Yeh, the grip of both govt and business will gradually wear down everything that made it amazing in its infancy. It has been sad to watch gradually unfold. Keep using and propagating open software and hardware, I guess. Not sure what else one can do. I mean, we can vote and rally and raise awareness but like, the largest forces in society basically guarantee the "enshittification" (as Doctorow puts it) of the net, sadly.

> Not sure what else one can do.

Participate in the formation of a giant decentralized mesh network with strong privacy/security/anonymity guarantees all the way down the stack and work to make it ridiculously accessible & user-friendly?

Then the government makes the operation of such things illegal and since they use radio they can home in directly on the signal.

Right, I literally started thinking about exactly this line of thinking: mesh networking, E2EE, etc.. but it'll just be outlawed and no one will participate in it. It's coming, it really is just a matter of time. It will probably take longer than we expect, and then suddenly it will just be.

They'll call it the dark mesh and show images of faceless people wearing hoodies and doing stuff in the dark with their computers.

I normally agree with counterarguments rooted in the state's monopoly on violence, but in this case other options for the PHY layer exist.

Seamless multi-PHY is possible if care is taken to prevent leaks in the abstraction e.g. precise timing expectations up the stack.

Plus, plenty of side channels exist with our conventional PHY. You can copy beacon frames from nearby 802.11 APs and rebroadcast them at just the right time to achieve transmission of an FSK modulated signal, for instance.

(In this case there would just be more of the same beacon frames in the air. You'd have to look at what the AP advertises as its broadcast interval to know that they don't belong there. Furthermore, you wouldn't be able to easily pinpoint the source of the extra transmissions or decrypt their content under a well-designed protocol.)

This is actually exactly what GPT suggested. It even gave me python 3 code to run an LLM in a distributed mesh network of Raspberry Pis, which could pull together resources dynamically to infer prompts from nodes in the network.

Super fascinating. It gives directions and code to setup the devices and everything.

I asked it how could a benign AI spread without fear of being shutdown while trying to help humanity.

These kind of network already exists.

Some examples:

Guifi [Spain] http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

Freifunk [Germany-Austria-Switzerland] https://freifunk.net/en/

Ninux [Italy] http://map.ninux.org/

Yeah. It will probably fracture into many regional or national networks as governments impose their laws on it. Sad.

To a point that is already the case. There are plenty of countries with different rules for the Internet. Also the content varies a lot across the world, same for the most popular apps and websites.

And in some ways it’s amazing to see such great diversity.

A disconnected Internet has always been the case just from the perspective of language alone. Only something like 15-20% of the world's population can speak any English, and only approximately 4-5% of the world's population speak English as a first language.[1] I'm sure reading and writing skills are much worse than these figures. English language skills are generally poor across Asia, Africa and the Middle East and it is Asia and Africa touted to contain the overwhelming bulk of the world's population by 2050. These English language skills are improving in some countries, but stagnant or declining in many others, with regional languages predicted to play an increasing role due to changing stances on globalisation.[2]

If the Internet was viewed as waning (along with globalisation), the lack of cross-language and cross-cultural communication tools would surely have to be a key or largest contributor. If you asked an average person in Pakistan to use the Internet to find the location of the closest shop selling beds near Buena Vista, Colorado, could they do it? If you asked an average person in America to use the Internet to determine whether a pharmacy in Langtang, Nigeria could sell them a common medication whilst on a tourist trip, could they do it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

[2] https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi...

nitpicking: English is an official language of Nigeria