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We need an alter-net now

First of all, my apologies for the technical issues experienced with the site yesterday and a big thanks to all those who emailed and TXTed me over the matter.

It seems that the hosting company had a pretty significant melt-down that meant the site was unavailable for several hours. This is quite unusual because I've been hosting here for many years and the uptime has always been more than acceptable.

Hopefully the problems are now resolved and it'll be back to business as normal (note to self: it's really hard to type with your fingers crossed isn't it?).

For those who missed yesterday's column -- there's a link to the right of the page to it and other "recent" editions of Aardvark Daily.

But now to the subject of today's column -- the state of the world... what on earth is happening?

Sorry for repeating myself in yet another column but I'm really left scratching my head in disbelief almost every time I browse the newswires.

Senseless violent attacks on the public are now an every-day event and yesterday we saw more people shot-up in the USA by a rogue gunman. This comes just hours after another idiot ran amok with a knife -- a crime normally confined to the shores of the UK.

Then there's this whole internet censorship thing (won't someone think of the children) which gets worse and worse with UK politicians now mooting to ban VPNs in that country -- for the sake of the children of course.

How will we, as a global community, push back against this imposed censorship?

Well the really worrying thing is that the vast majority of people won't even try to push back.

Sure, they'll leave some comments on Facebook or X that few will see, due to the effects of the very censorship they'll be criticising but by and large it seems that the bulk of the great unwashed will just accept their fate with barely a whimper.

I'd love to think that industrious and very clever people will come up with smart bits of tech that allow us to sidestep the roadblocks imposed by governments on the internet yet I suspect that even if they did this, most people would ignore the option and simply allow themselves to be dis/mis-informed by the self-interest of governments.

Personally, the lure of an alter-net is strong. I'd love to see us develop a completely separate global network based perhaps on license-free wireless technology. Imagine how cool it would be to create a nation-wide mesh network running on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands where there was no censorship and no surveillance. This would be almost like the early days of the internet itself.

Yes, we'd likely have to forego all those 4K YouTube videos and TikTok vids that seem to be the mainstay of so many people's online activities but at least we could build a communications network that allowed for the continued existence of truly free speech.

Perhaps it would be structured more like the old days of the Net with nation-wide mesh networks extending their reach to other countries via a UUCP-like protocol that was either tunneled through an encrypted internet pathway or maybe even via RF on HAM bands.

Since such a setup would be intrinsically a rather low-bandwidth affair with limited realtime capabilities, most of the traffic would probably be encrypted ascii text. You know good old typed messages -- the original currency of BBS and internet conversations.

If this is to be the fallback mechanism for proponents of truly free speech then so be it.

Sadly, given the contempt presently being shown by governments for the concepts of privacy and free speech, I suspect those governments would soon come up with justifications for classing such systems as illegal. Maybe they'd find a single instance of some ASCII art depicting some kind of objectionable material and then tell the public that this is the playground of perverts and terrorists so must be shut down.

However, just because such an alter-net could be classified as illegal and banned by a self-serving government does not mean that we ought not create it. In fact, this is all the more reason why such a system should exist.

There are many technologies out there that could be recruited to play a part in this and the cost of hardware now is so low as to be almost inconsequential.

If governments are going to throw down a guantlet by trying to censor the flow of information and remove our privacy, we have an obligation to ankle-tap those moves through our own cleverness and determination not to cave into such unreasonable restrictions. Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Viva la revolution?

Carpe Diem folks!

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