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.
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.