I’m not assuming that, I just don’t see why would it even matter if it’s from another instance.

Is it a mistake? Wouldn’t federated content still count the same way legally, since an instance is also a website?

To be fair there’s all the shit with dollar denominated oil, SWIFT, terrorist regime change on countries that don’t want to play along, etc. It might not be based on any kind of fair exchange of value, but that’s not quite the same as the USD’s global reserve currency status being vibes-only.

What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?

That they are trying to disarm their political adversaries seems like evidence. Afaik the situation so far is, the people they are detaining can mostly expect to survive. If it progresses beyond that, that’s when vulnerable groups still having guns gets more relevant, because the likelihood of a shootout is going to affect the scalability of mass arrests, or of the viability of extrajudicial killings by groups the government refuses to police.

It would maybe be safer on a custom OS because less malware would target it, but exploits can still exist, at this point I’d say you also should really be using a dedicated device for crypto wallet stuff if you have more than small amounts, whether that’s a purpose built hardware wallet, an old phone you reset and have only the wallet app on, etc.

That’s just the remote control part.

promises of a free TradingView Premium app for Android. Instead of delivering legitimate software, the ads drop a highly advanced crypto-stealing trojan — an evolved version of the Brokewell malware.

From another source, that works in part by exploiting “accessibility service permissions”:

Like other recent Android malware families of its kind, Brokewell is capable of getting around restrictions imposed by Google that prevent sideloaded apps from requesting accessibility service permissions.

…

This includes displaying overlay screens on top of targeted apps to pilfer user credentials. It can also steal cookies by launching a WebView and loading the legitimate website, after which the session cookies are intercepted and transmitted to an actor-controlled server.

Didn’t they ban Huawei phones in the US

How can you know the success is zero? Encryption is more widely used and much more resistant to political attack. Open source software is more powerful and accessible. A large portion of people loathe corporate tech platforms at a level they didn’t years ago. Granted a lot of that is just down to how functional or trustworthy the software is, and what guarantees about it can be plausibly provided, and it isn’t all wins. Maybe you can’t exactly get everyone caring about this stuff in the same way or for the same reasons you do. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible avenues to success, or that the tech habits of other groups can be written off as useless here, because it’s probably the most important thing.

Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof

Yeah. What I propose is getting more people involved and caring about freedom preserving technologies before it gets to that point. A tiny minority of somewhat more tech literate people are not going to be magically immune to authoritarian checkmate scenarios through technical solutions alone.

Are there now legal means to do longer range communications? I thought the main limitation was you need to be licensed to do anything more than short range home wifi

Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.

Unless these companies are hosted in MS, have offices, or sell ads there, there’s nothing legally they can do.

Is that really how it works? Haven’t legal challenges to these sorts of laws already been appealed up to the supreme court and they were upheld?

I’ve tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.

So far their efforts in various forms of voter suppression have prevented that, and at the same time more people equals more congressional seats.

Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.

In those cases it seems like the law does prevent state level regulation of those things, because the state is only allowed to regulate commerce happening within its borders, not what its residents do elsewhere (although they can still also regulate the use of fireworks and airguns, but enforcement is more difficult, for instance where I am they sometimes send out notices in the mail warning that it’s against the law for individuals to be setting off fireworks but there’s always a massive decentralized fireworks show every 4th of July anyway).

Somehow with the internet, the location of the server isn’t the thing that matters, it’s whose computer is accessing it and where that person and computer is located, and the liability is on the server not the user. IMO it should not work that way, because then every state with regressive politics has a stranglehold on the whole internet.

But the question is, what would be a reasonable legal principle for preventing such laws generally? Mississippi is going to pass bullshit laws, but it shouldn’t be possible for the jurisdiction of any state to be anything on the entire internet.

Could you distribute such programs in a way accessible to nontechnical users? I think most people will just nope out the second they’re asked to type anything into a terminal. Not to say it’s a bad idea, pretty cool concept regardless.

Laptops let you run arbitrary programs. Many people now only have mobile and no PC. I’m not sure if there’s already pressure to have PWAs registered with Google, but if they’re already doing that with browser extensions and apps, doesn’t seem too far fetched they would go there too, even setting aside all the stuff PWAs can’t do.