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Does the law in Mississippi apply to the geographic region and airspace, or only residents?
nobody should comply
There's going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We've had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the "Great Firewall of China" and asking themselves "Can we get something like this over here?"
If this really about protecting kids, they could've done opt in blocking at the ISP level. Just a few new fields with ISPs and they have products that can take care of this already.
This is really about tracking every little thing you do online.
Eventually it will be about restricting what we can access on the web.
This is why it's perfect time to get some tech literacy regarding tor, i2p, yggdrasil, and shadowsocks. It's not perfect solution to use tech to circumvent restrictions that shouldn't be there in the first place, but sometimes it really comes to that point and it's really nice to have all systems ready!
I've tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.
In my experience, if you have anything but "Network: OK" status (for example, "Network: Firewalled"), it's not working properly. If you're behind a VPN, you need to port-forward and properly configure a port in I2P config/settings. Another sign that it's misconfigured is 0 participating tunnels. This is how properly configured I2P network statistics looks like with high internet bandwidth:
spoiler
The situation does seem quite desperate. I'd like to heed your call. Please advise on most critical systems I should have ready right now today please. I know have a lot of work to do and must stay efficient
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If the internet were fully controlled, you’d need mesh networks - DIY, decentralized networks using radios, local connections, or other alternative infrastructures. I don’t know all the details, but Yggdrasil is a promising modern project that functions as an alternative “internet” for mesh networks, while also working over the regular internet.
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Within the normal internet, the most resilient solution against heavy censorship is probably Shadowsocks. It’s widely used in mainland China because it can bypass full-scale DPI (deep packet inspection) by making traffic look like normal HTTPS. There are ways for authorities to detect it, and there are counter-methods, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for evading state-level traffic filtering.
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Next in line are Tor and I2P. Both are very resilient, and blocking them completely is difficult. It’s a continuous cat-and-mouse game: governments block some bridges or entry nodes, but new ones appear, allowing users to reconnect.
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Finally, regular VPNs are useful but generally less resilient. They’re the first target for legal restrictions and DPI filtering because their traffic patterns are easier to detect.
Overall, for deep censorship resistance, it’s a hierarchy: mesh networks > Shadowsocks > Tor/I2P > standard VPNs. You can ask chatbots about any of these and usually get accurate, practical advice because the technical principles are public knowledge.
Arguably though, at some point they'll just say "if we can't read your traffic, you can't use the Internet."
Which still isn't a problem, as I'm sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it's going to take a while.
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
I don't know literally ANYTHING, so take that into account when answering this, but why can't a single person access the "Internet" on their own, without an ISP. Can't they be their own ISP? Or can't small groups of people - friends, family, co-conspirators - create their own private ISP?
this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.
You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.
But can they only access each other in their own "web?" Can they access the World-Wide Web on their private web? Or does that just expose them to all the other stuff anyway?
You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.
The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It's complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they're a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you're always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you'll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
To some degree you could, but you'd either rely on Tier1 transits to access the entire internet (costly), or you'd use IXPs (keeping your traffic local to other IX participants).
This doesn't account for how'd you'd actually go into purchasing a port for your residential home, which would probably entail laying your own fiber to a data center nearby.
You mean "at which point, people will just say 'oh, ok'". (Assuming they even notice)
"People" will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it
Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.
One... Not so disappointing fact is that means at least the Internet will go back to the pre-social media era.
You can feel it here on Lemmy still. It exists.
Yes it has its perks
Like Metastatic on LoRA?
Or maybe we'll use software defined radios (SDR) to transmit on other unregulated bands (as a hacker, you can often force the software to believe it's in the wrong region to transmit on bands the FTC didn't approve, as long as it's legal somewhere.)
Meshtastic will never replicate anything like the modern internet. It’s slower than 1980s dialup data speeds. Text messaging, maybe…but you ain’t sending a video through it, that’s for sure.
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If you mean an HTTPS ban, it’s technically possible, but even mainland China and Russia haven’t gone that far. One major reason is that it would completely undermine basic internet security. It would instantly make man-in-the-middle attacks trivial, letting anyone sniff purchases, transactions, and more. Buying anything online - or using a credit card at all - would suddenly become extremely risky.
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I agree with mastodon, even though eventually Texas will enact similar legislation forcing me to use a vpn to read it
Woudn't it be smarter to just leave the hellhole that is Texas? Either to the north or to the south, leaving is a win.
Rather than encourage people to leave, we should encourage more enlightened people to move there, and change the political climate. A lot of states are closer to flipping than people think, and Texas is one of them.
So far their efforts in various forms of voter suppression have prevented that, and at the same time more people equals more congressional seats.
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Sometimes there's family or other things you just can't take with you. Support structures you might not have somewhere else. Friends and neighbors. Mutual aid.
There can be circumstances that override that. But honestly, the more that flee. The easier it is to get what the fascists want. And at best you're only helping yourself short term. Because no matter where you go. They will come for you if they can.
For real. I want me and my family to leave the United States. Bringing the entire family to a whole new life abroad is a very tall order.
And even there. There's no guarantee. Going to Europe where fascists in Russia, Hungary, etc loom? Maybe you'll be safe a little longer somewhere on the Asian continent with the currently slower rolling fascist forces there. But it's only temporary. You can't ultimately escape.
The question is. Where well the breaking point be for most people. What event will cause the public to drag these fuckers from their homes and hold them responsible. Because that's what it's going to take. For them to remember that they rely on us. Not only for their wealth. But continued existence. Only when that fear has been driven into them, will things even start to get better.
And it might surprise us. It may just be a red state that does it. One of these Republican sycophants getting dragged from a town hall. Assaulted by a whole community for their rolls in making things worse for everyone. Police are going to have a hard time locking up a whole town. And these elected ghouls that love to ignore their constituents will reel in terror. To be clear, violence isn't the answer. Fear is. The fear of knowing we far outnumber them. That they could be subject to violent accountability at any moment. Dragged from their safe beds even.
Fear backed by the threat of violence.
Look, I hate violence. But anyone who says “violence isn’t the answer” clearly hasn’t read a history book. It’s nearly always how things are changed (for better or worse).
Violence is the answer for authoritarians. But it never lasts. Because it's just a tool. The answer is respect, justice, and consent.
Without them you end up in inane cycles of violence like we have now.
People fleeing fascism are just hoping other people will be forced to fight it and win before it gets to them. No matter what happens, eventually some people will have to stand and fight it. There is nothing wrong with deciding that the time to stand and fight it has come. It is scary, yes. It has been a long time since we have had to fight fascism. We might feel like we have forgotten how. But we will learn quickly. The same technology that enables them also enables us in ways just as profound, maybe more profound. Vive la resistance!
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Last time i checked "states rights" didn't mean the right to impose your laws on people or businesses running out of other states.
If anyone from Mississippi wants to use our services I'm totally ready to ignore any and all laws that don't acknowledge to sovereignty of the net.
Last I checked, “rights” now means “my right to control you”
Also states don't have one company to go after. It is nearly impossible to track down and file court orders for if your lucky non-profits in other countries.
Like I don't think there are many people that host Mastodon instances that will listen to a court order out of the goodness of there heart.
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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