Avoiding "The Botnet" - impossible?
Avoiding "The Botnet" - impossible?
- Introduction - -
Existing ways of combatting The Botnet - and why they're ineffective
- - VPNs
- - VoIP, social, IM, etc.
- - File sharing,
hosting... - - Operating
systems - - The TOR illusion
- - Inventing more darknets
doesn't do anything - -
The core of internet surveillance
- - The Real Botnet...is
PHYSICAL - - The Fake
Botnet Fighter - - All your
tech solutions...will eventually fall!
- - But what about
decentralization?
- - Services
are not your friends -
Introduction
People these days worry more and more often about escaping what I will call "The
Botnet" in this article - just a "meme" way of describing mass surveillance.
Websites have been created describing spyware and alternatives to it.
Replacements for social services, instant messaging, VoIP, etc. already exist.
You can use anonymizers like the TOR network or a VPN to hide from your ISP.
There are ways to privately share files and host websites as well. But are all
those effective - and more importantly - is this the core of the botnet - or
maybe we're going after this entirely the wrong way?
Existing ways of combatting The Botnet - and why they're ineffective
VPNs
These are proxies that route ALL traffic (not just HTTP) through their servers.
There are lots of them claiming to be 'no log', but it is easy to find examples
where people got ratted out by these, like <https://www.wipeyourdata.com/other-d
ata-erasing/no-logs-earthvpn-user-arrested-after-police-finds-logs/> (archive)
. Even
assuming the 'no log' policy is true, the government could still possibly
legally force the provider to track someone (at least in certain countries where
that's allowed). If that's not an option, there's always the old raid them
and steal the servers (archive)
(MozArchive) tactic. Of
course, VPN traffic is also easily blocked at the ISP or website level.
VoIP, social, IM, etc.
Simply suffers from lack of usage - so if you want to actually reach anyone,
it's Facebook, Skype, etc. Much of the commonly recommended "secure and
private" IM software has various issues (Signal and Telegram require a phone
number; Keybase has had a security audit which found many
issues
(local); Matrix protocol has just had
TOR-based messengers rely on the security of the TOR network, which is analyzed
below. Server-based ones, on the other hand, rely on the security of servers
controlled by people you don't know. And as usual, it's all going through the
enemy's networks. I don't mean to say that all those alternative ways of
communication are useless, but that we can't rely on only one layer of
protection - the messaging application level.
UPDATE August 2025: this is going to become very obvious soon with the
(MozArchive), which I was
planning to write about earlier, but then it
died
(MozArchive), and I was
assuming (or maybe just hoping?) it'd stay dead. Not in this cursed world,
apparently; the necromancers just can't stop animating their favorite corpse to
haunt us all.
When talking about Chat Control, people almost always focus on the horror of
breaking encryption, but if you read the actual
law
(local), you will realize that the
problems with it go much deeper than that. For example, every hosting or
communication provider will have to assess the risk that his service will
contribute to the proliferation of child sexual abuse (and do that every year /
2 / 3 according to the risk level). There is a template for this at the end of
the document. After that's done, the communication platform will have to perform
risk mitigation which consists of:
- adapting, through appropriate technical and operational measures and
staffing, the provider’s content moderation or recommender systems, its
decision-making processes, the operation or functionalities of the service,
or the content or enforcement of its terms and conditions;
- reinforcing the provider’s internal processes or the internal supervision
of the functioning of the service;
- initiating or adjusting cooperation, in accordance with competition law,
with other providers of hosting services or providers of interpersonal
communications services, public authorities, civil society organisations or,
where applicable, entities awarded the status of trusted flaggers in
accordance with Article 22 19 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 …/… [on a Single
Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act) and amending Directive
2000/31/EC];
- initiating or adjusting functionalities that enable users to notify online
child sexual abuse to the provider through tools that are easily accessible
and age- appropriate;
- initiating or adjusting functionalities that enable users to control what
information about them is shared to other users and how other users may
contact them, and introducing default suitable privacy settings for users
who are children;
- initiating or adjusting functionalities that provide information to users
about notification mechanisms and direct users to helplines and trusted
organisations, where users detect material or conversations indicating
potential online child sexual abuse;
- initiating or adjusting functionalities that allow the providers to
collect statistical data to better assess the risks and the effectiveness of
the mitigation prevention measures. This data shall not include any
personal data.
In short, every communication platform (which would include tiny XMPP servers
like mine) would need moderators and a ToS; reporting functionality; ability to
change privacy settings and private defaults for children; links to
helplines and trusted organizations (wtf?); as well as collecting some kind of
statistical data (the end of no-logs services like my MUC).
Do you see now how it's not just about breaking encryption? In fact, that's
irrelevant now because the new version of Chat Control explicitly forbids
that. But anyway, did something in the above paragraph catch your attention?
Because, to implement the private defaults for children part, you'd need to
track their ages. And that is exactly what the EU requires:
Providers of interpersonal communications services that have identified,
pursuant to the risk assessment conducted or updated in accordance with
Article 3, a risk of use of their services for the purpose of the
solicitation of children, shall take, the necessary age verification and age
assessment measures to reliably identify child users on their services,
enabling them to take the mitigation measures.
Anyway, after performing the risk assessment and mitigation you have to send the
results of that to some coordinating authority (these are per country). If they
decide there is a high enough risk of child abuse proliferation, they will
force you to install detection technologies:
The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request
the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or
another independent administrative authority of that its Member State to
issue a detection order requiring a provider of hosting services or a
provider of interpersonal communications services that are classified as
high risk in accordance with Article 5(2) or parts or components of the
services classified as high risk that fall under the jurisdiction of that
Member State to take the measures specified in Article 10 for the sole
purpose of to detecting in visual content or URLs the dissemination of
online child sexual abuse material on a specific service or parts or
components of the service, classified as high risk in accordance with
Article 5(2), for a limited period as specified in paragraph 9 of this
Article.
A little later the gov-boomers expose their lack of familiarity with the
relevant technology:
Providers of hosting services and providers of interpersonal communications
services that have received a detection order shall execute it by installing
and operating technologies approved by the Commission to detect the
dissemination of known or new child sexual abuse material or the
solicitation of children (the ‘technologies’), as applicable, using the
corresponding indicators provided by the EU Centre in accordance with
Article 46. In interpersonal communications services using end-to-end
encryption, those technologies shall detect the dissemination of child
sexual abuse material prior to its transmission.
Obviously - if you're running something like an XMPP server - the bolded is
impossible. Gov boomers are assuming everything is like Discord or Signal, where
the client and server are the same thing. So, they figure they don't have to
care about compromising encryption because they will just grab the data
client-side earlier. But, this approach can't be applied to XMPP as the person
that controls the server, doesn't control the client. So even if they judge the
server as dangerous, they will only be able to apply the general risk mitigation
requirements. Of course, this is still way too much burden for your average
XMPP hoster, and will bury him. But at least XMPP servers are truly immune to
having to decrypt their users' communications. Yet, can we be sure the spies
won't go after XMPP clients on the software repos? After all, they also have a
section called Obligations for software application stores which says that those
need to:
take reasonable measures to prevent child users from accessing the software
applications in relation to which they have identified a significant risk of
use of the service concerned for the purpose of the solicitation of
children;
So yeah, software distributors will also have to verify ages. Either way,
prepare to have your images scanned on any communication platform where the
server and client are the same. And of course, if the users are not running
E2EE, the spies can also enforce scanning server-side.
Is it not obvious by now, that we cannot fight the botnet just by installing
"NanonChatAppSupreme"? We are now surrounded not only by the big corporations
that want to collect our data for profit and lock us into their ecosystems (they
are the only ways of communication most people know), but also by states (or
multi-state hydras like the EU) that want to bury all alternative platforms with
an avalanche of requirements that they cannot hope to fulfill. So, even if you
managed to escape the big corpos and dragged your normie friends to XMPP, Matrix
or whatever (and you trust your hosts), the second form of the final boss is
waiting to devour you while you're out of items and on low HP. This seems very
deliberate.
Oh, and if you think "ha-ha! I use [insert messenger that's independent of
servers, or can switch them, etc], EU spies can't touch me, hahaha!" then hold
it, because this isn't their only way to slither in. Again, if they get a clue
in a few years, they could just force the software repositories to modify the
binaries or even sources on github to perform client side scanning. They could
install spyware on the target devices like they do with
journalists already. And
I'm sure I'm missing ways. By the way, the new law is a lot longer, but I don't
care to even read all of it, as most of it doesn't seem relevant here. There's
stuff about the communication provider having to release transparency reports
about the results of child abuse investigations, etc. But that's just adding
more requirements to an already buried service so...There's also a bit about
how, if the service is hosted outside the EU and ignores pleas for cooperation,
they will just block it. Either way, another proof the botnet is physical.
File sharing, hosting...
All regular hosting / file sharing providers have huge lists of what's allowed
and what isn't. Even my current host reserves the right to suspend, block or
cancel access to any and all Services, if they decide something contradicts
their list. And of course, copyright holders can claim something is violating
theirs, and you get your shit deleted then. Rom sites have been getting taken
down recently for example. There are also 'good hosts' like autistici.org, but
who's to say the government won't eventually take them down if they host too
much stuff they don't like? As long as we're using their networks, nothing is
safe. Push comes to shove and they raid the servers. Even Freedom Hosting went
down eventually.
Operating systems
Alternatives to Windows are available, but you will come across Microsoft's
system sooner or later - whether at a relative's house, school (they have
(MozArchive)), or somewhere
else. Not that Linux is all that great either in the botnet department - big
corporations like Mozilla
or Red Hat (through systemd), still influence it in negative ways. This will
happen in any society in which deals based on profit and / or control are
prevalent.
The TOR Illusion
The TOR network allegedly allows you to browse the Internet anonymously. It
works like 3 proxies connected together except encrypted, so a "proxy" (called
the TOR node) cannot see the contents of the previous, only the destination.
However, the last node does see unencrypted traffic - so we hit a roadblock
already before we started. The first node also sees your IP, but not the
contents of your request.
What are some other problems with TOR? Well, a lot of websites simply block it,
or otherwise try to make its usage inconvenient. Since the list of exit nodes
is public, any website owner can easily do it. So you might be planning to
"anonymize your browsing", but then realize it's simply unsuitable for everyday
usage. Even more so if you intend to actually interact with the websites you're
visiting - forums, imageboards, markets, file download websites, etc. all
famously hate TOR. If push comes to shove, ISPs could very easily block all
TOR traffic as well - in fact this has already happened in Venezuela for
example - <https://www.accessnow.org/venezuela-blocks-tor/> (archive) (MozArchive).
What about the so-called hidden services - exclusive to the TOR network? Well,
most of them are defunct and it's hard to find one that actually works - and if
you do, mostly you just see some scraps. In my country, I was only able to find
ONE onion forum that I could actually connect to, and it didn't have very much
activity. Their servers are also routinely raided (see Freedom Hosting) and
their owners jailed.
There are many ways of identifying TOR users anyway - browser fingerprinting,
stylometry, or even people sharing their personal data while on TOR. Operation
Onymous (archive)
(MozArchive) was very
successful (though kind of overstated by the feds - the amount of seized sites
were "only" 27 - here is a list). An already famous case of a
guy sending a bomb threat using TOR can be read here: <https://www.bestvpn.com/
privacy-news/harvard-bomb-threat-student-caught-using-guerrilla-mail-tor/> (ar
chive)
(MozArchive). They got him
because he was the only person using TOR on that particular network at the time.
The FBI has even paid a university to deanonymize TOR
users (
archive), and that's how Silk Road 2.0's owner
could be locked up. This is just what we know about - more attacks are surely
in use or preparation.
TOR still relies on its encryption, and if that's ever broken - say goodbye to
your anonymity, since all the traffic is stored for possible future decryption.
Though the TOR network does use Perfect Forward
Secrecy, which should ensure the
security of the encryption keys (without a direct attack on your device) -
cracking the actual ciphers is still a possibility:
However, forward secrecy cannot defend against a successful cryptanalysis of
the underlying ciphers being used, since a cryptanalysis consists of
finding a way to decrypt an encrypted message without the key, and forward
secrecy only protects keys, not the ciphers themselves.
Quantum computing makes this likely, too. Another thing that's absolutely
required for the security of TOR (that somehow no one is speaking about) are the
nine trusted-by-default directory authorities. If a few of those are ever
compromised (maybe that's already the case?) all of TOR's advantages go out
the window. This issue has been analyzed in depth
here.
Even the praised TOR Browser is not perfectly safe - for example, just using
different buttons in your window manager can expose a different screen
resolution (TBB version 8.5.3, newest as of writing). The first theme is
Murrine, second - Default XHDPI, if you want to confirm.
Of course, this alone is probably not enough to deanonymize you - but many more
issues surely exist, waiting to be discovered. Put a few together and you might
just find yourself exposed. Conclusion? TOR is not the panacea. Does that
mean you shouldn't use it? No, of course. Use anything that's available to
improve your privacy and anonymity - just realize it's not a magic spell, and
does not strike at the core of the botnet.
quite creative, and it's summarized adequately in this one quote:
Could someone be deliberately trying to induce abuse complaints on Tor
network participants to take down parts of the network (or disincetivize
running internal nodes, which are key for the network’s health)?
The answer is yes:
This spoofing “attack” actually started on other types of nodes before
migrating to relays, and those other nodes were hit with a much larger
volume of spoofed connections, leading to them actually getting temporarily
taken down in some cases!
Of course, this doesn't deanonymize anyone directly, but if people stop running
nodes because of abuse reports (which is what I'd assume happens in a
significant number of cases), it would decrease the anonymity for every TOR
user.
You, too, can probably make your friend’s hosting provider (with their
consent, of course) shut down their server and cancel their hosting contract
by getting them flooded with well-meaning but confused abuse complaints.
Yes, you could. It always comes down to who owns the infrastructure, and who
decides the "rules" according to which it runs. That's why we can't win this
"war" by installing some type of software on our computers (alone). We need our
own server spaces, our own ISPs, ones that keep no logs and ideally require no
"contracts" to sign up for. Alternatively, to bypass the ISPs completely.
Anything else is a mirage that's destined to disappear anytime an attack like
this happens.
Inventing more darknets doesn't do anything
I don't care whether it's i2p or nym. I don't care how advanced they seem at
first - weaknesses will be found eventually, like they were for TOR. They all
rely on encryption that will be broken eventually. And they are all going
through the enemy's networks. A meshnet has a too high barrier for entry (both
skills and cost), and doesn't protect against states who have decided that
selling meshnet devices will be banned, or the ones that have access to CCTV AI
to detect who's using them, the ones who can compromise them at the production
level, the ones who can put an Alexa in your apartment by default (ar
chive)
(MozArchive) to hear what
you're doing at all times, the ones who can delete you from existence by zeroing
your bank account or throwing you into prison or doing any of the myriad of
things that having access to the physical infrastructure lets them. Do you not
see now how it all comes down to the physical
infrastructure?
The core of internet surveillance
To derive benefit from the Internet's most popular services (like Facebook,
Twitter, IM, website hosting), you have to deal with their terrible terms of
service and privacy policies. Not only that, but any packet you send or receive
is physically going through networks that you don't control. ISPs can watch,
modify and block them any way they want - and they are subject to government
whims as well. Encryption is at best a temporary non-solution, as explained in
the TOR section (they could block all encrypted messages easily for example - by
comparing them to known languages. If it's not found in any known language, the
packet is trashed. Blocking HTTPs? What was it - port 443? Boom and done).
Maybe some smart 'hackers' would learn to bypass these blocks, but in the end,
we'd be fighting a battle we're sure to lose. Eventually we're going to have to
face the fact that...
The Real Botnet...is PHYSICAL
As said, servers for the services we use are owned mostly by big corporations
(or sometimes other strangers, which almost always have to submit to the former
either way), while ISPs and governments own the networks, so the botnet is
physical, not technological - and the solution, by extension, must be as well.
This might be hard to see in internet surveillance (which is not even the worst
botnet) - but easy in something such as CCTV. They come in, mount the cameras,
and boom! You're being watched. You're now their property - which they
literally admit to. No really - for 30 days (or some other amount), they can do
whatever they want with your captured movements. And the duration is just
claimed...Regardless, you're at their mercy now. If they see you engaging in
some 'forbidden behavior', they can punish you and they do have a proof you
did it. And they can blame you for sins they arbitrarily chose - they certainly
aren't asking you if something should be banned or not. Everything in this
society is owned by businesses or governments - and so serves their
interests, not yours. CCTV is just one example. Drones, killer robots,
whatever you can think of - and not necessarily technological. Schools,
hospitals, airports (remember the patdowns?) - you have no control over any
of these. And that is The Real Botnet. If we want to destroy internet
surveillance, we're going to have to take over not only the most popular
services' servers (hey, we can have a Facebook that respects the user - no,
really!) but also the ISPs - PHYSICALLY - since presumably we won't spy on
or censor ourselves...And with that, hopefully we can bury the other botnets as
well.
The Fake Botnet Fighter
The guy sitting in his apartment wearing a hoodie, running a fully libre
ThinkPad, unbreakable Qubes OS, TOR for all connections, carefully avoiding all
stylometry and sharing any personal data at all, encrypting his communication
with a one time pad three times, and worrying whether some botnet hasn't slipped
in anyway. He has no phone or only uses "burner phones" and pays with bitcoins.
And then...he finally has to come out of his house, and has his face recorded
by a CCTV camera a hundred times. This guy has to be respected for his
dedication, but he is useless for a revolution. You cannot combat The Botnet
using tech only.
All your tech solutions...will eventually fall!
It is inevitable. And everytime it follows the same script - some country or ISP
blocks TOR or VPNs, or torrent sites get taken down, or Facebook / Twitter /
YouTube implement yet another way of censorship, or any of the myriad of other
issues you can think of. People then freak out and scramble for more
technological solutions that are only band-aids. Then, if they find one,
they continue their comfortable life while the cuffs get tighter. I mean, can
you imagine that, in 20 years, you will be able to use the Internet as freely as
today? Impossible - they will keep cracking down on everything until the
'solutions' are too tough or not even viable anymore. If we controlled the
infrastructure, we could not only delete all logging ISP-wide, but also fix all
the problems with FB / YT / other malicious service providers. Of course, you
cannot take over just like that - the web of slavery is too deep - if we
just barged in, the police, media etc. would get involved, and that would be the
end of it. A full-scale revolution is our only option - and we should use
the time during which we can fairly freely talk on the internet to plan for it.
Then we could fix not only "The Botnet", but most of the other problems of
society.
But what about decentralization?
Hiding or moving the problem. The "federated instances" always suffer from lack
of activity, unreliability / short-livedness (hey, why aren't we all hosting our
own shit? That's right...), and being subject to the whim of an internet
stranger instead of a big corpo. Or take torrents. How many seeds does your
favorite anime series have? How about something less popular, like video game
soundtracks? People also get notices from their ISPs (VPN / TOR is just moving
the problem again) if they didn't like their torrenting; some are apparently
fined (archive). And of course, torrent sites still get taken down or
(MozArchive). Mesh networks?
Yeah, like anyone's going to bother. Even if there theoretically was a
decentralized solution worth shit, the governments might simply decide to kill
off the whole Internet once they can't control people through it. Or install
backdoors in the encryption algorithms or any one of the devices that are used
for the meshnet. Again, our enemies have bigger resources / influence than us.
Therefore, even decentralization would be temporary in the end - we will need
their infrastructure eventually. In that case, we could also take control of
something like YouTube or MEGA and keep their popularity and all the content,
but change design / policies / TOS, so that users are guaranteed basic respect,
privacy and freedom.
Services are not your friends
Yesterday a friend sent me this
video, which explains how (in short)
a VPN company bankrupted and got bought by another company, which then refused
to honor the lifetime subscriptions of the customers of the original one. At the
end, the author showed his wiki outlining the
unethical practices of various companies; he pleaded for people to help fill it
as well as suggested making a browser extension so that people are notified of
corpo transgressions anytime they go onto their sites. This is a great
initiative but I fear it might not be enough. Why?
Because these are all defensive movements - we're always on the back foot,
having to stay hypervigilant without any way to actually retaliate - just hope
the opponent tires out. "Look, we found on this wiki that this company did X bad
thing!". And what then? We run. We run to a company that's not listed on the
wiki, hoping it lacks the skeletons in its closet. But, even if that's the case,
it could become "bad" at any time. And then we run again. The "free market"
ideology is simply glorifying constant running! And it should be obvious by
now that it has failed. To hammer the point, let's try to find out what's
required to run your own website:
Of course, you need to find a host. Since you don't want to reveal your "real"
identity, you immediately dismiss all the ones that require such, and are left
with only a few. If you want to pay in Monero and not shitcoins such as Bitcoi
n
(archive)
(MozArchive), some of them
will be eliminated. If you want no arbitrary censorship, even more will be
eliminated (
archive)
(MozArchive). After all that
painstaking research, you finally find some service to settle on...or so you
think, only to find out issues later. When I decided to move from Neocities to a
VPS, Incognet seemed the "best" out of everything that was available back then.
As it turned out, it was an illusion. Their portal was extremely slow and
resource intensive, and kept logging me out every so often. But since I didn't
have to enter it a lot, I could deal with it. However, since it was annoying to
pay for my host every month, I had to eventually succumb to paying them in
advance for a year or two, and letting it "renew itself". It becomes a problem
when you don't want to use their service anymore,
(MozArchive) Crypto payments
are non-refundable. So, their design goads you into paying in advance, but then
you can't withdraw the money after you realize something bad about them, or
they simply change policies - which has already happened:
Due to a changing legal landscape in the Netherlands, we prohibit the use of
our services to make public any material from an IncogNET IP that you do
not have permission to redistribute. This includes (but not limited to)
hosting IPTV streams, sharing videos, pictures, music, ebooks or other media
that you do not have permission to share, etc. This rule has always applied
to our United States service locations, and is now being applied to our
Netherlands location.
Of course, they are not unique in this. Most hosts - or any services, actually -
have a clause such as "we can change policies at any time", or "we can delete
you at any time", or "we can sell at any time and your data will end up in the
hands of our buyer", etc. When searching anonymous hosts I picked this
(MozArchive). And as
expected, it says: Evolution Host reserves the right to change or alter our
terms/policies at any time. It is the client's responsibility to check our terms
regularly for any updates/changes. So, the "customer" pays in advance for a
product, that can change at any time and kick him out at any time, without the
possibility of refunds, and his only way of "resisting" is complaining to
support... And what if the support system is also defective, like it is at
Incognet, which doesn't even respond to
E-mails? Their portal also
went down for over a
month at one point, so
even posting support tickets wouldn't have worked. What if someone's server was
about to expire during that span of time? They'd just lose it, without recourse.
Even if you still had access, switching a host is actually a massive burden, so
people might remain at their current one even if serious flaws have surfaced.
It is possible to pay for a service due to "reason X", then have no recourse
while they do a 180 on it. Isn't it obvious that the entire game is rigged
heavily in favor of the "service"?
Think about it: why should an invention of civilization be allowed to be
appropriated by a few (let's say airline) companies? Why should we not have a
say into how they are run? An actual say, and not running and hoping another
company will fit our needs. Some people are required to fly for jobs, etc. And
they shouldn't have to be dealing with research on which retard company (archive)
(MozArchive) doesn't ban
the unvaccinated (what if it's none?), for example. Unlimited property rights -
the current pillar of civilization - are absolutely insane; and all this
bullshit relies on them. Libertarians call it freedom but it is a fake freedom,
one in which a couple big business owners pull their "customers" by leashes;
pretty much a scam. And a wiki or even a browser extension is not enough to
combat this problem. How many will even learn about the site? How many will
download the extension? (most people do not use extensions AT
ALL!).
I wish Louis Rossman luck in fighting the system - the same way I wished Ross
Scott (who tried to
"message his representatives" about consumer protection issues and learned the
hard way that they don't care). But I very much doubt his initiative will
suffice. I mean, think of how many things an average person needs just to lead a
"regular" life. Shoes and other clothes, food, a fridge, a washing machine,
cleaning products, a computer, an internet connection, probably a car or other
means of traveling, furniture...and those are just the basics. What about
supplements, medicine, games, cosmetics, and other things that are not strictly
"essential"? All of those are potential minefields. We clearly went wrong
somewhere when wanting to take advantage of any invention of civilization
requires "researching companies" who provide access to them. Companies who
don't really care about the product
quality, or
or customer
dignity, or
treatment of their
employees - only
the resources they can extract from you whatever the cost. And since they always
our only recourse in the current system is running. This needs to change. And it
changes by...
What will save us?
...Reclaiming the infrastructure from the forces of evil. If I didn't make
my point clear enough earlier, well, I will now. Everything goes back to the
physical! We can't keep pretending that putting digital bandages over physical
wounds works. The problem is inside the routers, the processors, the
datacenters, the wires. The capitalist
system that benefits
from collecting data. And the legal
system that allows and justifies
abuses. We need our own factories, our own
cities - that are designed
with privacy and respect in mind. No more begging or running - we just change
the relevant functionality directly. Imagine how many useless and / or malicious
things could be eliminated, if only the actually affected people had control
over them.
We are all cucks
We all connect through ISPs, having to sign contracts that might not have our
best interests in mind, e.g banning hosting or WiFi sharing. Those ISPs might
also collect data, share or sell it wherever, give it to the feds, inject ads,
block protocols, censor "misinformation", or do literally anything else - and we
cannot stop it. To produce our computers, we rely on corporations that
integrate malicious stuff like Intel IME or Microsoft Pluton into the parts.
Though we might use open systems for ourselves, Windows is still everywhere at
institutions. And those open systems (e.g Linux) are increasingly being taken
over by corporations,
anyway. We rely on Twitter or Facebook for outreach, hoping they are not going
to kick us out for "misinformation". And those companies are so big, that even
national governments or political parties
[(archive)ttp://web.archive.org/https://www.euronews.com/2022/01/06/polish-far
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(MozArchive) are
subservient to their whims. We rely on YouTube for hosting videos, and feel
smart and cunning when we wear a condom like Invidious, but the corporation
upstream can break the condom at any time. And so we toil fixing the
frontends (archive) (MozArchive) every time
our masters decide to ruin something. Even our FOSS is hosted on a service ran
by the biggest anti-FOSS company, funnily enough. We rely on donation platforms
like PayPal or GoFundMe that can block our funds (archive)
(MozArchive) if they decide
we're undesirable. We hunt down ad networks to add to our filter lists, only to
be foiled again and again by the advertisers and trackers. We think our
darknets will save us, when they all still go through the enemy's networks and
can be easily blocked. We're fucking cucks! I mean, look at this
guy and tell me he's not totally
embarrassing. Or look at all
people complaining about YouTube's
removal of the dislike count.
You can uncuck yourself individually up to the level of maybe 80% if you're
really skilled / determined. But it's going to take a lot of sacrifice and is
never going to reach 100%, anyway. It is also going to become increasingly
harder as time goes on and every newly invented technology also becomes apart of
the same slavery scheme. I am so tired of playing the whack-a-mole game with
evil. Let's tackle it at its cores. What we are doing today are band-aid fixes
over stuff that exists solely because evil people are currently in charge. Yet
we are all just deluding ourselves through the band-aids. How can you simply
install an adblocker and forget about what it represents? The only reason ads
exist is because they earn profit for the companies that display them. Yet
people happily swallow the capitalist bedrock of society while offloading its
costs onto the (most) people who don't install an adblocker. This is of course
all going to come crashing down soon, for example when grass or sky ads become
more common. The same applies to closed source software - organizations like the
FSF whine and whine about the evils of it, but love the profit
motive (archive)
(MozArchive) that births it
- or they even welcome the corporations into FOSS and pretend they won't have a
(MozArchive) there. See?
It's cuckery all the way down even when "solutions" are involved. How about
cryptocurrency? You can barely buy anything for it and are still probably going
to need a bank account just to live. And in many places, it is very inconvenient
to use crypto with how hard it is to get it anonymously (the crucial
advantage). It is all also dependent on the infrastructure of the Internet and
electricity. As I said before, we need to set up a society with the values we
care about (privacy, anonymity, freedom of speech, and others) baked in, instead
of put on top as afterthoughts. It is not just about the profit motive -
that's just one example. Power and control are motivations in themselves for
some people. And so you have the spying, censorship, etc for the purpose of
keeping power. So we have to move the scale of power towards our side, but I
feel like everything in this society is set up to prevent that. For example,
people believe things like:
The law is the law, you gotta follow it. Vote better if you don't like it!
A private company can do whatever it wants without consequence. Vote with your
feet / dollar!
Property rights are sacred. Don't you dare deface those ads or destroy those
CCTV cameras!
Profit motive is amazing, rewards "merit" and "creates innovation". The
alternative is communism, and that's bad and killed gorillions of people!
The powerful spread the memes that keep the power in their hands, while the
plebs repeat them and believe them as if they themselves benefitted from those
ideas. If that isn't the ultimate cuckery, I don't know what is. But it is also
cucked to think we can solve all our problems by typing away at our keyboards
while ceding all physical territory to the forces of the dark.
Society needs sane defaults
We can't expect your secretary or plumber to become an expert in technology and
fish out Monero, self-hosting and mesh devices from the sea of deadly sharks.
Just like we shouldn't need to become experts in nutrition just so we can pick
out the few foods that won't make us sick. But the theme of this report is tech,
so that is what we will stick to. Anyway, the peak of ethics in society will be
reached only when a regular person can just jump into the popular choices and
be rewarded with ease of use, anonymity, privacy, freedom of speech, good
functionality, etc. When the Windowses, YouTubes, Discords, Facebooks, bank
accounts or their future equivalents, ISPs are not trying to abuse us at all
times and are at least mildly ethical. Imagine all the wasted manpower on those
now! Imagine all the infrastructure that could be repurposed for good, while we
have to do with breadcrumbs... These institutions need to either be regulated to
hell, reformed by insiders, or burned down and replaced with something better.
How exactly that is going to happen, I have no idea. But the defaults need to
become sane for our society to be sane, too. Maybe then our current band-aids of
darknets and crypto won't be so necessary. Of course, I'm not delusional enough
to think that a "one product to rule them all" can be created, so there will
still be a place for enthusiasts to roll their own setups. But at least the
basics should be able to be ensured for the normies. And so, can we answer the
title's question of whether Avoiding The Botnet is impossible? Well, with the
current mindset this would be an empathic YES. But with proper fundamental
modifications to how the world works, we can in fact bury The Botnet. And let's
end on this good note.