Briar. No servers to block.
Assumong you are talking about chat control, here’s what I would do:
Level 1: based on what i know, they wanna send data to a service to check for csam before it is encrypted. So use DNS level blocks to circumvent it. Think NextDNS.io
Level 2: they made the companies/app to integrate the checks into the app. In this case use use Open Source and self-hostable apps like matrix or simpleX. Ask your tech savy friend to host it somewhere and use it.
Level 3: they use DPI or smth to detect encryption. Use onion routing networks such as tor or i2p. They are designed for this. Look into snowflake and riseup vpn, they both implemented some tech to make it difficult for governments to surveil us.
Level 4: they banned all internet. Use meshtastic network that uses radio waves and a specialized device to connect and send data. I don’t think it will come to this but it would be nice to have more people using it cuz I also wanna get into it lol.
Some general ways to navigate this would be using plain old vpns, i think they wouldn’t use the csam detection service if you are not in EU but not for long i think. Once EU does it, everyone else will also start doing their own versions.
The problem with mesh networking as a means of evading government censorship is that radio transmissions can be localized rather trivially. Meshtastic might have a use case for evading corporate censorship, or providing some kind of service in remote areas… but if a given government wants to ban unmonitored communications in general, then every node in the network is a beacon that local law enforcement can find and shut down. If your government is going into the sort of full repression that a Level 4 ban implies, then that sort of encrypted RF transmission amounts to a public signal that says “I’m breaking the law right now at this location”, and anyone enforcing said ban can use that signal to physically track you down. (See also the related problem of finding a drone’s operator, which is very doable.)
No, as a matter of both historical fact and current best practices, what’s left after Level 4 is the sneakernet. If you want to share data that your government doesn’t want shared, do it in person, ideally on miniature devices that are easier to smuggle. That’s the only real data access that exists in North Korea, but it exists nonetheless.
Level 4 encryption doesn’t exist. But Jamming does.
I think jamming all radio everywhere would be kinda difficult, but im not an expert in this. I just said it cuz many governments, when they want to censor everything, they disable all internet going out the country. Also i find the idea cool 😅.
As for encryption, i think if you can learn to set up meshtastic, then it should be trivial to also add encryption to it.
Buy 2 copies of the same book. Provide the second party a copy of the book and the cypher order(ex. First number page, second number paragraph, third number word or letter).
Alice and Bob and Eve and Trent and Mallory.
ML based semantic obfuscation. Without going too much into details, the idea is to use a seq2seq+VQ-VAE model to create embeddings, then modify those embeddings via a key (ideally in a way that preserves the latent distribution of the training set). The model is trained with cycle consistency, i.e. minimising the difference between the input embedding and output embedding. By knowing the key, the embedding from the encoded output can be converted back to the embedding for the original input, and the encoded text appears as clear-text as long as you stay within the distribution.
It would ultimately have similar effects as when most governments banned The Pirate Bay: it stifled grandma from accessing it, but anyone who has any will to do so, or small amount of technical skill will bypass the ban.
I ignore the ban and continue using my applications which are all open source.
Same here, good luck implementing that ban
i’ve read that many apps can be not just banned but blocked. now i don’t have a source at hand but i heard that russia blocks not just signal but also matrix, meaning that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether the app is open source. similarly i’ve read that deep packet inspection can block things like sslvpn and wireguard.
still, blocking delta chat is really quite difficult, as russia has noticed and got angry about, so there should probably still be a way unless the country also blocks all email communication
They can block Signal because it is centralized. Signal knows this and built proxies into the app for this purpose.
Similarly they can block the main matrix.org server but since it’s decentralized you can still use any of the thousands of servers they may not even know exists.
Russia’s long term plan seems to be blocking Western networks and force the bulk of domestic users to the Max messenger, which implements inspectability a la ChatControl. Apropos: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
You can tunnel through the Great Chinese Firewall fine, if you know what you’re doing.
They block the ip addresses for the server components of those applications. easily circumvented with a proxy outside of russia. most these communication apps have such proxy support builtin.
The only way ‘apps’ can be banned is if they cut of the internet. soon as you have a data pipe from one end to another you can encrypt whatever you send.
This is why i2p and p2p protocols are so important it makes it infinitely harder to control / ban. you end up having to have a directional whitelist (i.e. you need to only allow outgoing connections from home devices to a specific set of ip), and even then once thats in place… if any of those things allow communication we can push data through them.
i see your point, but i worry that deep packet inspection would still be a major pain in the butt in that case since it may detect your encryption and block it, regardless of the ip you’re trying to talk to
not really an issue. DPI just increases costs for enforcement and is fairly easily worked around at the application layer. annoying to implement a workaround but not hard. this is the issue with most enforcement mechanisms people try to come up with when dealing with systems, they try to prevent anything they dont like ™ and it just ends up costing them more.
in fact iirc i2p basically helps with this problem just by existing already since it inherently generates a steady stream of data.
i got my fingers crossed you’re right! thank you for your kind responses :D
Can we switch over android to open source operating system easily?
What about windows on laptops?
I don’t know what you mean, e.g. GrapheneOS and AOSP based ROMs are all open source. Linux (or *BSD) on mobile devices is also an option.
Huh thanks I will have to look into that, not computer savvy here.
To do whatever it takes - I certainly will not comply. No, I don’t care that makes me a criminal. If somebody made it legally mandatory to eat babies, I wouldn’t do that either.
I have a modest proposal for you…
No, not even if they’re poor babies. It’s just not palatable.
There are plenty of free and open source pgp tools out there. Nothing is stopping you from encrypting your own text and pasting it into messaging apps. Even if you dont trust some tool from the internet, sha2 isnt that hard to understand or implement with a bit of motivation
Probably find ways to buy all the advertising profile data I can, sort through it until I find some related to the fools that voted for that, and give it to spammers.
The people that make these laws often have zero idea how anything works beyond “the lobbyist said do this, so I do this.” So they should be educated about their poor decisions.
Get all my money out of the bank in physical and keep living. Since encryption is dead, internet commerce is dead and keeping any sort of money in digital is now unsecured.
That would be really funny if a bunch of other people realized it at the same time
Oh yeah I was looking from the sidelines back when something like that happened in Argentina with the banks trying to freeze draw-outs. Fun times.
Nice try!
The government banned pirating media. That hasn’t exactly stopped the tech savvy from doing it anyway.
hasn’t even stopped the non-tech savvy lmao
Manual encryption.
I have a few tools in backup and installed on my devices in case that happens.
Ok, let’s roll with it. Gov manages to ban all encrypted communication, The only logical conclusion would be that all communication has been banned, since you can always easily agree with your correspondant about an encryption. No communication means, no telephone, no mails, no internet, no speaking, no sign language, I guess paper is banned too, no pencil, no way to write anything…
Hmm, I guess the gov managed to get us back to living in cave then, and managed to erase everybody’s memory of technology too.
My gameplan is then the following, get a big stick to defend my cave with my local community, growing food, chill and enjoy life until I die from a disease.
