- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
There is a lot of totalitarian shit going on, this being only one of the recent tragedies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4
I always try to say to myself: don’t wallow in grief, organize and act!
Except for advocating for online privacy in one’s everyday life and being politically active when I have the ability to, do you have any tips on what one can contribute with technologically, from home?
I have:
- A 1Gbps up/down connection
- An RTX 3080
- A few Raspberry Pi:s
- 20TB storage
- A static public IP if I ask for it
What I have found so far:
- running a Tor bridge or guard/middld relay - bridge for the sake of our peers living in places where Tor in inaccessible and middle relay to contribute with bandwidth
- running a Monero node - although my GPU is LHR, so perhaps it wouldn’t contribute much to decentralization…?
don’t run tor bridges, they are publicly listed (the protocol needs this) and bad, influencial people put their IPs on IP blocklists for website operators. as I know, snowflake shouldn’t be a problem.monero nodes don’t use the GPU, if you have the storage you can run a node too. maybe you don’t want to host it on the clearnet, but only as a hidden service, you could do that on Tor and I2P. make sure it’s listed on the monero.fail site
you can also run an I2P router. by just having it run in the background you contribute to the network with your bandwidth. if you have an always on computer, it’s better to run the router on that, because in I2P routers do “routing commitments”. if you just quickly shut down the router without waiting for these to expire, connections using your router will break. you don’t need to take this too seriously, but just don’t run it on the PC in public mode if you can’t solve this there
Tor bridges are explicitly NOT listed. Regular tor nodes are listed but not bridges since that would defeat the point. Publicly listed tor nodes are blocked in places where they block tor. Bridges are not listed so users who need access to tor where it’s blocked can gain access.
oh, I have mixed up bridges with relays. thanks!
Well I’ll be damned. How have I not looked into I2P before. This seems like a whole new world to explore. Thanks!
be prepared though: I2P is slow, slower than Tor, for now. that may improve with more peers but I don’t know what is the cause of the relatively low bandwidth.
also in my experience outproxies are pretty unstable, but that’s not that big of a problem because I2P is more about in-network traffic.
I2P has been slow for at least 10 years. I thought it would be faster by now. If there is any time people would be motivated, it’s now. We might see a surge in use and speed yet!
Thanks for the heads up! For now, I only want to contribute with bandwidth and decentralization, so I won’t be using the network myself. :)
I’ve taken an interest in Hyphanet recently too. It’s kind of like an ancient precursor to IPFS (large distributed filesystem + encryption and some anonymity built in). Not many users as far as I know, but I like the idea of it; being extremely censorship resistant (but has all the downsides that entails).
Just read the whole FAQ section and it’s a really cool idea on how to circumvent censorship and attain some level of plausible deniability! I’m not quite ready to run a Hyphanet node though, since I’m not yet comfortable with the notion of storing other people’s data on my drives in this anonymous format. Which is a bit hypocritical since I already contribute with nodes on other networks/solutions that don’t require me to store others’ data, just let it pass through my equipment… Maybe I just need to sleep on it. 😅 Anyway, thanks for sharing! 😊
https://github.com/hyphanet/wiki/wiki/FAQ#can-i-get-trouble-if-i-run-a-node