Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
Yes, have a look at reticulum. No centralized addressing authority. No centralized domain naming system. Everything is globally routeable. It also just got support for transferring HTTP with RServer and MeshBrowser.
What is meshbrowser? Ive done work with reticulum but never heard of MeshBrowser?
I only heard about it a couple of weeks ago. It’s a chromium-based browser that will do regular HTTP over TCP but will also do HTTP over reticulum and you just enter in like http://reticulum_destination_here and it loads the web page. To host HTTP sites you need Rserver which is its companion.
How hard would it be with a bored cop or activist with a $100 scanner off Amazon to find the nodes for a local Reticulum network and knock them down, or identify the people hosting them?
Moderate. Reticulum can work over almost any medium. Ethernet, wifi, LoRa, HF, serial, paper qr codes, etc. If I remember correctly, real-time communication only requires a medium capable of doing 5 bits per second.
I always figured we would go to tor when this day came. But I keep seeing people mention all of these alternatives I have not heard of. Is this reticulum better?
Tor is if you can still access the Internet in general. Reticulum is a network that can exist outside the Internet physically, with long-range radio waves. Think Bluetooth, but the waves travel farther, and carry much less information.
Its decent…but VERY hard to set up. At least at the moment.
Ive played around and contributed a tiny bit over the last couple of years. You basically set it up piecemeal and then you have an actual decentralized server/client setup on a number of devices. Phones, lora, etc… can all work with it.
Ive sent myself some pictures/voice/internet packets via two heltek v3 at one point using nothing but the system and a laptop not connected to the internet. It does what is says on the tin.
But it took quite a bit of time and effort to get there. And while it was neat, no one else is really using it and things go down all the time. So I moved on to “easier” projects like meshtastic/core.
Tor/onion is MUCH easier than using reticulum but also is dependent on quite a number of internet nodes all being up and doing their thing. reticulum can run on the equivalent of 1W (or less) helteks.