Yet another Hacker News

I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27

155 points Tomte 1 hour ago 62 comments

cyanydeez 1 hour ago | parent

It seems like "censored internet" will be the least of the worries when it comes to agent explosion. Even if your internet is free, how are you going to find it through the slop brigades generating and consuming the same "load bearing" crap. Even if you setup the oracle of the day, and no one stops you, how are you going to filter all the crap out to find it? And how will you afford it when everyone puts up pay gates to deal with the xplosion, leading to only the most valuable aislop being allowed on.

sssilver 1 hour ago | parent

If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?

If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.

mixmastamyk 7 minutes ago | parent

It’s not about refuting random collections of words, but rather that lies spread faster than truth.

QuantumNomad_ 15 minutes ago | parent

> If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?

No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.

> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?

The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.

croes 1 hour ago | parent

AI will help them to create the perfect cage.

No jailbreak, no exploits

pixl97 49 minutes ago | parent

I mean yes, it is likely there is no other probable outcome.

One of the big problems with the HN rugged individualist types is they think they'll get to have awesome unlimited power at their broke ass individual scale and that somehow people with millions or billions of dollars aren't going to use said power fully to their advantage while crushing anyone that stands in their way.

More so they think that power seeking type people and organizations will not quickly adopt this technology and spend massive amounts of money to entrench their legal position while weakening everyone else's rights.

As much as technology may free us, it seems even more probable that it will put us in the perfect cage as you say, or just completely end us all. There is no universal law that says technology cannot power scale way beyond humans ability to remain chemically stable. If we fly too close to the sun our wings will melt off.

saidnooneever 58 minutes ago | parent

Is there an uncensored intetnet, because i dont think there is. if there is any, it can be turned off because its being routed on the censored net wrapped in encryption.

that being said, that makes me pretty interested in this talk. outside of hacking sattelites and such things and/or infra i really dont see any opportunities to break free of the will of corporations as they can simply pay infra providers to do their bidding.

I dont think software can solve all problems because internet exists essentially as informaiton transported over infrastructure. the software surely helps enable that but its a helper not the actual network.

happy to learn otherwise from anyone here ofc :-)

ThrowawayTestr 44 minutes ago | parent

Do you consider removing illegal content censorship?

pixl97 39 minutes ago | parent

You might be confusing two different things.

Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.

Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.

cowlevel 26 minutes ago | parent

Of course it's censorship. In china you can't talk about a certain quadrangle, and when they remove content about it, that's censorship.

pixl97 43 minutes ago | parent

> informaiton transported over infrastructure

Even building your own internet, say over wireless is easily detected and jammed.

About the only thing that could save us (though likely cause so many new problems we won't feel saved) is some kind of more sci-fi technology involving the non-locality of the universe for devices to communicate (not even talking about FTL communication, just different topologies within universal limits).

cowlevel 26 minutes ago | parent

Or, hear me out, optical laser mesh

pixl97 24 minutes ago | parent

Very easy to detect and deal with, especially when you're talking about fixed positions like your home.

cowlevel 23 minutes ago | parent

But impossible to detect if you aren't standing in the beam path. Or use fiber, and it's impossible to detect if you don't trip over the fiber.

adrianN 19 minutes ago | parent

It seems relatively simple to me to detect fibers hanging around cities as soon as the network is bigger than two nerdy neighbors. Same for lasers and telescopes.

saidnooneever 16 minutes ago | parent

ud need tons of beams tho do maybe its easy enough to segment the network badly by finding bunches of them?

m4rtink 15 minutes ago | parent

It really depends on what ypu are dealing with - if you are worried about communication being too centralized and monopolized, it might be a good idea to start building and alternative. Doing that might avoid the situation getting worse, slow it down or even reverse the trend.

If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.

Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.

adrianN 10 minutes ago | parent

Building an Alternative internet seems like a fools errand to me, like building an alternative road network. How are you going to reach a critical mass of users? What should stop the powers that control the old internet from taking off your network as soon as you beat the odds and gain popularity?

saidnooneever 5 minutes ago | parent

this is the thing. an alternative internet is often suggested but whos gonna host a global switching network and put cables in the seasnfor that, and will it be allowed? what about cables in the ground or antenae everywhere to spread the network? it could simply be made illegal if it isnt already

saidnooneever 15 minutes ago | parent

i like this idea. it does sound scifi, maybe quantum entanglement? i know nothing about this stuff tho :)

aktenlage 41 minutes ago | parent

It's not black and white though. There's a scale from "easy to censor without collateral damage" to "need to take the whole nation offline to suppress information flow".

And there is a scale from "trivial to circumvent, if only (you know) you want to" to something like "need to be very tech-savy and use custom hardware"

cowlevel 27 minutes ago | parent

As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.

saidnooneever 17 minutes ago | parent

cant you just disable resedential and non critical connections? ISPs etc. know whos who right? no need to take the nation offline. only the people in it (civilians, medium/small businesses etc)

u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic

entropyneur 8 minutes ago | parent

Russia is trying that (white lists) and it's proving costly enough that even they have to back off. They'll probably get thete eventually but it requires serious investment if money and time and inevitably hampers the economy.

weinzierl 38 minutes ago | parent

I sometimes think mid to end of 90s was peak freedom. Never before had there been so much mostly uncensored world wide communication. Unfortunately most likely there never ever will be again.

m4rtink 30 minutes ago | parent

What about a solar powered mesh network build on commonly available LoRa chips and micro controllers ?

cowlevel 28 minutes ago | parent

Who owns the spectrum?

m4rtink 21 minutes ago | parent

In Europe it is using the 868 MHz ISM band with some duty cycle rules (maximu of 10% of every hour can be used for broadcasting).

In the US apparently 433 MHz is used instead.

easterncalculus 26 minutes ago | parent

Does this exist already? Meshtastic doesn't do IP.

m4rtink 22 minutes ago | parent

Sure does - MeshCore for example:

https://meshcore-analyzer.eu/#map

Quite active here in Czech Republic for example.

As for the IP protocol - maybe its too much overhead for this use case ?

MeshCore uses PKI and public key prefixes as addresses & for routing/repeating.

haunter 53 minutes ago | parent

Most people prefer censored internet as long as it aligns with their political leaning. Maybe that wasn't the case 15 years ago but it's pretty much true nowadays. I myself consider this as a fact.

Gareth321 19 minutes ago | parent

I agree. Interesting you’re being downvoted. I’ve been using Reddit for 16+ years and have watched it morph from a libertarian, centrist community dominated by developers and geeks, into a very left wing, violent, vehicle to export American political activism to the world. Redditors used to abhor censorship. People would practise debating all kinds of taboo topics because this is how we become wiser. Now just commenting on the wrong community will see you automatically banned from 30 of the largest subreddits.

They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...) It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.

brador 49 minutes ago | parent

The problem is there are so few uncensored places now that if you do make one you overnight become the sweary nasi/pedo/sexads bar because everything else is closed to them.

Basically Reddit 2018.

ThrowawayTestr 42 minutes ago | parent

It requires a strong-willed webmaster and a board culture that rejects such unfun people.

pixl97 35 minutes ago | parent

Thus they are censored.

Part of the problem here is there are people that think any kind of censorship or moderation is wrong. I will not make any universal statement about the correctness of their position, but I will make a personal statement about their position. "They are fucking crazy".

Now, every once is a while you need a bit of fucking crazy to shock you out of the position you're in and reassess what position you should hold.

cowlevel 24 minutes ago | parent

And by blocking certain people, you demonstrate to authorities that you can block anyone you want, and you will be held in contempt if you don't block anyone they want. As opposed to having no technical blocking capability.

Dwedit 49 minutes ago | parent

"Censorship" vs "Content moderation". You can't have online discussions without moderation, and that makes moderation some form of censorship. Thus you can't have online discussions without some form of censorship. Only difference is who is doing the censoring.

b33l 43 minutes ago | parent

uh maybe you can't

zzzeek 41 minutes ago | parent

Ok Elon

eviks 42 minutes ago | parent

Of course you can have online discussion without moderation. In the most basic form: you publish on your site, I respond on mine. No moderator involved

And there are plenty of other differences besides "who", for example, "how".

pixl97 37 minutes ago | parent

> can have online discussion without moderation

That's a big negatory.

>you publish on your site,

And your site gets a takedown for illegal content, or cops show up at your door and drag you out while beating you.

Life is heavily moderated in a million different ways. What we're talking about this point is just moderation or unjust moderation.

Gareth321 26 minutes ago | parent

It’s hard to take down sites on Tor. Usually impossible without the full weight of the FBI/CIA. I agree with the user above: we can do decentralised communication without censorship. Of course if you start from the faulty premise that online discourse needs to occur on one of a handful of censored platforms then that’s impossible.

cowlevel 25 minutes ago | parent

And so tor has a reputation of mainly being used for illegal things - because it is - and several countries just block the entire thing.

tgv 27 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, that's not going to solve twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.

I'll make my position clear: many parties try to influence people, and quite a few of them do so with grave consequences. The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference. In the words of the article: it's already not "technology serving people", but rather "controlling" them.

If extreme right (or left) parties come to power, your freedom of speech and privacy is over. So it's either moderate moderation, or authoritarian moderation. And if it's up to me, it's not your choice.

Gormo 22 minutes ago | parent

> Yeah, that's not going to solve twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.

It sounds like that would precisely be a solution to the problems of using these platforms.

tryauuum 19 minutes ago | parent

as long as it's not the government who is doing the censorship / content moderation then I'm OK

since the government is too powerful and can enforce its ideas with legal violence

b33l 12 minutes ago | parent

20 years ago I heard "I'd rather China than Google" and I still think about it often

rustyconover 47 minutes ago | parent

FOSDEM is a great conference!

If you ever get the chance to go, please go! Especially if you're an American I recommend it. It is so different than any other conference I've ever been to in the US.

It doesn't have a lot of sales pitches, the technical content is top notch, and overall it is really fun and interesting to see what everybody is talking about and working on.

weinzierl 42 minutes ago | parent

I can only second that! And it is so relaxed, came and go whenever you want. No hassle to get tickets like for Congress. Of course you will queue - a lot, but consider it part of the experience.

pantalaimon 24 minutes ago | parent

There are also several events around it that make it nice, like meeting random other FOSDEM attendees over a beer or dancing at ByteNight

m4rtink 12 minutes ago | parent

Many communities also hold their yearly meetups & dinners there, often the only time people working together daily in the community see each other face to face :)

barrenko 7 minutes ago | parent

I welcome you all to my neighbourhood!

talkingtab 18 minutes ago | parent

The big problem with the internet - which is very dysfunctional - is not censorship but propaganda. Everyone on the internet is selling something because that is the only way to pay for being on the internet.

If the people who pay for the internet are not the users then who will the internet serve? Not the users. and since corporations are known soully (as in that is their soul) what would you expect? If people who want to profit by targeting people with lies pay for the internet, is that censorship? Well sort of - but maybe worse.

We need a community internet task force. Lets start one. Request for comments.

billfor 7 minutes ago | parent

One persons propaganda is another persons truth. Who are you or your task force to decide? The big problem with the internet is it gives dumb people access to each other.

iugtmkbdfil834 5 minutes ago | parent

RFC.. but we would have to agree what the ground rules are. I somehow suspect that those will be will be somewhat different ( kinda like some would argue against/for codes of conduct ) person to person. Still, if we could upend at least some of the underlying commercial interest or even the need to rely on advertising, it could be something.

edits abound

themgt 5 minutes ago | parent

I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Around the world, people are being silenced, monitored, and denied access to information.

Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated

The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.