Exactly. This is why the tech has to be made resistant to surveillance and censorship by default. Until usage of alternative connectivity and circumvention methods sticks out as a sore thumb (turns out, for most tools it does), it applies a constant pressure on anyone under oppression to stop, increasing the risks for those who continue to use them.
We got basically three different things. First we got APRS, mostly used for position reports (go on aprs.fi for a map). That is pretty nice but unusable for anything more than a SMS worth of things, and you need repeaters and not just internet gateway collectors to actually have something that's resilient.
Next thing is AX25, the technical foundation behind APRS. Yes you can use it to create actual data links, but it's about modem speeds so virtually useless outside of toying around.
And finally there is HamNet but it's line of sight based and not cross routed to the internet, and identically to all things ham radio, encryption is banned by law.
And on top of that, you can expect regulatory agencies to crack down on ham radio fast and hard, should it be used for political dissency motives at scale. It's already against ham practice to talk politics, especially with people in repressive countries - we don't want more countries other than Yemen and North Korea to just blanket ban ham radio.
i.e. if there's a blanket ban, can you use your radio hidden in your house or can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?
Sadly, yes. A bunch of SDRs spread over the whole country with precise clocks or a scheme like the one used in ADS-B MLAT reception (that's based on using the internal SDR clocks without requiring precise clocks on the host) is enough to use multilateration to hone in on any kind of signal, even looking up in raw signals in the past.
If I were to guess, I'd assume that even in nominal democracies the secret agencies are already running such monitoring stations so it's probably already the case that, should need be, all communications can be triangulated.
The HF bands are all small enough to be sampled whole with a single cheap RTL-SDR each, a KiwiSDR can sample literally all of them at the same time, only the VHF/UHF bands need more dedicated equipment (e.g. a BladeRF) - all of that is inside the range that hobbyists can easily afford.
"Huff Duff" is WW2 technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_direction_findi...
The units used for detecting and locating clandestine transmitters started WW2 as large truck mounted facilities to hand carried units (with antennas) that fit inside suitcase-sized containers.
Modern ham groups engage in transmitter hunting as part of organized events. Bunny hunting and fox hunting are alternate names for such activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting
How to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN-c5DQFuhI
Governments use much large automated facilities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circularly_disposed_antenna_ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FRD-10
I don’t understand this sentiment. For exchanging information, modem speeds were great. Wikipedia, forums like this one, instant messengers, etc all worked fine
The problem is, websites got wasteful. You're not going to get any modern website - including Wikipedia - to load in anything close to usable waiting times over a modem speed constraints. HN and maybe Old Reddit are an exception but HN is a niche forum and Old Reddit is probably going to get dumped once Reddit manages to port over all features that were only exclusive to Old Reddit for like six years or so. IRC is all but gone, in no small part "thanks" to Freenode going down the drain and Slack/Discord/Teams eating its lunch.
I don't think so. It's just a question of the severity of the punishment for violating regulations. A couple of small fines for an unlicensed networking and collaborating - and there will be no one left.
>There's a ton of cheap tools now that can be used for running local or citywide networks, hams have their own packet radio stuff.
The issue has never been in the technical plane. The equipment for building and operating networks has become dozens of times more accessible over the past couple of decades. The problem is in the increasing number of regulations that purposefully lock all clients into a few select controlled service providers. They have a goal and they have the tools to achieve it, so it's only a matter of time before they reach the minority of network-enthusiasts.
I don't think you give people enough credit. There have been dissidents in totalitarian regimes the world over, even when the punishment was death or being sent to a labour camp.
You might think that unlicenced networking isn't important enough, but I think many people would see it as the start of China-like censorship. Especially now that we've had decades of a mostly-free Internet, I don't think people will react kindly to politicians taking it away.
Edit0: I checked, as this seemed self evident, but it's seemingly perfectly fine for residents to use VPNs and for adults to visit porn sites on or off a VPN. Obviously not for minors but that's not the point.
You probably know very little about totalitarian regimes? The thing is that they usually have a rather weak legal system, governed by the principles of lawlessness. This creates strong incentives for dissident activity:
- You won't be caught, because the police are interested in breaking their own laws, and not in finding criminals - If you are caught, there is a chance to buy your way out, because the police are more interested in receiving bribes than in jailing a dissident who has violated something unclear - Even if you are completely law-abiding, you can still be detained as a dissident, because they urgently need to catch a dissident today - You can't be completely law-abiding citizen, no one can, laws doesn't supposed to be workable. And if you break a bunch of laws just because you breathe, it's easy enough for you to break just another one - And even if you obey all the laws you can, what awaits you? A miserable, half-starved life that can be cut short at any moment for any reason - You don't receive social stigma and disapproval, because the majority of society clearly does not approve of the persecution of dissidents
The point is that severe punishments, including the death penalty, are used under totalitarianism precisely because of impotence in the fight against dissidents.
But we are talking about completely different regimes. Regimes with laws that work. Regimes with extremely efficient bureaucracy. Regimes where people have very much to lose and where they clearly know what they need to do to avoid losing it. And regimes with a system of totalitarian surveillance of all citizens. People won't need to be executed. Just a small fine EVERY time - and very quickly there will be no one left.
> but I think many people would see it as the start of China-like censorship.
The start has already begun, and as I see it, China is a children's party with tea and custard cakes compared to what awaits us.
Totalitarian regimes don't need to be failed states. These countries had functioning rule of law and bureaucracy before WW2, and this apparatus was fully used by the new totalitarian governments. So I think they're the closest model that we have for how our ("western") societies might work after sharing undesirable information is made an offence.
Pirate radio isn't new, and hardware has gotten both cheaper and more sophisticated since kids drove around in cars with haywire FM transmitters.
The current american administration clearly wants to stamp down on disruption, too. If they can't deport us I think they'd be fine with prison or working us to death. Future administrations won't be so dumb to think this is just related to criticizing Israel, either, but anything.... disruptive.
it seems then that store-and-forward ad hoc p2p (ie extremely high unpredictable latency) is the only option for those who can reach some node with a connection to the outside (maybe laser near the border). or perhaps really clever steganography with outside partners assisting.
Starlink/Kuiper and the geostationary satellites are an alternative. Not perfect... but far better than *nothing*
Only when (if) Stalink removes the need for base stations and just sends the traffic directly between satellites.
You still need the Starlink coverage to be enabled on system level, and the local government to care enough to track down Starlink users at the same time. I can't imagine that there are many countries that meet both criteria.
This is defeatist. You're probably right 'for the masses' but there will always be those networking and collaborating and bypassing whatever restrictions get put in place. I have online contacts in 'firewalled' regimes that use v2ray/shadowsocks or whatever the thing of the now is to get around the restrictions.
There's a ton of cheap tools now that can be used for running local or citywide networks, hams have their own packet radio stuff. There's now all those new LoRa networks that only really popped up in the past few years.
What I'm trying to say is the stuff is there and it's accessible, but it's only going to be a minority of people that use it just as it's a small minority that comments on posts like this (people like us) and even smaller yet again that write content on how to do it and create those tools to begin with. But it has always been this way....