor, so they fined CF.
- freehorse 9mo agoNot submitting to state censorship requests is not a great example of what is the problem with Big Tech as discussed here.
- elAhmo 9mo agoI wasn't referring to the state censorship request, but rather to the 'flocking' to self-proclaimed champions of free speech in the current Trump administrations as a cry for help.
- freehorse 9mo agoI personally find that the fact that a private company compels a list of IPs and domains that they want blocked to get blocked more alarming than that.
- mlrtime 9mo agoNot really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.
- salviati 9mo agoThere were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration. They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers. This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons. I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
- ezst 9mo agoNot OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?
- elAhmo 9mo agoOP, not a bot. CF definitely chose to be political in the message, so regardless of what Italy did or who is right and wrong, posting that message is just a message that reliance on CF can just be a bad idea long-term.
- ezst 9mo agoJust for context, did you see this from CF's CEO? https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492 The bits about Vance, Musk and "freedom of speech" are not only completely unnecessary, but well over the top.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ActorNightly 9mo agoBig Tech is going to optimize for profits. They are gonna bow down to whomever is in charge.
- Y_Y 9mo agoBut also because it seems fun in the meantime. In fact a state that doesn't plan to turn off the internet should probably want a cohort of amateur radio operators ready to turn into a signals corps. Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces. On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to hear about how anyone got into resilient mesh networks and what they're doing with them now (outside of overthrowing the Ayatollah).
- thenthenthen 9mo agoHow I got into it was tiredness of centralised platforms that dictate how we use those platforms. Often archival, search functions are non-trivial in things like Whatsapp, Discord etc. We made our own mesh application based on wifi and batman but ofc we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.
- salviati 9mo ago> we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over. What was the deal breaker for them?
- thenthenthen 9mo agoThe ubiquity (network effect) and ‘convenience’ of other apps. This was more than a decade ago and our devices were an extra thing you needed to carry (travel router).
- fragmede 9mo agoIf/when you feel like trying again, Tailscale has made mesh routing available at a consumerish level.
- ajsnigrutin 9mo agoAmateur radio is one of the first thing that gets banned in wars, including eg. WW2 in US and the start of ukraine war in ukraine. Considering the age and political orientation of most people here in this thread, and the age and political orientation of most eg. US hams, the situation would be quite different than most here imagine.
- 3D30497420 9mo agoI built a basic LoRa network so I could send data from my washing machine in the apartment cellar to my Home Assistant box in my apartment several floors up. It very much did occur to me that the technologies/skills I was learning would also be useful to create a decentralized mesh network for general communication.
- reaperducer 9mo agoI built a basic LoRa network so I could send data from my washing machine in the apartment cellar to my Home Assistant box in my apartment several floors up. I have sensors in eight of my plants that use LoRa to transmit moisture levels to an SBC running Forth that lights up a single segment in an LED bar to let me know which ones should be watered. I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
- 3D30497420 9mo agoLove it. > I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat. This should be the next Pixar film.
- amelius 9mo agoHow is Ukraine doing this? I suppose Starlink isn't available to everyone.
- einpoklum 9mo agoUkraine is being assisted by NATO and commercial corporations based in US and Europe, that would not be a DIY start-from-nearly-nothing example which would be relevant to popular protest movements.
- DecoySalamander 9mo agoMost of Ukraine doesn't need to do it. The internet infrastructure is largely intact and very decentralised. The biggest challenge is the lengthy power outages, but mobile networks keeps running thanks to generators.
- RenThraysk 9mo agoThere are a few videos of various Ukraine Telecoms talking about how they're keeping themselves connected.
- pjmlp 9mo agoExcept people also forget the part state police, and collaborators, play on running such meshes. It isn't without peril for the admins and users.
- NoiseBert69 9mo agoThere is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa. With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors. I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff. Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
- amelius 9mo agoI guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)
- NoiseBert69 9mo agoBut better having the government shooting down your 10€ ballo.. node with a F-35 instead of a 50€ node.
- digiown 9mo agoIf you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.
- ajsnigrutin 9mo agoAnd instead of "just" getting teargassed and sent home, you get thrown to a concentration camp for organizing communications for the domestic terrorists there to overthrow the government, attack ICE, <insert whatever you want here, something you're pro- or against>.
- danesparza 9mo agoYou also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.
- ajb 9mo agoIs that the right threat model, though? Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better. An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
- jfengel 9mo agoThere is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election. It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
- swaits 9mo agoKeeping things in perspective, no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term. The places where this happens, like Iran now, are in extremely different situations than anything in the US, or any other Western country. That shouldn’t discourage people running meshes though.
- dbspin 9mo ago> no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-court-immigration-los-angeles-reaction https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-cour... [3] https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-chillingly-targets-people-ideology https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
- larodi 9mo agoNobody cares until is too late. And it is also very hard to get it right, given most p2ps eventually become centralized, or depend on a centralized mesh of hosts. Otherwise I totally agree with the statement, not sure whether is practically possible.
- BatteryMountain 9mo agoYeah until google, apple & friends boot them from the stores and block side loading as well. Then we're all screwed, as they will have 100% grip and visibility on comms and won't allow third party encrypted comms. Just wait and see friends, that day is around the corner. Which means all sensitive comms will move back offline...
- sneak 9mo agoApple is already blocking protest coordination apps in Hong Kong at the demand of the CCP, and ICE oversight/tracking apps in the USA.
- endofreach 9mo agoand what kinda protocol to „browse“?
- ivanstepanovftw 9mo agoYou should not fight against companies, they do not have bad intention. The government can block Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with jammers. Russian government already does this in schools during exams, and already doing it around important infrastructure. Focus on fighting against governments.
- cyanydeez 9mo agoNot gonna do much of the gov turns violent.