Comment by nickslaughter02
1 day ago
> Two days later, US Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson warned big tech firms they could be violating US law if they weakened privacy and data security requirements by complying with international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
> still have a unified internet across the globe.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
Yggdrasil is a decentralized mesh IPv6 network. It automatically forms one big network as more people connect together. It has end-to-end encryption, it's fast (unlike darknets), and it's pretty simple.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP. But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).
4 replies →
I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
1 reply →
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
Reticulum is interesting. It's basically flowing through all network interfaces available on the devices and routing data packets. Making it very easy to connect say lora and bluetooth to the global internet, even using i2p.
Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.
Im sure you will be able to get a passport for digital travel
Funneled through your local government router, where you first have to install certificates and agree to let them MitM.
We do still have limited entry and exit points to other Countries internets. You could end up with Great Firewalls across the globe if it got bad enough. It doesn’t deter VPNs though
They will put you behind bars for years for using VPNs once they win.
5 replies →
The actual great firewall deters VPNs. Western internet blocking tends to be weaker for some reason (cheaper?) but there's no reason they can't be just as effective if the political will was there.
I think this was 100% the intention.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
> international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
It should be noted that the Online Safety Act is in fact not international, but UK-only.
> How will this work with chat control? There is no POC for a chat control E2E-compliant chat app and there will never be. this will just kill EU made software because they will be forced to comply, while US software will use real E2E as marketing.
As others gave said the UK left the EU 10 years ago.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
The UK isn’t part of the EU anymore. As I understand it, this doesn’t apply to the broader group.
It's a US company - tell the UK to pound sand if they think they're going to tell businesses here how to operate because they want to run the UK like a draconian hell-hole.