/tech/ - Technology

Is this something that a state in a bigger country could get away with, or does this only work because Italy is relatively small?

So what does this mean in practice? Is this like the chinese Great Firewall?

>>12950
I don't know what factor scale plays.

We can look at material conditions for information controle.

For example the DPRK. They are a semi agrarian semi industrial society. The peasants don't care about what's written in the News, because everybody in the social order above them will starve to death if they stop working, they don't need words or images to wield political power.

The industrial part of DRPK society compares it self with other countries that have similar levels of development, and the DPRK leads "that bracket". They have roughly twice the living standard and about 20 years longer life expectancy to their closest competitor.

The privileged strata of DPRK society that has full access to international information sources, finds a terrifying outside-world. If they look at western sources, they find lots of cartoonish anti-DPRK propaganda, that makes western society look extremely brainwashed. And they also find tons of think-tanks that preach bombing the DRPK into the stone age.

There currently are very few incentives in DPRK society to change their structure.

For a second example there would be china, the Chinese government has made a bargain that if Chinese citizens give the state lots of controle they will get lots of economic growth and improving living conditions. And the Chinese state has delivered on that. Plus the local governments and provincial governments in China are very democratic and actually change their policies to conform to public demands, which has become somewhat rarer in the west. All that said i'm predicting that China will have similar civil liberty struggles in the medium term future as the West had in the 20th century. Because that's the societal result of prosperous industrial societies. It will probably have a different cultural tone.

One factor that's frequently being overlooked is development over time. The west had very high levels of freedom of expression and is now going backwards while living conditions are declining, which makes the ruling class appear to be pure evil. While China and the DPRK never had this before. The Chinese government is slowly easing up the grip on information controle while living conditions for Chinese people are improving, which makes them look benevolent.

In the west political legitimacy is based on upholding rights. So we have to consider the possibility that these people are trying to discredit western governments, because they're clearly not upholding those rights to free expression. If this extremist political current persists eventually they will be viewed as a hostile environmental factor that damages information technology. Basically if censorship is possible that's just a technical defect.

From a physics perspective a completely free and open internet seems to be an inevitability. Information transfer technology is very expensive (still) and the only way to make it cheaper is to reduce the amount of energy and mass involved in "carrying information" (metaphorically speaking). Going from paper to electricity involved a huge mass and energy reduction. By using a less energetic and heavy medium information-transfer gained some ability to pass through solid matter (radio/micro waves). If we project that technological progression into the future, that means that eventually we'll go for a weakly interacting low mass particle that can pass through the planet.

There is fierce competition to develop that, because the military desperately needs this to send signals to it's submarines, and underground facilities. Portable communication devices desperately need it to reduce power consumption. Low energy/mass communication particles are also harder to jam, which probably will become a requirement for economic exploration of space to avoid blackmail via signal jamming. That means that in the long run all the censors are dead. Just people who figured out temporary ways to block the signal. In the end signals will be able to pass through led barriers that are light-years in thickness and can't plausibly be blocked.

>>12951
>So what does this mean in practice? Is this like the chinese Great Firewall?
No, the material conditions for that only exist in China where 80-90% of the population trusts the state. Many Chinese people think their state wants to protect them, improving living conditions are usually interpreted that way. However even in China this level of information controle will only remain for a while.

In the west trust is mostly gone already and many people think the state is out to get them. Declining living conditions and various other factors have seen to that. The ruling class appears to be malicious and the political strata appears disconnected from the rest of society. There will be legal disputes, huge political struggles and technical battles to route around the censors. Copyright will suffer more ideological erosion, more than it already has.

The free internet can be saved.

>>12949
>Is it possible to make internet infrastructure more resilient against PDOS (political denial of service) attacks ?

Sure, but it won't get off the ground without mass adoption by apathetic normie masses. You can't just assume that if you build it, they will come. There has to be something for them to "come" to besides a digital ghost town full of empty buildings and vacant lots. You'll have to slowly foster a tight-knit community of individuals who use the darknet for a wide range lucrative criminal enterprises that appeal to normie interests before they finally start trickling in. Their numbers alone will draw more content creators and developers and "entrepreneurs" of various stripes. It's not a technology problem but a people problem.

>>12977
>Sure, but it won't get off the ground without mass adoption by apathetic normie masses. You can't just assume that if you build it, they will come. There has to be something for them to "come" to besides a digital ghost town full of empty buildings and vacant lots.
I agree with that.

>You'll have to slowly foster a tight-knit community of individuals who use the darknet for a wide range lucrative criminal enterprises that appeal to normie interests before they finally start trickling in.
I think you're wrong on this, if crime had worked as the "killer-app" to draw a crowd, the existing "crime stuff" would have taken off already.

I will admit Japanese cyberpunk stories from the 80s promised cool cyberpunk shit, and the reality is boring as shit.
-drugs that aren't worth taking cause they ruin your health and turn you into a junkie
-stolen databases of sensitive private information
-fake-ass assassins
None of that is a appealing offer, where's the nanite technology and cyborg enhancements ?

I think people want better customer protections and better quality controle. People are migrating off Amazon back to direct-sellers with a simple web-shop because Amazon sells too much useless trash. It boils down to uncertainty. If you can't be reasonably certain about the quality you're gonna get for your money, people will avoid. Your scheme of a "den of criminal enterprises" will attract scammers and then people will shy away.

The OP describes unhinged internet politics in Italy, that is a form of uncertainty too, that will drive people to seek out other paths. So there's that.

>numbers alone will draw more content creators and developers and "entrepreneurs" of various stripes. It's not a technology problem but a people problem.
This is correct again, it requires a something to initiate a virtuous cycle.
But we have not figured out what that something is. It probably won't be petty crime tho.

>>12979
>the reality is boring as shit
The darknet economy has basically crystalized. Whoever was going to show up because of the drug market is already here. Everything else is marketed to hackers looking for hacking tools, pedophiles looking for cp, dumbasses who want to hire hitmen, and other cyber criminals looking for utilities like bots and SEO optimization. We have to think outside of all that to bring in large numbers of normies and bootstrap a virtuous cycle of mass adoption.
There's lots of untapped potential in piracy. I see an entire potential market that current DNMs have neglected and left upon a shelf to collect dust. Take books for example. Imagine a darknet clone of Amazon where you can browse books that have been scanned and digitized, and buy them with Monero for pennies on the dollar compared to buying them from Amazon. This would hurt Amazon in the process, so what's not to love? However I've looked through the "Digital Content" sections of various darknet markets and they're mostly just cracked porn accounts and "howto become elite haxx0r" ebooks. Why not create some competition that will force them to evolve?

>>12981
Build a community of people who digitize & sell books, and become successful enough that DNMs copy it in their own business model

>>12981
To have success with something like this, it's not about enabling illegal shit. You want something that upholds laws without enabling might-makes-right battle-law. Mega corporations abuse the legal system to bully smaller competitors with malicious litigation. In those cases small producers almost always are technically right but the other side has so much litigation capacity that they'd go bankrupt trying to get justice. If you facilitate protection from this type of might makes right, all the small and medium producers will flock to your thing.

>>12981
>>12982
As far as media distribution goes, your goal should be to become the publisher of choice, not just doing sloppy seconds. All the creatives always complain that they get their creative vision compromised by editorial censorship of publishers. So if you can find a means to publish without that imposition, that's going to be the winning strategy.

You need better licenses too. Maybe something with levels and income-goals.

First level is crowdfunding, the makers gets payed in advance, but the price for the consumers must be very low.
Second level is a paywall like with most other publishing, this level should only remain active for max 1 year.
Third level is a flat-rate (must be single digit price) for all the stuff you published that is older than the crowdfunding and paywall level, content remains in this level for max 2 years.
Forth levels is entering modified public domain, this happens after 3 years at the latest.

license must prevent changes that can extend the duration of levels, and the modified public domain must ban republishing on platforms with full or partial automated take-down systems or adding any kind of drm.

Income-goals are meant to skip levels. So if enough people buy during crowdfunding to reach a chosen income goal, the content can go directly to flat-rate or even modified public domain. The sales from the paywall level also add to the income-goals. As a publisher you charge a percentage of the income, and you incentivize choosing lower income-goals with a lower percentage publishing fee.

AI is going to be a thing now and has to be taken into consideration, it's not going to replace creators, but it will greatly improve their productivity, single individual and small teams will be able to make appealing stuff. The best thing to do here is mimicking FOSS principles, so all the producers on your "distribution-thing" must contribute every thing they publish as AI training material, in return they get free access to the Ai stuff.

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The makers of Dark nets probably do not want you to conceptually link their thing to illegality, their intentions are about making a tool for privacy and freedom that protects vulnerable people that are being politically persecuted. Maybe be mindful of that.

>>12949
This whole scheme would require a lot of resources and technical expertise and other preparation work in advance just to put it in motion. I'm thinking in terms of asymmetrical warfare. The current infrastructure is monopolized by big tech. They're the ones who have the luxury to implement big top-down plans like this, we don't. My only goal is to start something that has the potential to evolve into something like you describe, which I can create on a shoe-string budget. Start off with something shady, then turn "legit" once it gets off the ground, like Napster. I would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.

And as for DNMs, they're very comfortable with "illegal shit". Why do you think they sell hacking resources and cracked accounts and gift cards bought with stolen credit cards?