While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.
The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.
> or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome?
reskined chrome are still ultimately taking google's changes downstream. For a while, it may be OK, but what happens when google changes the web standards to suit themselves? Will those reskinned browsers fork the standard?
Firefox _is competition_, but not competitive based on market share.
Standard wireguard is blocked by DPI in Russia, China, Iran, etc.
The soluton in the post for VPNs as in "censorship bypass", not as in "virtual lan over the internet for businesses". Like AmneziaWG or VLESS protocols.
But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.
At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.
Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.
Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires additional configuration.
Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".
> Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".
Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road etc, or disfavored politics).
I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they should be illegal rather than when they formally are?
Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays.
When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.
Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it.
Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.
You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content.
Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".
I still don't get how to bypass a theoretical block, you need to access at least one of the current major relays or a side channel to find a follower, only аfter that you can re-translate the new set of relays. The autosub is good, but IMO the current major operators have an Elusive Joe situation because nostr is very small. Things will change as soon as people with money and government connections see it as a problem.
I totally agree with the Wikipedia argument though.
I think relay discovery by clients has improved by leaps and bounds and will continue to do so. Previously you had to give some complicated "follow me at such and such relay" thing. These days you can just tell people your npub and things seem to "just work". I don't know what's going on under the hood, I can only say that clients figuring out which relays have content seems to have improved drastically.
To improve user experience, Nostr clients typically pre-load several large relays. In fact, Nostr also supports using NIP-19[1] pointers to pass custom relay hints to the client, similar to the tracker in BitTorrent and Magnet. Furthermore, I believe that with Let's Encrypt now offering free and widespread IP certificates, domain dependency issues will be further alleviated on Nostr.
Tor, sure. i2p requires some proxy config in your browser and you need to run a service in the background explicitly. I wish they'd release a dedicated client like Tor does.
I'm not sure why that would require more friction or why my comment was downvoted: i2p is harder to use than Tor. Adoption will be hindered by it, even in tech circles. I want to fire up an executable and maybe click through one prompt but not have to remember all the configuration steps the next time I want to use i2p.
The current focus are new rust and go implementations, but embedding lib for applications is also in the roadmap.
I also agree on hindrance. I don't understand why they don't provide a simple docker-compose at least for daemon deployment for immutable management with controlled scopes. There is an image in the dockerhub, but no proper instructions. People have to spend several hours to ensure that everything works correctly.
Freenet (aka Hyphanet) is 25 years old... it's been "stable" for decades. Biggest problem is that content is sort-of hosted locally and considering how much child porn and other criminal content is in its darker corners tha can be risky.
Darknet term is mostly used to refer onion services, which have been around since 2004. Freenet was never meant for anonymity, both have separate goals.
We've seen only the world where everything has been adopted to IPv4. p2p technologies strive even under it, but they could really shine with the ability to connect directly between devices. Imagine BitTorrent on steroids, where you don't have peers with assigned IPv4 and seedboxes and everybody else. Torrents are generally faster than usual channels to download things, but with ipv6 it would be far faster than now.
Cloudless cameras streaming to your phone without Chinese vendor clouds, e2e encrypted emails running on your phone without snooping by marketing people and three-leter agencies, content distribution network without vendor lock-ins. The possibilities are impressive if we have a way to do it without TURN servers that cost money and create a technical and legal bottlenecks.
We can't say nobody wants that world because we've never tried it in the first place. I definitely would like to see that.
While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
reply