Technology

Compared to the open internet and the slightly dark parts of the internet, there is nothing of great interest, except the fact that no one can easily hunt down what you did while you were there.

The real problem is, by the time you actually want to be there because there is no anonymous access to the real net, they'll ferret out people running i2p at all and block them from doing so.

Wait until it's one of the only private places to go.

There's a few places.. Torrent tracker. Could use a lot of improvement though, yes. It's always been that way unfortunately. TOR is larger but that makes sense due to gov origination and its associated money.

I had the same problem, then I decided to do something about it

Russia seems to have a lot of problems blocking Tor if it's so trivial to block their obfuscation methods.

If no cross-border traffic is allowed at all, that's where reticulum comes in. Radio doesn't respect borders, and if you want to kill the ability to use any kind of radio communications to get out of the country, then you have to jam the entire radio spectrum as well as the light spectrum to avoid using point-to-point laser communications.

I don't see why not.

The big problem with TCP IP is that it requires being assigned IP addresses and the border gateway protocol and other such infrastructure, which is not usable as an individual.

In Reticulum, you self-assign a destination address using your public and private keys and then announce that that service is available to the rest of the network through whatever connection you happen to have to the rest of the network.

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.

The protocol is reasonably private. Trying to find exact sources of a piece of traffic is about as hard as it can be. Reading the contents of the traffic is also at a very high bar.

The downside is, it still needs visible nodes to connect to, and the VAST majority of us only actually have access to TCP routed networks for that purpose. The only way you're talking to that reticulum node in Norway from California is because BGP is delivering your crypto stream for you.

If you have a small neighborhood and you're all like-minded, you could use reticulum over HaLow or LoRa network adapters to create a private, IP-less mesh and it could go as far as you can find more people willing to run the hardware. HaLow has enough bandwidth to stream video, LoRa is mostly only good for text. Of course, If someone is doing something like video, it won't take much to saturate everyone's connection. It's not like someone could run a Plex server and everyone could be watching it in the neighborhood at the same time; that 30MBPS can only handle a couple of decent-quality streams.

If my current hardware failed and I had to go buy a tablet for some reason, I’d… yeah I’m out

(I have 13? 14 computers?)

We need the open source hardware movement to be faster as well. RISC V CPUs are already a good step in the right direction, but we do need more.

Better get to making the most of it.

Some of us bought our hard drives before OJ Simpleton got elected. Fill em up now or regret it later.

Ebooks, 100%. Information density first and foremost, then comics/manga, then movies and sure, some TV, a copy of wikipedia, linux isos and tools, more isos, more tools, a few containers and a virtual machine disk of your choice - went with Debian.

Future's fucked. I do my part to donate to whoever I think will turn the tide anyway, but... have a plan B.

If it comes to that point, there will still be ways to get software that gets around it. It might require a physical transfer from somebody, but they can't ever cover 100% of the options. Black markets will always exist, and Anarchist or hacker groups would probably help you for free.

Even though you can't put up a mast and are currently isolated from the rest of the mesh, put up a node anyway, and then add yourself to one of the maps with, say, a quarter mile of inaccuracy.

If somebody was to drive to the location you have your node pinned at, with a quarter mile of inaccuracy, they would still be able to communicate with your node.

A node on a mast is great. A node on your roof is good. So, if you can't have great, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good and put up a node on your roof. Your house is still probably around 30 feet tall, so that's still 30 feet of height, and somebody will eventually be able to communicate with you.

Otherwise, you get the chicken and egg problem, where a new person turns on a mesh core node and sees nobody available, so they turn off their mesh core node and put it in a drawer, and when their neighbor gets a mesh core node and turns it on, they see nobody there, so they turn off their mesh core node and put it in a drawer, not knowing that their neighbor has one, and if they had just left it on, they would have someone to communicate with.

As for the government making their own client and trying to hunt people down, you can make mesh nodes out of a lot of things because it's so small and low-powered. I've seen people make security cameras into mesh nodes or solar lights into mesh nodes and when you mentioned this my thought went to a mesh teddy bear. I've never seen anybody create a mesh teddy bear, but I don't see why you couldn't.