turns out china was just a little bit ahead of everyone huh
It’s more like some people saw an opportunity in selling China-style online censorship to other governments. They just needed convincing stories to sell.
Stories of children being groomed with internet porn and calling for mass censorship. Stories of the stars of internet porn regretting it and calling for mass censorship. Stories of terror attacks being organized on the internet. Stories of awful chatrooms.
So now anyone wanting to oppose your censorship is a nazi islamist pedophile jerking off to CSAM in their mother’s basement.
And it won’t end with banning the most disgusting and gory lolicon hentai. It won’t even stop with banning porn. It will end with things being banned because some Trump, Orbán, Putin-class dictator didn’t like it, and the chatbot spat out some reasonable sounding argument that supported it beyond “the glorious leader didn’t like this”.
Tor, i2p if you still have access to TCP and reticulum to bypass TCP entirely.
Edit: I should have said bypass TCP/IP because you need centralized infrastructure to use TCP IP because of the border gateway protocol and routing.
With Reticulum, you self-assign a destination hash using your public and private key pair and then announce that destination hash over whatever connection to the Reticulum network you happen to have. Whether it be Bluetooth, LORA, TCP/IP, serial cable, whatever.
ELI5, why bypass TCP? I’m looking this up, but an answer might help me and others understand this better. :D
It’s not really a “you need to bypass TCP” and more of a “TCP traffic could be censored”… just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.
Reticulum isn’t necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn’t something who’s failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).
For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else’s LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it’s picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn’t strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they’d be cut off)
Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don’t block TCP traffic, then you still have options.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and it’s difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.
Corporations like Meta, Apple and Alphabet are closing off the internet. Governments are just woefully underpowered against these companies who make internet addiction their business.
Underpowered? They’re in bed with them.