We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .

We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it's been nearly a month and i haven't heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to "lol, nah". the french would've set a car on fire for less is all i'm saying

They've said nothing of the sort.

England isn't the problem, it's London that's the problem.

London needs to become its own independent city state and then they can do what the hell they want with it and then we'll be governed by someone from Leeds or Manchester or someplace like that, by someone who actually has a grip

One backbench MP said something about it.

The problem of social manipulation via bots isn't limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We're also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It's causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it's largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform's manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It's a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.

I just don't like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).

So we must censor everything to protect us from misinformation which allows the censors to determine what is available and what is lot.

Sounds an awful lot like China.

Geez Brits. One shit decision after another. Just like your western children.

US: Father, why did you vote for Brexit?

UK: Son, who are you to talk? You voted for Trump twice. Now shut up before your mother chimes in...

France: No wonder I took the house in the divorce and left you with your father.

US: Well at least I didn't abandon my affair baby Haiti.

France:...

UK: Did you really have to go there son?

It is time to move to darknets like:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid

The UK's Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit | Taylor Lorenz

From the US and Australia to France and Italy, those seeking to obliterate privacy and restrict content are on the move, says technology journalist Taylor Lorenz

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)

There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.

Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

It’s cute you think VPNs will survive this.

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late.
Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.

It’s cute you think VPNs will survive this.

We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .

We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .

Just read some story about a Digital ID being proposed called the Britcard which everyone has to carry all the time sounds very Black Mirror and concerning.

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

So we must censor everything to protect us from misinformation which allows the censors to determine what is available and what is lot.

Sounds an awful lot like China.

Geez Brits. One shit decision after another. Just like your western children.

US: Father, why did you vote for Brexit?

UK: Son, who are you to talk? You voted for Trump twice. Now shut up before your mother chimes in...

France: No wonder I took the house in the divorce and left you with your father.

US: Well at least I didn't abandon my affair baby Haiti.

France:...

UK: Did you really have to go there son?

It is time to move to darknets like:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid

The UK's Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit | Taylor Lorenz

From the US and Australia to France and Italy, those seeking to obliterate privacy and restrict content are on the move, says technology journalist Taylor Lorenz

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)

and stay out of the EU, england

Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?

In any case, you can't have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.

But honestly all of today's computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.

I wonder if it's possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it's a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don't know Japanese to play with it.

Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.

Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won't help. It's not even a matter of technology, it's a matter of links' capability when you can't use the Internet because, ahem, you'll be detected and police will come knocking.