4 ms·
What is the final defense? I suppose we create underground relay networks of radio networks within cities that allow for computers to connect directly to eachot
by asdff 4mo ago
What is the final defense? I suppose we create underground relay networks of radio networks within cities that allow for computers to connect directly to eachother, and from there we seed all our pirated content and discuss whatever the hell we'd like.
Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
- raincole 4mo agoThe final defense is always to change the government (one way or another). When we need to resort to technical mean we have lost.
- smalltorch 4mo agoTrue, I always wonder how that would actually play out. The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon. >That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
- andunie 4mo agoThe opposite is true.
- throw10920 4mo agoBy this you mean that the first line of defense should be to change the government, correct? If so, I'm pretty sure you're right. Technical solutions to social/governmental problems seem like they're making those problems worse due to actively rechanneling energy that could be used for awareness/activism into technical workarounds.
- andunie 4mo agovoting is just a suggestion from a slave to the master
- oska 4mo agoI completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum Technology is what has always precipitated political change
- iamnothere 4mo agoWould-be revolutionaries need secure, reliable comms even more than the average person.
- chadgpt3 4mo agoPGP
- iamnothere 4mo agoGood for protecting the message itself, but it does nothing for metadata. These days the metadata is what kills you. (Who talks to whom, when, and how often reveals enough to press the drone missile button, apparently.)
- Bender 4mo agoOpenPGP + SMTP as a starting point as email can reach many and Thunderbird makes OpenPGP happy clicky simple. The body includes instructions for the E2EE chat servers to use. Metadata trail ends there. Other circles of friends are joined in by other means. E2EE ejabberd (OTR+PGP+OMEMO) servers switched up after everyone is on the first outer layer of chat servers. Old servers are wiped. Of course all of this assumes nobody is silly enough to use a cell phone or all of this is futile. Everyone is using a laptop they paid cash for and a clean install of a generic minimal install of Linux and Coreboot running a script to make everything ephemeral and the OS nearly immutable. No security distros as they have all been infiltrated, just a vanilla simple Linux and a script.
- r_lee 4mo agowhat...?
- JuniperMesos 4mo agoPGP is not a very effective software suite for encrypting actual messages people want to send to other people, because it's a decades-old tool designed for email workflows that arguably never worked particularly well and is not well-suited to how people want to communicate today. Chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp that include end to end encryption as a matter of course are encrypting far more messages between humans than PGP for emails ever did.
- verisimi 4mo agoChange the governance. Both red, blue and the corporate sides are supportive of this.
- memoriesofsmell 4mo agoTrusted IPSec tunnels to form your own trusted internet of peers/friends within the internet. It's all just 'a LAN' then. I dunno how well that scales, but it's a lot easier than trying to sort out radio shenanigans (which in my experience are actually regularly enforced by FCC/your local equivalents).
- Bender 4mo agoThat's been done a few times with Tinc (open source VPN) [1][2]. It's great until the group includes one bad apple. All it takes is one person with low impulse control, low opsec to bring the whole thing down. Some hacker groups did this some time ago. [1] - https://www.tinc-vpn.org/ https://www.tinc-vpn.org/ [2] - https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-to-peer-vpn/ https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-t...
- singingtoday 4mo agoThat's just the technical problem. It can be solved.
- chadgpt3 4mo agoIncluding an untrustworthy person is a political problem actually
- jm4 4mo agoYou would be breaking numerous laws, your transmitters would be removed quickly, you would be out thousands of dollars in equipment, and no one would be on your network anyway. You would almost certainly go to jail if you tried this.
- post-it 4mo agoNot that quickly. Tracking down a low-power transmitter in an urban core is technically feasible but a lot of work. Police don't like doing work.
- copperx 4mo agoThe police? Wouldn't that be the FCC?
- Bender 4mo agoYes the FCC. Here [1] were their recent enforcement actions in April 2026 and in May 2026 [2]. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMjMlHpus8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMjMlHpus8 [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFutq5wyYcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFutq5wyYcI
- pocksuppet 4mo agoThis one happens quickly.
- singingtoday 4mo agoHave you ever actually read all the laws? It's functionally impossible to survive without breaking laws.
- jm4 4mo agoThere’s a difference between violating a dozen obscure laws on a daily basis that never get enforced and operating an unlicensed radio broadcast. See what happens if you try it. The FCC does not mess around.
- bijowo1676 4mo agoI think everyone (especially young gen) should absolutely master the offensive hacking skills. I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems. This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving. Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government
- subscribed 4mo agoOut of the kids (tweens+) I know because of my kids NONE is interested in anything even remotely adjacent to it. They wouldn't be able to troubleshoot a dns issue. Or even, say, AI. They know about "chatbots" and "generating images" or "adding effects". Herein ends the story. You can't teach someone this sort of skills if they like staying ignorant.
- storus 4mo agoSelf-destruct drones with mesh node transmitters? Radiowave reflectors placed at strategic spots blended with the surroundings? IR multicast transmitters?
- emodendroket 4mo agoI don't think there's some magical technical trick that lets you do an end run around politics.
- DiabloD3 4mo agoOh, there is. It was invented by China in the 10th century.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoViolence is a form of politics and always has been. Whether that be violence from the state to the people or vice versa.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoWhat was that?
- krapp 4mo agogunpowder.
- emodendroket 4mo ago"War is politics by other means" is the one line of Clausewitz everyone can quote.
- ibarrajo 4mo agoYou can already do this, it’s called reticulum. Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa. Issue is the size of the community and linking up to actually serve internet or surface public services there.
- Magnusmaster 4mo agoI expect the government will require ISPs to only allow connection from approved operating systems that only allow installation of approved apps so we can't do this. Not in the short term, but eventually.
- latentsea 4mo agoThe final defense is to stop having children. Then there's no one to think of.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoThen we are the last generation and nothing matters. Sad, isn't it? I'm trying not to cry. You know, there's an argument that if your soul/consciousness is occupying a randomly selected body (whatever that means - don't take it too literally) you'd expect to be occupying a body during the time when there are the most human bodies to occupy. 6% of all humans who were ever alive so far are alive right now. It's not really rigorous because some consciousness has to occupy this body and that consciousness would make the same argument, but it's a weak inkling of an argument that the future probably has less humans than the present.
- latentsea 4mo agoIt doesn't imply we're the last generation. The last generation to live like this maybe, but not the last. It seems somewhat clear that modern society is incompatible with humanity to a degree. I think in the all it means humanity regresses to the mean, the population drastically shrinks and people live much simpler lives.
- fennecbutt 4mo agoPeople are already doing that lmao and the general population is so apathetic that they simply don't care cheap flights and buying crap from Temu will cook us to death, they don't care that late stage capitalism has made it harder and harder for people to have families. Even if the replacement rate is magically fixed tomorrow there's still gonna be a long gap and hard times ahead. It's still far off but I wouldn't be surprised if these were the earliest signs of societal collapse. It does seem impossible to avoid, going in cycles.
- latentsea 4mo agoCollapse happens slowly, and then all at once. I assume humanity will eventually go through a "regression to the mean" and the collapsed birth rate is the pendulum gearing up to swing in that direction at full force.
- lyu07282 4mo ago> because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking They depoliticized people to this degree that they fantasize of joining the a-political resistance movement, its kind of sad. This isn't meant as an insult, you should be angry that you live in a society that left you politically oblivious. Like no dude, people fought against power all the time, the people who you listen to just told you that all that do are dangerous politicized radicals or terrorists. Find who is punching UP, then get a political education in that direction.
- inigyou 4mo agoNo revolution in history has ever succeeded without the support of an alternate group of elites who replace the current elites if the revolution succeeds...
- sznio 4mo agoand if these elites are better aligned with you, siding with them is better than doing nothing
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoAs suggested by a sibling comment, more often than not, those punching up are planning to replace the current elites with themselves, or a worse system. Thankfully, the opposition is not a homogeneous group, so use critical thinking to discard terrible options.
- freeopinion 4mo agoOr... use a protocol that hides packets in Minecraft traffic with out-of-band control through steganographic Discord audio. It's really slow, but its private.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoHow do you run that program if it's not on the app store and you can only run programs from the app store?
- teekert 4mo ago100% with you, I don't understand that people feel they have privacy in their house but not on the internet. Those people just don't understand how humans work and how we get better as a species. I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.) There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).
- nsvd2 4mo agoIf at any point your counter-governmental action actually threatens to take some share of power away from the government, they will swiftly and quietly deal with you (they have about 1000 ways to track you, and AI reduces the cost of tracking greatly). If you are irrelevant you will mostly be ignored. By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.
- loa_in_ 4mo agoIf and only if you give up, you forfeit and oouse.
- tychez 4mo agoCompliance is much easier though. You want access to Fable? Show us your ID. As much as I am completely against this in spirit, all that is needed is restricted access to frontier models and then it just a question of how do you want to see my papers sir?
- tomaskafka 4mo ago… and over time you find you have become an ISP for child p*rn distributors, and that your only choice is whether you want to know it or not (Auschwitz guards recommend the second option, however that’s not available for unbroken human beings). Yes, Mr. Market will pay you handsomely for helping someone anonymously stream a torture of kidnapped child. No, as a society, we decided we don't want that to happen even though it is technically possible. There are horrible people, and they are drawn as moths to any oblivious operator willing to close his eyes (sorry, wanted to say "use e2e encryption" of course).