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Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Signal
(sh.itjust.works)
The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Nepal has issued an order requiring all social media platforms to be registered in Nepal.
Based on this, the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has instructed all network service providers to deactivate 26 platforms, including Signal, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, and others.
To lift the ban and operate legally in Nepal, each platform must:
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Register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
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Appoint in Nepal:
- A Point of Contact
- A Resident Grievance Handling Officer
- An Officer responsible for monitoring compliance with self-regulation [1]
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Submit an application in the prescribed format along with required documents, as per the Directives on Managing the Use of Social Media Networks (2080 B.S.). [2]
Reference:
[2] Directives for Managing the Use of Social Networks, 2023
The I2P netDB isn’t a single dumpable list like you’re suggesting. It’s a Kademlia DHT stored across rotating floodfill routers. Floodfills aren’t static — routers get promoted/demoted based on bandwidth, uptime, and capacity — so the view of the network is constantly shifting. A normal router only ever queries small slices of that DHT, meaning you never get the “whole picture” from one vantage point. That’s a deliberate design choice to make enumeration hard. On the traffic side, I2P isn’t just onion-style routing. It uses garlic routing, where multiple encrypted “cloves” (messages) are bundled together into one garlic message. This kills the simple “one in → one out” traffic correlation trick. Add to that the transports: NTCP2 is indistinguishable from normal TLS over TCP, and SSU2 is UDP with full encryption, padding, and replay protection. From a DPI standpoint, it looks like generic encrypted noise — there’s no clean handshake to match on like with old Tor circuits. As for blocking, I2P is decentralized. There are no directory authorities to censor, no fixed bridges to burn. Floodfills are chosen dynamically and constantly refreshed, and peers discover new ones automatically. The bigger the network gets, the harder it is to enumerate and blacklist enough routers to make a dent. Censors can try whack-a-mole, but the distribution effect scales against them: more peers in more ASNs across more countries means higher cost to block. So yes, you can suspect I2P traffic if you really try, but fingerprinting and wholesale blocking don’t scale — the protocol was designed specifically to make both correlation and censorship exponentially harder as adoption grows Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95hSAMEwrlM
I am well aware of the design and structure, you mentioned I said some things there that I clearly didn't say.
If I2P is outlawed, and there's a strong possibility we'll see that in our lives, and ISP's are told if they let unchecked traffic through they're responsible for legal ramifications. They'll run enough nodes in enough places and terminate enough end user accounts (at the very least in the US) to make people not want to run it.
I don't care if you can't DPI it. If it's on their network, and they start running peers, they will be able to root people out, not everyone, but they don't need everyone. If the ISP's share their data with each other, making that map isn't all that hard.
The floodfills can be secure and ephemeral AF, but P2P traffic, even packaged through garlic still passes through points that can be seen.
The whole design is supersmart, and from a legal stand point it's solid. But when we lose protections of beyond a reasonable doubt become stripped, they'll tear that network apart user by user until no one wants to chance running it.