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Pushing back via tech

The UK and Australian governments are leading the Western world in rolling out online tracking and censorship.

As I've said before, this is all being done under the Trojan horse guise of "protecting the children" but the real underlying agenda is to ensure that nobody uses the internet without being identified, surveilled and tracked.

The amount of power this hands a government is enormous. In fact it's downright dangerously enormous.

Dissent can be cracked down on in a very effective and even automated manner, ensuring that anti-government sentiment is effectively forbidden and punished in a way that quenches free speech and other freedoms.

I'm sure some folk reading this are rolling their eyes and thinking "yeah, right -- this will never happen" -- but it will.

One only has to look to the UK right now where last year, up to 30 people a month were arrested for simply making posts to social media.

According to that article, thousands more were "detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail".

The "hurt feelings" police are already out and active -- and this is before they've even hooked AI systems up to a forced digital ID system for internet users.

Imagine the trove of data that such constant surveillance of internet use would generate.

Everything a user did and said could be catalogued, analysed and reported in a way that, we would be told, could slash crime rates by pre-emptively identifying those who posed the greatest risk of offending.

Real shades of Minority Report!

In the UK, they now want to have special software on your phone, computer or other devices which are used to access the internet. This software would scan for potentially illegal images, hate speech or anything that the government of the day deemed to be illegal or a risk factor. In effect, Big Brother would be your constant companion and always looking over your shoulder.

That mandatory digital ID required to log onto the Net would make sure that you were held accountable for anything and everything you say or did, with that data recorded for posterity. Imagine the effect that simple law changes could have...

If something that is quite legal today were suddenly made illegal tomorrow (such as membership of a certaing group or ownership of (say) a 3D printer) then instantly, those who had previously admitted such things or even expressed an interest could find themselves the subject of investigation or arrest -- even though they had broken no laws at the time.

Once we hand over the keys to our privacy we become slaves to the state and democracy is replaced by fascism -- yet I fear that unless some real push-back is brought to play, this is exactly where we're headed.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the woodenheads in the Beehive are eyeing events and progress in the UK and Australia with glee. No doubt they're already plotting the roll-out of similar things here in New Zealand.

What can we do to prevent this?

Firstly, we must let politicians know right from the outset that this is totally unacceptable. At every juncture we must voice loudly the fact that we will not submit to such measures.

When they roll out the old "if you don't support these measures then you're pro child-abuse" BS (as they invariably will) we must tell them to get stuffed.

We should also prepare a fallback technology.

The internet has one huge weakness -- it has centralised points of access: ISPs.

If the government regulates that ISPs must implement a digital ID verification before users can connect to the wider internet then that's exactly what they'll do. If they don't then they risk prosecution, fines and the possible imprisonment of their directors.

Right now, we should be working furiously to create our own mesh-based RF IP networks that are totally decentralised with no fixed points of access.

There are things such as Meshtastic and the like but these are pretty low bandwidth. I'm thinking that we need to come up with something that has far more ability to support images, video and other high-bandwidth content. This could use the ISM bands for hand-held devices with some key backbones delivered via point to point IR laser links -- totally invisible and (as of now) 100 percent legal.

The best thing of all (from my perspective) is that this would be a fantastic opportunity to harness modern technology in a way that will spur innovation and challenge the tech community.

Just the other day I was thinking about how *boring* the computer world has become, especially in an era where development of everything outside the datacentre has effectively stopped due to the lack of DRAM, VRAM and storage.

I've been watching a bunch of YouTube videos about the old 8-bit computers that were so exciting back in the late 1970s through mid 1980s. Every week there was a new and revolutionary new 8-bit micro released that pushed the boundaries of what was possible. From a user's perspective, even getting these things to do a simple wire-frame 3D animation was a real dopamine rush and highly addictive.

By comparison, today's computers are "blah". When graphics become so good that they're indistinguishable from real video and when you've got so much processing power that *everything* happens instantly then a computer has gone from being an exciting device to a boring appliance.

For this reason, I'm looking around to see if I can find an old Z80-based computer from that era to play with. To relive those exciting years when microcomputing was new and shiny. I've tried emulation but that just doesn't cut it -- I want the purity of a real Z80 and the challenges of old-school hardware. My only concession might be to replace the floppy drives with an SD or USB-thumb-drive reader.

It'd also be great to bathe in the phosphory glow of an old-school CRT for a change.

If anyone has such a machine that they'd be willing to part with for a paltry sum -- hit me up.

Meanwhile, I'm playing around with bits of hardware to see just how much I can squeeze out of readily available silicon that could be shoe-horned into a smartphone sized 3D printed enclosure as a useful node of a meshnetwork alternative to the internet we now use.

My little Raspberry Pi powered AI LLM has been surprisingly useful in helping with these early ideas -- but more on that another time.

Carpe Diem folks!

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