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Privacy
Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
Rules
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
- Be civil and no prejudice
- Don't promote big-tech software
- No apathy and defeatism for privacy (i.e. "They already have my data, why bother?")
- No reposting of news that was already posted
- No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
- No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)
Related communities:
Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net / !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
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/
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.
You can tunnel through the Great Chinese Firewall fine, if you know what you're doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Manual encryption.
I have a few tools in backup and installed on my devices in case that happens.
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
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.
PGP
Would switch to self-hosted matrix and persuade as many family members and friends to do the same, using my server if they want.
Use them illegally.
Nice try!
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.
Stop talking to people altogether. It's not like my mental health can get much worse anyway.
Probably best investment now would be a ton of thumb drives. Thumbernet will be big.
We used to call that the "Sneaker Network"
Well, we'd be back to the 80s and I'd ask my parents about life back then. Online banking would cease to exist and I have to go to the bank teller's window to get or transfer money, also shops probably fall back to cash only. I'd need to open and start my car with a key unless that kind of cryptography is still okay and it's just phones... I'd plug my laptop and smartphone in with a network cable becase I'd be afraid the neighbours commit crimes with my Wifi... My employer might want to resort to paper instead of computers because there isn't any authentication for the company's data... I could cancel my Netflix and Spotify subscriptions because they'd either cease to exist, or I could just watch them without paying. I'd talk to my wife in the evening instead of arrange stuff via an instant messenger... I guess all of that is doable. People did it that way a while ago. It just needs restructuring of the entire economy, society and our lifes would lack most of the modern convenience. (And if it's just phones and every other cryptography is fine, I'd just get rid of the thing and use my laptop or whatever is still allowed for everything.)
And since the question was about the gameplan... First thing, I'd invest all my money into copper and fibre optic companies immediately, because people will need to install A LOT of additional, direct cables between things.
Flood all communication channels with constant AI bullshit.
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.
Keep... using it? How are they going to enforce this?
Worst case scenario, and they somehow manage to remove access to every encrypted chat application in every store (including f-droid) and every repos of every distribution everywhere; and shut down every server in my country; and get telecoms to block every port of every secure chat client; I've got VPSes outside my country, and VPN configured. I'd probably build my own encrypted chat - centralized server hosted on my VPS - with PK E2E encryption.
For a big, public chat app, the bar is higher. For my family and friends, something I hacked together would be good enough. As long as encryption is done in the client, hiding metadata (who's talking to who) isn't important for my use (we're all family & friends). Chat is the most trivial of applications to build; it only starts getting complex when you want it to be serverless, or anonymous, or have PFS. Securing popular servers (attractive targets) makes things harder; being popular makes things harder.
Start speaking a dead language. Or just use genz language. Can you skibidi that for me?
Ah, here we have the sigma rizzler, frfr no cap.
I am old and have no idea what tf you just said. We need to just use Gen Z as live encryption devices. They could make a whole industry out of it and be like those "windtalkers" (was that the name?) from WW2.
I'll show them mine if they show me theirs. On a serious note, encryption is just complicated math added on top of ones and zeroes. They can't really ban that, it'll only make people all the more educated in circumventing such bans and then they're fighting an encryption hydra, becoming stronger with each iteration.
OTP