from the stifle-opposition-quash-free-speech-and-muzzle-expression dept.
Internet shutdowns by governments have 'proliferated at a truly alarming pace':
The number of government-led internet shutdowns has exploded over the last decade as states seek to stifle dissent and protest by limiting citizens' access to the web.
Nearly 850 intentional shutdowns have been recorded over the past 10 years by nonprofit Access Now's Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), and although the group acknowledges that data on incidents before 2016 is "patchy," some 768 of these shutdowns took place in the last five years. There were 213 shutdowns in 2019 alone, with this figure ticking down to 155 in 2020 as the world adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic (which delayed elections and led to lockdowns that kept populations at home more often). And already in the first five months of 2021 there have been 50 shutdowns across 21 countries.
"Since we began tracking government-initiated internet shutdowns, their use has proliferated at a truly alarming pace," Access Now's Felicia Anthonio, campaigner and #KeepItOn lead, said in a new report on the issue in The Current, a publication of Google's internet thinktank Jigsaw. "As governments across the globe learn this authoritarian tactic from each other, it has moved from the fringes to become a common method many authorities use to stifle opposition, quash free speech and muzzle expression."
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @06:56PM (56 children)
When you have riots in the streets because a minority in their echo chamber thinks they are a majority, what do you think should happen?
"OMG! We are trending! To the streets with our pitchforks!"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday September 05 2021, @07:13PM (38 children)
Odd. I haven't seen a single internet shutdown in the USA over BLM. Or France over the Gilets jaunes.
But one in Kyrgyzstan, 2 in Belarus, one in Turkey... countries that you don't get to hear a lot of protests from... maybe mostly because protesters tend to disappear quickly and quietly.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 05 2021, @08:30PM (7 children)
Apparently we're getting social media blackouts and restrictions on tweeting [theguardian.com] when the Queen dies.
We Brits have strange priorities:
Flags!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:20PM (6 children)
Actually, Liz dying is a pretty big deal.
She's the only monarch most of us have ever known and whose death will cause many of her constituents to transition to republics. Canada plus a bunch of realms in Oceania and the Caribbean will fall within a decade or two.
No one cares for Charles or his dull son William - perhaps if the cool one, Harry, were king...
We had a vote 2 decades ago here downunder to replace her with a Clayton's president but decided not to fix what ain't broken.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @11:36PM (4 children)
You must be a neo-Nazi or something. https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/g4782/prince-harry-cringe-worthy-moments/ [marieclaire.com]
1. Dressed as a Nazi
2. Calls his Asian friends by names such as "Paki" and "raghead".
3. Drug rehab
4. Got nekkid in public in Las Vegas
5. Bashes in the faces of news photographers he doesn't like.
6. Falls into swimming pools - drunk.
7. Spurs his horse to death
8. Snorts vodka
But, hey, if you say he's cool, he's cool! I'm not even a Brit, what do I care?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @12:42AM
Prince Harry's out of the running anyway, and a good thing too. (By the way, he didn't spur it to death - it just bled. Still not good, but not what you're saying.)
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday September 06 2021, @09:19AM (2 children)
American here, the Nazi shits fucked up (don't know the context). Maybe it's all the punk music I've listened to, but the rest seems pretty cool to me.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @10:05AM
He wouldn't do those things (I take'm at face value for the moment, only heard of the Nazi stuff) if he wouldn't believe that somebody would consider them cool, would he? Seems like he has found an audience.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @06:25PM
You're an ignorant dumb ass. The so called "Nazis" were the good guys. Fuck the Jews (Holocaust is Jew lies) and the allied race traitors
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @12:44AM
Charles isn't anybody's idea of breath-taking excitement as far as I know, but he has one thing going for him. He has a long, LONG association with conservation, ecological stewardship and organic farming. The nation and the world could do worse.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday September 05 2021, @08:44PM (12 children)
Let's see: hmmmm..... Eric Snowden was effectively silenced and so was Julian Assange: they were morally right and correct, but not legally right (according to the USA) and so they were silenced.
Sometimes you don't need internet shutdowns to silence protests; you just need Governments that are willing to silence 'inconvenient truths'.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:00PM (10 children)
And those cases turned off the internet in what country again? And for how long?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:39PM (9 children)
Just a matter of time, my fren, just a matter of time...Snowden showed us that.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday September 06 2021, @12:18AM (4 children)
#Freearistarchus!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @12:29AM (3 children)
Grow up you whining little piece of shit. If the staff had any balls they would wash their hands of your bullshit and delete your account permanently.
(Score: 1, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 07 2021, @02:39AM (2 children)
You whiny coward of a cowardly AC! I hate you! I hate you so much! I wish the staff would just delete AC permanently, so we did not have to put up with all the AC bullshit and whining! Please, if you cannot say something useful and informative, or at least witty and risible, stop up your pie-hole!!
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:58PM (1 child)
And somebody modded this Flamebait? How perceptive of them.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:37AM
And a -1 Redundant, which can only have come from Runaway, or his remaining sockpuppets. Someone suggested that the Redundant mod was unnecessary, superflous, sort of extra, and, well, redundant. But how else could a Runaway mod be signaled?
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Monday September 06 2021, @12:35AM (2 children)
https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-preston/2021/09/04/elon-musk-has-an-amazing-message-for-anyone-who-wants-to-censor-his-starlink-internet-n1476048 [pjmedia.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday September 06 2021, @02:00AM (1 child)
Except for China, which will blow them out of the sky.
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-constellation-china-threat-2016-11 [businessinsider.com]
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/15/starlink_china_crisis/ [theregister.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 06 2021, @02:52AM
One of the basic tenets of futuristic sci-fi war stories is, the satellites stay up, until one side or the other is certain that the other side gets more benefit from the satellites than our side gains from them. At that moment, the satellites come down. You better have a backup plan for when they come down.
Satellites are vulnerable, and they will remain so for a very long time, maybe forever. There's just nothing to hide behind in a near-planet orbit. Now, if your sat can sneak off and hide behind the moon or something, then maybe it will be more survivable. Problem is, no matter how well hidden it might be, as soon as it broadcasts anything, it has given it's position away - so not much point in hiding, even if you can find a hidey-hole.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 06 2021, @08:03AM
I wouldn't hold my breath, dear, it's not healthy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday September 06 2021, @06:27AM
Daniel Hale [wikipedia.org]
The Drone Papers [theintercept.com]
I wonder how many are aware, in spite of not being an Internet shutdown?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Username on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:23PM (13 children)
There was several. I remember reports of cell service in Ferguson being stopped. If you posted anything about BLM, your post on facebook, twitter or YT was disappeared. Until Trump got into office that is. Now, was that truely a shutdown by the government? Is a political NGO that consists entirely of members of the party in power and doing things on their behalf, governmental?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:44PM (5 children)
On that same note I also believe there would generally be a much thicker line drawn between "protestor" and "rioter" if footage from these protests was made more available, especially when you see protestors bounce would-be agitators. Turns out when you corral all the 'official' reporters in one spot they just keep their cameras on whatever's burning.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @12:45AM (4 children)
They would anyway. If it bleeds, it leads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @01:00AM (3 children)
And if they can turn a protest into a caravan of boundary-crossing looters, you'll return again and again and again to consume more outrage/fear.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @02:16AM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @05:56AM (1 child)
Weird to have you admit that the GOP nonsense is as bad as it looks, then go on to defend their values against all world data.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @02:11PM
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 06 2021, @08:06AM (5 children)
You're comparing a government turning off internet access of its population to private entities deciding what you can do with their property. Do you see the difference or do I have to point it out?
Nothing kept you from opening a service, preferably outside of the country that you accuse of trying to curtail your freedom to express yourself, access it and broadcast your information on it. This is kinda different from countries where the local regime decided to cut your connection to the rest of the world.
I really hope you can tell the difference.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday September 06 2021, @02:04PM (1 child)
What i'm saying is that Snowden showed us that there are well funded agencies in the US that are QUITE willing to break the law in order to get what they want, sometimes with the backing of the President and others high up in the 'hierarchy' of the US.
Stopping internet coverage: is it that far from holding people without access to an attorney or any form of justice (Guantonamo Bay) and declaring people who do the morally right thing as terrorists and force them to flee their home country to escape a possible kangaroo court and prison?
I. don't. think. so.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 06 2021, @03:14PM
Yes. The difference is that nobody gives half a fuck about the people in Gitmo. But they do care about their cat videos.
Yes, that shouldn't be. But that's how it is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @02:14PM (2 children)
You're going to point out that the private entities are conveniently acting as proxies for the government's interest in those situations, right? I wager most of the intentional government-led shutdowns listed in that study are actually implemented by private parties rather than by a government actor directly.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 06 2021, @03:18PM (1 child)
You really think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatever antisocial media are there give half a fuck about what the US government wants? They care about profit. If anything, they tell the government to be happy with the info they throw them and shut up or they pack up and leave and then the US government can try to get anything from them anymore.
I think you grossly misinterpret who owns whom in this game.
The antisocial crapfests care first and foremost about money. That's it. They have no allegiance, no loyalty, no political agenda. They want money. Yes, money also means power, but for that they don't need politics. If they do, they buy a few politicians to do that for them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @08:15PM
Absolutely.
And that is why. It's vastly more profitable to get some quid pro quo from the government than to subject oneself to the considerable problems that a displeased government and its regulators and law enforcement agencies can provide.
Government is top dog here. The "but Facebook has money" is an absolutely ridiculous argument. Think about it. Facebook has revenue [macrotrends.net] of around $100 billion presently. Sounds like a lot of money, right? Well the US government has revenue of $3.4 trillion over the same period. I get that billions and trillions sound alike, but one is much bigger than the other.
But it's worse than that. Facebook has to use most of that revenue just to insure that it has a future revenue stream - paying people, marketing, etc. That results in a net income somewhere around $30 billion per year. The US government does a bit of that too, but it's expenditures to keep the revenue going are much smaller. For example, the IRS (the US agency tasked with collecting most taxes) has a budget of roughly $12 billion a year. The budgets for the revenue collecting part of the federal government is minuscule. Thus, the similar net income for the US government is in excess of $3 trillion.
This also extends to borrowing. The US borrowed something like $3 trillion this year. They didn't get the serious analysis that a private business would have received for borrowing nearly the same amount as their annual revenue.
Then there's the bookkeeping. Facebook accountants would go to jail for the games that US government accountants are allowed to play - such as being allowed to completely ignore long term liabilities.
Finally, there is the raw power that governments have. Facebook can't start wars. It can't force large businesses like itself to follow very unprofitable rules that Facebook doesn't have to follow. It can't jail people.
Sorry, profit/money cooties don't make Facebook the owner. The US government has something like two orders of magnitude more of those things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @12:31AM
Do you have any evidence to substantiate this claim or are you just spreading rumors?
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday September 06 2021, @11:26PM (1 child)
Odd. Presidents were overthrown in Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia. In Ukraine the guy was actually elected and then overthrown twice. The same guy. The only country that managed to stop it was Belarus.
That's while in the West nobody overthrowing anybody. Well, there was a weak attempt in Washington, but they are all carefully being hunted down. May be it's because democracies tend to make revolutionaries disappear quickly and quietly?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday September 08 2021, @06:32AM
It's easier to keep people from revolting if elections are honest, the person you elect is someone Russia likes so they don't try to stage a coup (which I guess must really piss the CIA off, that used to be their job after all, THEY TOOK UR JUUUBS!) and if your army is generally in favor of the idea of having a democratic system.
You need at least 2 of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @11:33AM
Because the stability of the nation is NOT influenced by these niche protests.
USA can control the social media directly, if they wanted to. And the party in power used BLM to try to rally its racist base. For France, the protests are just a normal weekend thing.
You don't hear? YOU? Because I hear quite a lot of problems in Belarus. And that attempted coup in Turkey, yeah, it's not just a protest over wages. Maybe you heard about Syria? They got there though protests organized on Twitter as well. Maybe you recall the entire drama with the "Arab Spring"?
Kyrgyzstan had their government overthrown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/world/europe/kyrgyzstan-protests-election-parliament.html [nytimes.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Kyrgyzstani_protests [wikipedia.org]
Maybe if the Trump Insurrection in January would have resulted in more than it did, maybe then you would see local Internet shutdown in some parts of USA.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by helel on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:20PM (16 children)
Are you suggesting that if we shut down the internet we could stop Republicans from rioting? It's an interesting mental exercise altho I think most people would object on principle.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:50PM (15 children)
You're half right, anyway. Without the internet, we wouldn't have seen the Summer of Love 2020, sponsored by BLM and Antifa.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:23PM (13 children)
Without murder of American Citizens at the hands of Law Enforcement we wouldn't have had BLM protests.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:59PM (11 children)
Unlikely. BLM protests justified killings when they run out of murders, and they get their mojo on a 4 year cycle.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday September 05 2021, @11:10PM (8 children)
... Uh huh. On this particular world there has NOT been a state of 'out of murders'. When you guys should be talking about how LE treats American Citizens instead you guys talk about how it's the victims' fault. Oh and there's less tolerance for that now since the about-face for of one of the Capitol Rioters recently.
You've got a path that's both easier and less attractive to opportunistic looters.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @06:36PM (7 children)
Fuck you, ignorant, brainwashed race traitor. Blacks don't belong in any white country and should be shipped home/expelled. Peacefully if possible in the US as it's not completely their fault the Jews brought them here as property (primarily for other Jews and 1-2% of whites). Blacks in SA and other white nations they invaded voluntarily should be told to leave and other white nations should send in the military to run them out if they don't leave (which we know they won't becasuse they are dependents of the worst kind; ungrateful and violent). First we would have to get control of our intelligence agencies and military from the International Jews and their lapdog Shabbos Goy. Won't happen until dumb whites like you wake up out of their dream world created by Jew school books, agents(teachers) and media.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @06:54PM
Get a life troll, humanity doesn't want you racist idiots.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday September 06 2021, @07:19PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @08:37PM (3 children)
as it's not completely their fault the Jews brought them here as property
I wondered how you would weasel out of the fact that most blacks in the US are descended from slaves that were brought here involuntarily and have since interbred with everyone else here (something like a third of them are white even!). Of course, it's the Jews. The problem with that fairy tale is that a lot of non-Jewish whites made that happen and profited handsomely from it.
My take is that it's time you came up with something better and grownup to worry about. We're not about to create a "white country" just because there are Jews somewhere in the world. But if such a thing were to happen, you can bet good money that your elites in that country, whether Jewish or not, would immediately figure out how to import non-whites just for the cheap labor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:46AM (2 children)
khallow, psst! You're out of your league again! Did you not notice that the racist scumbag was talking about white countries that blacks voluntarily migrated to? Like, SA? We are dealing with a Rabid Afrikaaner here, those Dutch that god has forsaken. Best to just ignore them, unless they try to shoot their wives and children, or build rockets in Texas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:43PM
Khallow's actually making good points, including about the pragmatic attitude of elites.
As for your racist attitude to south africans, I think that puts you more in company with the original racist ranter. (Not that the assessment is one that makes sense anyway, historically. The incursion of white colonists coincided, roughly, with the incursion of Bantu tribes and both were pretty destructive to local groups.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 11 2021, @02:10AM
"as it's not completely their fault the Jews brought them here as property"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 06 2021, @11:02PM
I wondered how you would weasel out of the fact that most blacks in the US are descended from slaves that were brought here involuntarily and have since interbred with everyone else here (something like a third of them are white even!). Of course, it's the Jews. The problem with that fairy tale is that a lot of non-Jewish people (white, black, and others) made that happen and profited handsomely from it.
My take is that it's time you came up with something better and grownup to worry about. We're not about to create a "white country" just because there are Jews somewhere in the world. But if such a thing were to happen, you can bet good money that your elites in that country, whether Jewish or not, would immediately figure out how to import non-whites just for the cheap labor.
[added:] In hindsight, you're probably just trolling for a reaction. Congrats, if true. But if this is really something you believe, you're failing hard. Jews, blacks, whatever won't patch up your life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @05:58AM (1 child)
Jesus Christ you fuckers are just absolute evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @03:49PM
You're evil but you don't know it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @12:21AM
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of rampant American racism, Hmmm?
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday September 06 2021, @12:52PM
The AC I responded to specified minority groups. 60% of Americans think the police should be held to a higher standard [washingtonpost.com], making the protesters against police violence the majority.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @07:13PM (2 children)
Capitalistic oligarchies have no need to shutdown the internet, so long as they have sycophant corporate heads willing to censor the webs for them.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @07:22PM
Did you say "Joe"?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tork on Sunday September 05 2021, @10:26PM
"Tucker made our sponsors lose money again!"
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @08:44PM (24 children)
What we need is a transport and routing protocol that works well under conditions of uncertain, uncoordinated and fluid topology naming, with point-to-point communications and encapsulation of communications such that final destinations are externally opaque.
This lets out IPv4, IPv6, and damn near any mesh system that I've seen proposed. I've actually worked out what would be feasible mathematically but the reality is that nobody really seems to give a shit because such systems might be used for kiddiepr0n, and that turns everybody's brains off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @08:57PM (18 children)
The sad fact of the matter is, only an entity with the scale and power of a government has the necessary funding and institutional backing for major infrastructure projects, and governments are not in favor in decentralizing anything.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:04PM
The only reason we have the internet in its decentralized form... or rather, we had, was that the government was scared that there's an enemy powerful enough that it can do a decapitation strike, so that's why it wanted a sufficiently resilient decentralized network.
Since that enemy doesn't really exist anymore, there is no governmental interest in not having everything in their grasp.
It's time for China to become threatening again to again make governments feel that it would be a good idea that a decapitation cannot happen.
Kinda strange to think that Soviet Russia was one of the cornerstones for our freedom. As long as they existed, our wannabe-dictators had to pretend they're the good guys.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @12:48AM (16 children)
Not true. A project like this could be done by a few hackers with tin cans and modems. And then expanded on an as-desired basis. It could even be piggybacked over the internet for long haul - why not? If the contents of the packets are opaque, it'd be pretty straightforward.
The problem is the nobody-gives-a-shit level. I've already done the mathematics and design, decades ago. But everybody told me the internet would always be free and route around damage forever because we can trust Uncle Sam...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @02:07AM (15 children)
Well, cough it up, big shot! Don't bogart that joint...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @04:25AM (14 children)
OK, assuming you're actually interested on a technical level and not just another time-waster: The central challenge is that you do not, and can not know what the topology of the network is aside from your direct connections, because even if you did, it might change at any time. In general this is a pain in the arse because it means that no routing table withstands scrutiny for long, and route usage has to be based on a combination of past information plus current discovery. You'll notice that if you can solve for this, you also solve for chokepoints because a new route that can be discovered works whether's the official AT&T route, or Bob the Hobbyist with a cantenna and a wild look in his eye.
The next challenge is how you handle name and address collisions, because you must assume that they can be deliberately created by bad actors. You need a disambiguation system, as well as an ad hoc technique for setting up that infrastructure without a central (or even decentralised, but effectively delegated) authority handing out names and addresses.
There's quite a bit to the naming/addressing thing, but to I'll cut to the meat of the matter, that at its heart public/private keys give you a last line of spoofing defence, so the public ones have to be part of the naming infrastructure. Given out-of-band options for verification, this is pretty effective.
The question of routing comes down to figuring out how much smarts your machine needs. Interfaces are a legacy approach of the IP way of thinking; they have been used to create virtual identities, but honestly they're not very helpful. What you want is to reach a given destination, and how you get there is moot. This still supports virtual machine identities, because you can host them on a given real host. So then you start by figuring out how tough the routing choices are that your machine has to make, and its level, so to speak, of routing intelligence. A degenerate case is 0 connections to other machines; any packet is either local or dead. Slightly higher: only 1 connection. It's either for local, outbound, or dead. Higher yet: two connections. It's either for the local environment, passing through, or outbound - and this is the lowest level where some kind of choice is to be made, because it could go out one way or another. This prompts a route discovery, which is related to (but not identical to) what used to be called a "big shout" looking for the destination.
There's a lot more to this, even though it's algorithmically simple, because you'd actually start with routing hints where available. The naming system has, not merely a record of identity and verification (key) but also a routing hint that would be familiar to people who still remember UUCP. This is no coincidence, because UUCP solved a pretty similar case. This reduces the hunt for a grain of sand on a beach to a pebble in a pile.
This isn't a good forum for laying out the whole damn thing, but if you're genuinely intrigued, you can respond with questions and so on.
Bear in mind, this isn't supposed to be efficient in the ideal case - it obviously isn't. It's supposed to be functional in a hostile case, which is where we're going.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @05:12AM (2 children)
I took a quick glance at the routing section of the RFC for UUCP and I think I have a general idea of what you mean when you talk about routing hints, but a little more clarification would be helpful. How do we prevent source/destination filtering between endpoints with a malicious network operator? When it comes to discovery, is there a way to avoid TCP/IP's naive approach of relying on "politeness" and dumb routing when hints are not enough to generate a clean route ahead of time?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @04:08PM (1 child)
OK, a couple of questions packed together.
"How do we prevent source/destination filtering between endpoints with a malicious network operator?"
Answer number 1: You don't. You can't. If the government of Shariastan is palpitating with horror at the idea that you might be seeing decadent western beach pictures, and they look for destination addresses of beachpics.XXX to drop those packets on the floor, you can't prevent them from doing so. However, if Shariastan does so, but the wicked Russian Freedom of Speech collective sets up alternative networking through a satellite, or powerlines, or whatever, then that alternative route will be discovered because requests for beachpics.XXX suddenly do start returning through it. The government of Shariastan can't even know that such traffic exists without trying it itself, and reverse-engineering the route step by step. They can't cut off addresses, because they don't control them. They can't withhold naming because they don't control that. They can't revoke keys, because they don't control that, and as long as some dissidents are willing to put up links, those will keep popping up like bittorrent sites in the wake of a takedown wave.
Answer 2: The equivalent of VPN servers would be trivial to create, because the ability to pop up a virtual server, assign it a name and number and just have it act as a router, unwrapping and forwarding, inside encrypted connections, is basically baked into the founding assumptions of any such network protocol. "Someone sent me a packet. Unwrap - it's another packet for someone else. Toss it in _that_ direction." The VPN doesn't even have to know with any clarity what the source was, or be able to decipher the contents.
Bear in mind that a given packet only needs, in principle, a destination and a payload. You could add some network management data elements if you like but a source is not a requirement for a pass-through node to perform routing. This means that performing naive source/destination targeting isn't possible, and even tracking things like sequence numbers doesn't work if they're in the encrypted payload. Pulling stupid webcache tricks to inject advertisements is right out because you don't even know that the traffic is web traffic, let alone what the content is.
"When it comes to discovery, is there a way to avoid TCP/IP's naive approach of relying on "politeness" and dumb routing when hints are not enough to generate a clean route ahead of time?"
Yes and no. The direct analogy of TCP/IP's default or fallback routing processes doesn't quite apply in most cases because, aside from "outbound, not local" there kind of isn't a default route.
But here's a bit more of a breakdown on that. You and all the kids from school got soup cans and string, and set up primitive modems to wire up your suburb. It works, cool, with only a 58% packet loss rate, at 300 baud! Amazing. You want to send a message to Suzie.hot.library.grrrlz, and ask her what she's doing on Friday. You are pretty sure she's online, and your little computer is hooked up to Bobby's, kitty-corner to your place. In the first instance, it's easy. Your computer checks its cache, and determines that you never had the balls to talk to Suzie before, so it's not locally cached at all. Your computer sends a request to Bobby's.
Bobby is a real social animal, so his computer has four outbound links (not to mention his parents have a large plot of land bordering several others). Two of those are leaf nodes, including yours, but two connect to other people with more connections of their own. How does Bobby's computer know this? Because when the computers establish a physical and logical connection, they communicate an identity and also the complexity of their own network context. Ergo, your computer told Bobby's: "I'm JoesRPi, level 1" while his told yours "I'm BobsAmiga, level 4". Extend this principle, and Bobby's computer can tell that when and if it doesn't have a route, it has two non-leaf connections through which it can request remote data.
However, there's a wrinkle. You're not just asking to talk to Suzie, because there's more than one Suzie in school, and you are kind of scared of Suzie.cheer.queen.bitch, not to mention her attitude turns you off like a switch. So your request isn't just Suzie, as a computer name, but Suzie's computer in a naming context. So the first request that REALLY goes out is of the order of a DNS query. Cutting a bit of this already long story short, the DNS query returns with:
suzie.hot.library.grrrlz - computer ID 12345 - public key 54321 - routing hint 67890
Bobby's computer doesn't need to know, necessarily, how to reach 12345. In fact, it probably doesn't because as luck would have it Suzie the library grrrl has a leaf node computer as well. Just not that much traffic for her flows through Bobby's node. However, 67890 is a node belonging to Steve the Supernerd, which has five leaf connections and three trunk connections, and to which Suzie's is directly connected. Bobby's machine knows, or can _very_ rapidly find out from the cached data of neighbours (in a network with any stability, this sort of data propagates very rapidly, depending on assumptions) where to find Steve's, and Steve's knows where to find Suzie's.
Putting it in more prosaic terms, you ask Bobby if he knows Suzie, and he says naww, but if Suzie knows Steve he knows Steve, so yeah, they can get you together. Success!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:19PM
Next question:
Does anybody give enough of a damn about any of this to actually work on an implementation?
So far, judging by the response, the answer is a firm "no".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 06 2021, @06:33AM (6 children)
You resolve trust between discussing over net but never physically meeting IRL ... exactly how? Because otherwise everything is just handwaving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @03:23PM (5 children)
Same as it ever was. Out of band communications. Many ciphers depend upon them - for example, OTP. If you really, really REALLY need to know that you're going to be getting only authorised kitten pictures from Kittenpics.XXX, then you absolutely have to have independent verification of their public key, which you can then, at your option, include as part of your name search to make sure that the diabolical powers of Puppypics.XXX haven't spoofed the local naming system, the local addresses and pre-empted the valid response coming from Kittenpics.XXX.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 06 2021, @10:25PM (4 children)
Then your internet is not a replacement for the current internet and the two will need to coexist, because your internet is inherently much poorer in regards with the possible interactions, no e-banking/e-commerce as the first two.
I always rely on trusting a DNS to resolve the name of my bank. If you replace it with certificates (or shared secret or whatever crypto handwaving), I'll need to store an immensity of them and deal with their expiration.
Ummm... yeah. Try explaining to me a decentralized ebay next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @10:38PM (3 children)
Wait ... waitwaitwait.
You think the current internet solves that? For real? For realsie-reals?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I'm sorry. That was so rude of me. Heehee. I mean, unforgivable. Hahahha.
Let me put it this way: if you trust the current DNS infrastructure, then you should be just peachy-keen a-OK FINE with a distributed approach to naming with a foundation of identifiable nexus servers.
But you do you, I guess.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 06 2021, @10:44PM (2 children)
Read more on trust [schneier.com]. It's always a compromise.
Move the balance towards paranoids and only the paranoids will use your internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @11:33PM (1 child)
Compromise is available. For folks like you, trusting what you get back from a regular query is just fine, now roll over and go back to sleep while Big Brother's Little Sister rubs your back.
For the paranoid, out-of-band verification, multi-factor authentication and all that stuff is still there.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 06 2021, @11:58PM
I survived a communist regime and its secret police for 25+ years.
Use your technology and stick out as a sore thumb, just prepare yourself for a $5 wrench attack on your or your close contacts' multifactor authentication. Also keep in mind the situation is dynamic and can change in any minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:33PM (3 children)
On the contrary, as a tech site this is the precise forum, to discuss technique instead of arguing stupid politics that distracts everybody's attention.
Personally, I would like to "broadcast" my signal, and the guy with the "key" will pick up, but how do I hide my "transmitter"? Plus we need hardware just just passes a signal regardless of content or protocol. The pipe itself has to be truly passive
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:03PM (2 children)
If you're just broadcasting, and everybody's just broadcasting, you start to run into bandwidth problems pretty quickly, especially in a routed network because of exponential growth of the number of links; it's like a massively parallel breadth-first search.
You also, under that assumption, can't hide a transmitter because anyone who can pick up the transmission can deduce that the transmitter exists, and a fair amount about it. Best case, you scream an encrypted message that only the intended recipient can decrypt, and verify that you're the source, but at layer 0 a source can still be traced.
And passive pipes do exist; traditionally they were made of copper wire although optic fibres exist as well these days. The problem is that the moment you want to apply discrimination to routing so as to conserve shared resources, you need to bolt some smarts onto your passive pipe. However, a properly self-managing system should be able to have set-and-forget routing nodes as elements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:26AM (1 child)
And there still needs to be a physical meeting to exchange keys, gotta use one time pads, right? I think a partial solution is intermittent connections, or some sort of "spread spectrum" scheme, switching addresses at irregular times, and piggybacking on the noise, but, how do you sync?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:28PM
You don't necessarily have to meet physically, but there are workarounds. Depending on what you intend to do, it could be a physical mail, or even an advertisement in a newspaper. It depends on the context of the intended communication.
As for what you're talking about, look up ratcheting ciphers.
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday September 05 2021, @09:34PM (4 children)
Gab is working on it. They have a plan for an entire decentralized social media network. If there was a CP post, Gab's node will ban it, but some nodes might not. For instance Twitter allows CP for some reason. If they had a node on the network, you could view it there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @12:46AM (1 child)
It has to be down at the TCP/IP replacement level. Capable of handling any hardware that affords signal passing, but from layer 1 up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @03:50PM
At that level it would require hardware replacement similar to what the IPv6 rollout needed. Good luck getting people to pay for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @04:40AM
Does Gab call it the [fediverse.party] Fediverse [wikipedia.org]? Is it based on StatusNet and XMPP?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:52AM
Oh, great! The geniuses that coordinated the January 6th violent insurrection and overthrow of the United States Congress? This should go well!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06 2021, @03:44PM
In fact I'm more afraid of less shutdowns than more.
If there are more shutdowns, it means that the government did their last resort to stop things. That there is a reason for shutting it down, that something happens.
If there is smaller it means that the Internet is under control. By troll armies, by forcing divulging of personal data (read: registering and logging in) and chilling effect of it, or by societal problems which may be fixed only by collapsing the society unfortunately (the idea that employee is the property of the employer even in free time).
P.S. Sorry for unformatted sentences, not enough coffee for today.