A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
There is Very Probably No way to get around this kind of thing. You know until GovCan allows Bell and Rogers to filter “hackers” traffic to protect Canadians.
And then you just upgrade your VPN software, and look for sketchier providers. We could switch to an intranet like Cuba, but then our economy might end up like Cuba because it will suck. And I would switch to pirate radio bursts to move content around, so I’m still going to be able to get my scientific papers without buying them. Or porn.
If there were a standardized large scale mesh network I would be all over that. Like if everyone agreed (before governments get too handsy) on a TCP/IP over HAM setup, a ‘free’ internet could be built and ready to go when the corporate owned networks go 1984.
So on a second read, I think you might be talking about a situation where the government still allows an alternate system to operate, at least if it’s established. I already wrote this up from the same worst-case perspective as in OP.
For daily driving, the trick with that would be offering something commercial providers can’t, other than an abstract long-term argument. Without that, you’re basically just trying to start your own ISP, but without any investors. For enthusiast use, see APRS below, which is a thing.
APRS is kind of the relevant current standard. The trick is that being carried by radios that are unpredictable, it has no upper bound on latency (I think). If you want the same browsing experience (TCP especially needs a lot of back and forth) that’s really hard, because presumably big brother isn’t going to let you have a mesh station online for very long.
The burst thing I was talking about is genuinely how spies do it in locked-down places like Eritrea or Turkmenistan - you go to a busy public place and absolutely hog bandwidth for just one second, using a disguised radio, and then wander out with your groceries before the radio detectors can catch up. I suppose open-source resources for that would be good, if they don’t already exist.
I’d love to look at the transport layer of NATO’s system. It’s designed for both wartime (so arbitrary failure rate, type and pattern) and extensibility, and I’d be fascinated to know how they did it. Unfortunately, it’s also a big damn secret, to the point it’s the main thing they bring up when the media asks about China getting their hands on a working F-35. I’d also anticipate that it relies on every user registered as friendly acting friendly, at least over the long term.
One of the things that’s on my future project list is over-the-air crypto, so you can pay someone to transmit your 50 meg thoughtcrime video slowly but persistently. As far as I know there’s no prohibition on digital sigs (like there is on encryption), so it should be doable somehow.