@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good

Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.

Unfortunately, it's like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.

In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, "tampering-proof" or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.

Not to mention how "easy" is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do "wardrive" scanning in order to seek "irregular transmissions" (not just those disrupting others' transmissions, but anything they could deem "irregular" because they're the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed "irregularity" could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).

This takes me to another point from your reply:

I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

It's worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn't exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.

I mean, you're not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it's inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.

Problem is: there's no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.

And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.

For authorities willing to control everyone's lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as...

"private content/people's intimacies must be scanned/watched because they're known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff"

This is almost the argument behind EU's "Chat Control". And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution regarding "disgusting and concerning stuff", but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.