Negative thoughts flooded my mind. The EU is constantly trying to push Chat Control. They’re blocking bootloaders on phones, introducing ID and face scanning everywhere, in the US they’re trying to push system-level verification, corporations are spitting in our faces and don’t even hide it. I know we have to fight. My personal rebellion was joining Fediverse and Lemmy and quitting Reddit. But seriously, boss—I’m tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile? Can we win against corporations and politicians who we pay but don’t listen to us?
Nope. They have no power over decentralized services outside their jurisdiction.
We will always have the option of privacy, even if we loose every court battle in 99% of countries
In the US MS send data to AtData (former Towerdata), among others, which use keyloggers and mouse movement logs, because this is irrelevant if you use decentralized networks or even the Onion, they know always what you do and what you post. Because of this is important to desactivate Recall and block coresponding telemetries. Portmaster, PiHole or similar nowadays is mandatory in any OS and network system.
Not for Linux?
Well Linux don’t have recall, but anyway depending on the apps you use (don’t forget that GitHub is owned by MS and for sur certain APIs also in FOSS). Firewalls and traffic monitors like Portmaster also are for Linux. Also Linux isn’t immune against spy- and logger malware.
To be clear, Windows as most used OS is traditional also the main target of malware, but since nowadays are more and more servers working on Linux (even those from MS itself), the panorama is changing. MS has therefore invested a lot of work in shielding Windows with an efficient sandbox system, secure boot and one of the best AV on the market included in Windows, even protecting against Root Kits.
While Linux, being less affected, has rested a little too much on its laurels and does not have really effective protection or an AV that deserves the name until today. The risk that malware can affect the system (which is free and easy to substitute) is certainly smaller in Linux, but not so for files and documents, nor for the Boot sector.
Read the Communist Manifesto. Thank me later
Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.
Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.
The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.
You can’t stop the signal.
The EU isnt trying to push chat control. If it was then the EU wouldn’t have shot it down multiple times like it has been.
Lobbyists are the ones trying to push chat control on the EU.
lobbyists need time; the more they have, the more they can do.
In Poland we call it “gotowanie żaby” (eng. boiling a frog). This is a nice idiom for slow action towards a specific goal despite the resistance of reality.
We will always be able to keep our own provacy. Linux phones are getting better, motorola is working with grapheneos. Even if all new phones suddenly become locked down we will still have our own phones. They cant stop us from building and using our own private services. The main issue I see is friends and damily not willing to use private messages.
Privacy is dependent on our peers to to have privacy. Privacy is not a choice.
It’s a mess when the right wing control freaks are in the gov. The only thing a user can currently do is avoiding as much as possible these platforms, using instead eg. P2P for communications (https://otr.to/, https://github.com/michal-wrzosek/p2p-chat, https://mesh.im/, etc.). Because of this and big corps the internet is dying, I see the future only in decentralized networks, I2P or something like this for an communication without a big brother in the middle.
They aren’t blocking bootloaders, they’re blocking the firmware. It is an issue, but it isn’t as problematic. The only ones blocking the bootloader unlocks are capitalists, who want to profit from your data and break your phone when they need more money.
One action can serve multiple purposes
I think moving away to decentealised means of connecting is the way. We already have things like Reticulum. If we invent a powerful and robust decentralised way of physical connection (like LoRa or HaLow but better) then we won’t need any corps - neither ISPe nor those that create web services for the ISP based network
You are definitely right, but I will caution that people are going to have to get used to a lot slower connectivity speeds and higher latency than we’ve been used to.
Max reticulum link is 40mbps, tor to onion services is like 5mbps, wifi halo is like 1-16mbps and MeshCore and Meshtastic are like ~20kbps max.
Centralized internet has gotten us used to speeds of hundreds of megabits per second and latency of 10s of ms, and that’s just not possible when decentralizing systems, at least not right now.
at least not right now.
I think this is the key point. Decentralised alternatives begin as slower and less ergonomic, but over time, when more people use them, they should catch up on the proprietary solutions. The massive transition from Windows to Linux that has been happening lately is a good example of that IMO. It’s only us who can help these initiatives grow after all.
Had similar thoughts this morning. I think it’s clear that many countries are going to head down the Great Firewall route; which is now very effective. It’s so hard to bypass and risky that most people don’t attempt to. As more countries implement these measures, and the list of countries/datacenters where people can set up XRay proxies (for example) shrinks, it will be easier to detect and block. I imagine if ad-hoc meshes became popular, then they’d be shutdown too. The problem is more political than technological.
Just do your part and don’t get discouraged. You don’t have to do everything. Walk the walk, talk the talk. If things don’t work out, at least you tried; that’s more than the majority did.
Do what you do no because of some expected local or global outcome, but because it’s right.
i wish i had spent more time on the “pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will” part before i started to learn about leftism; i’m in a funk rn because there’s a seemingly impenetrable gulf between where we are as a society and where we think we are and it’s making me want to give up.
Do you believe “left-wing” ideologies are more negative?
it’s that society tolerates casual brutalities that are innate to right-wing ideologies that is negative to me.
yes, but not in the west, obviously. you’re describing imperialist colonizers as if they somehow should be the beacon against the panopticon? my brother in christ, they created the panopticon. as the empire collapses, living conditions worsen and the crisis deepens, they’ll enforce more and more policies that reveal their true face: fascism. we have a chance, we as in the global south.
Why do you think the global south will be unaffected by fascism? If there is a rise of surveillance capitalism and fascism they’ll try to suppress foreign people with other viewpoints.
im not saying that it won’t but op is talking about this issue and referencing imperialist countries for hope, they created this, why do you think the hope would be there? i don’t understand what’s the privacy community obssession over ewwrope at all, all of those countries are part of the 3/5/8/16/32 eyes. they are the ones pushing age verification even if some other countries also apply it.
Brazil is part of the global south, and together with the US, they are pushing age verification at the systemic level, just to mention
How do you even type an em-dash?
I use Heliboard – on Android — which has a lot of different dashes when you long·press the -regular- dash.
With Linux you can use the compose key or some key combinations, usually with a modifier like AltGr or Shift+Alt.
Most word processors do it for you If you type space dash space then any letter, it will convert the dash to an emdash when the letter is typed.
Alt + 0151 (on the num pad)
Or just press Ctrl + Alt + -
That doesn’t work, try ctrl + alt + del
Lemmy lets me do it by typing three hyphens - - - without spaces—like this.
But I really don’t see a reason to use anything other than a hyphen - it shows I’m human!
oh—that’s neat!
Yea I thought this was a bot, 5 hour old account and such a weird first post containing an em-dash. Glad I was mistaken!
The zillion dollar question. The control freaks do their job and have lots of power, but on the other hand the diversity of responses is immense. Things change: it’s evolution. Be smart, adapt, and don’t forget that a better tomorrow for each and all is possible, day after day.
All things that go up must come down. Icarus’ wings will melt from the sun’s heat. The web will crumble under the weight of llm bots. Markets will crash due to llm’s not living up to their hype. Big tech will be broken up. Billionaires and the trillionaire will be taxed to death. Regulators will lose interest. Let’s have hope.
he is no longer a trillionair. Don’t forget that.
Billionaire or trillionaire is irrelevant. He’s still a dumbass
all long after you die; i wish i could take pleasure from knowing that people that i have zero relation to will get to enjoy this reality.
Oh ye of little faith
pretty much and it makes me wish that i had started with the whole pessimism-of-the-intellect-optimism-of-the-will perspective first.
It has been written! Now we wait
This made me so hot. Pure smut.
i think it will get better, but probably not before lobbyists make it worse first. i guess my question about it is: will i still be able to go to lemmy/mastodon/peertube along the way, and what would it take from the instance owner’s part to keep governments from forcing users to relinquish IDs?
But seriously, boss—I’m tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile?
Nah, we’re fine. It’s just that serious secrecy is a lot more effort and I’d rather not need that. But we do have all the tools.
That’s 80% of the frustration for me. They have already lost that fight for control when they legalized encryption. Now the cat is out of the bag.
For example, encrypting things and hiding them in normal pictures and posts. Using code words in normal online interactions, woven into sentences where there is nothing to decrypt and the message only makes sense to people looking for a message.
Properly executed encryption isn’t just indistinguishable from regular white noise, if it’s mixed into a channel already carrying a message, an observer not looking for something will never see the difference.
You mean stenography, not encryption. Which would be possible even if it’d be illegal.
Like what the court stenographer types? That stenography?
LOL, the autocorrect 🤓 steganography*, sorry!
He/she meant steganography.
Yeah, amazing autocorrect fail.
Happens to me all the damn time.
