>>3
Call me an armchair tyrant but the Illuminati ending was the best ending. To answer OP's question, there will always exist the spark of free information exchange and discussion somewhere on the web; it will become harder and less-legal to find as time goes on, but it will always exist for the same reason that censorship cannot defeat an idea. I encourage you to do what you can to help keep the internet a free place and encourage others to do the same.
So if the web gets regulated, then I can go somewhere on the Internet that isn't the web. The ancient Gopher, Usenet, and email newsgroups still exist. There are also new technologies that are designed to be censorship resistant
>There are also new technologies that are designed to be censorship resistant
Do any of them not suck? Freenet is good for text files but not that great for any other sort of file. Others I've encountered seem to be reliant on serving things directly from your personal PC much like older, less armored P2P schemes.
The internet has been shit since the early 2010s this site is still one of the last good sites on the web.
>>6
I do not understand your definition of "not suck".
>>8
Needs to:
A) Be able to maintain a copy of something even if one's own computer gets broken off from the network for whatever reason.
B) Be able to reliably store files beyond just tiny ones.
If it can't do those two things, the notion that it's "censorship resistant" is just a gimmick to promote a functionally inferior network (and the claim itself is kind of bogus, if it can't do point A).
Freenet is pretty good at point A by establishing redundant copies throughout the network. The system it uses for that makes it bad at point B though because anything larger than about a megabyte tends to get bumped out of the network sooner than later (and sometimes will give the illusion of still being there but never complete all the pieces). Nothing else I've seen (Tor, I2P) even seems to be able to get point A right (you can at best maybe bitcoin to some dodgy webspace provider to host something until THEIR system goes down/takes it down, which is hardly any better than the clear web).
Widespread adoption of encrypted comms and more people hosting their own services. This is equivalent to giving corps a giant middle finger
>>9
So your idea of "censorship resistant" is a literal computer virus: self-replicating and intended to be impossible to stop. I wonder why nobody else has thought that this was an idea that needed implementing... 🤔🤔🤔
> self-replicating
More like something similar to how Freenet does it, you install a client and files propagate to different nodes across the network as they're inserted/requested. The biggest problem with Freenet has always that the algorithm it uses tends to favor keeping small but often-visited things like someone's "lel I'm using Freenet" test page while dropping less visited but potentially more useful files (for a few reasons, partly the popularity algorithm itself which might or might not be improvable, partly because access tends to be from an index page and anything linked to on said index page gets more hits than anything else. This system also has the issue that you have to trust the index maintainers in what they may decide to show/bury; Freenet's tendency to prioritize trust systems over building something that works from a "no one is trustable" stance is the other big issue I have with it, but ultimately they may be on to something with that one, any sort of connection to another computer requires some degree of cooperation that could be maliciously manipulated by a bad actor). Ideally, of course, everything posted would be retained forever, but limits of available disk space make some sort of prioritizing a practical necessity. If that's too virus-like for your taste, enjoy your server takedowns I guess.
> intended to be impossible to stop
That should be a no-brainer as necessary to the definition of censorship-resistant. If it would be easy to stop, it would be easy to censor, now wouldn't it?
https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/FAQ gives a pretty good overview of why they made things the way they did. Most of the ideas are good (and generally better than other systems I've seen), I just think there are a few flaws that keep it from being a really viable for general use.
I'll also add the disclaimer that it's been a few years since I've used this thing and it may well be that stuff's been improved in the interim.
>>14
Going by a look at their page without having tried it yet, it looks like it's more of a response to the practical shittiness of traditional web hosting (cost, centralization and its woes). It might address "censorship" if by that you mean difficulty finding a web host who's willing to host something controversial. Breaking the shackles of traditional hosting and expanding the use of P2P systems over centralized servers is certainly a worthy goal, but the fact that they offer anonymity as an option via piggybacking with Tor suggests that actual censorship-proofing is something of an afterthought. I have my doubts about it holding up against an antagonist with sufficient resources and determination like a government or big corporation (although the cynic might well say that ultimately no system will hold against such, if they're big and determined enough.)
tl;dr I'll definitely try this and if it's reasonably performant and reliant I'd probably consider it worth recommending for the majority of uses, but I doubt I'd advise plotting a revolution there.
Endless glory to big corporations. Death and suffering to the infidels that avoid the light of advertisement.
Hail majestic corporate light
Heaven born and ever bright
how our spirit like the waves
at the breath of thine awakes
and now the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.
Ah! We are those whose thunder shakes the skies
- the thin spun life.
What are the big corps monopolizing the internets? FANG?
>>20
The suspects:
Google/Alphabet
Facebook
Amazon
That's basically it.