[deanhills]

This thread was inspired by the announcement from HostLease about the EU requirement for ID. Although I have a perfect understanding where that comes from, and I know Hostlease has to do it, it still makes me hot under the collar at the way things are moving with the Internet. We no longer have the freedom we used to have. And it's steadily getting worse and worse.

We've just had a major successful hacking of a very large credit card corporation - Capital One - in Canada last week. It involved millions of ID including social insurance numbers. The hacking was done by a crazy IT lady from the States who said she did it just because she could. She announced it in the social media and is now behind bars. That to me means there must have been a vulnerability in Capital One's access system for a crazy person to have been able to hack it. Luckily it doesn't look as though the info was sold, BUT, wow. Where is this going to stop? Like small people like us get to be shunted around by large corporations and governments to trust them with our personal details. These days every one is living with plastic IDs and credit and debit cards that are provided as though that is regular and OK to do. If one questions it, one is seen as "otherwise". I'm otherwise! I don't think the banking or any of the other corporations and governments care one iota about my safety and security. It's all about control for their own agendas and it always ends up with their bottom line. It's cheap to do it this way. And if a large corporation or Government entity gets hacked, maybe that's good for them, as they now have an added excuse to put in more safety and controls, and demand more ID and compliance from every one else. All in the name of safety and security. For me the EU in Europe is a glorified police state. Thank goodness I'm not living there! But I don't think it is farfetched to think that what is happening in Europe is probably going to make its way to the rest of the world as Governments in other countries must be watching what the EU is doing with the Internet ID requirement. WordPress, a US company has even all of the EU docs prepared in new WordPress installations.

The dark net now seems to be looking attractive to me. Where does one start with it? Like can someone really savvy create a "safe zone" in the dark net where Governments and large corporations can't get their greedy fingers in?

[tryp4vps]

..... The dark net now seems to be looking attractive to me. Where does one start with it? Like can someone really savvy create a "safe zone" in the dark net where Governments and large corporations can't get their greedy fingers in?

The easiest way to get started is to create an onion website and access it on darknet through the Tor browser.

Back to what your title says, I do agree with you that our freedom of the Internet is mostly gone. More and more services now require KYC, but sadly there are very few of them willing to protect the privacy of their customers like the way Hostlease is doing.

[Kururin]

Well first of all. I would say I wouldn't use Deepweb unless it was really fast. Tor is painfully slow and cubersome to setup onion website. There exists solutions like Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live Service). Edward Snowden the whisleblower used it. Basically it operates under the premise of an USB is the OS itself. If it's unplugged everything inside the USB gets destroyed and no data is retained at all -- Thus the part Amnesic -- it forgets everything and starts anew. It also comes with Tor inbuilt. But again I wouldn't use TOR in any kind of way unless it fast's enough. And about the ID part. I think everything will get restricted as years passes by. Privacy laws are being slowly invaded and changed at will, its because of the Age of the goverment. The government is run by old people -- ones who doesn't really care about anything else other than money -- if we the young people lead the government surely but slowly it will come to respect the modern things we come to appreciate like privacy and internet openness. And if you guys really want to fight this now I recommend save the internet, fightforthefuture and EFF. Join their cause and support them. I am aware these are U.S based suggestions mostly but If the superpower can change other will follow (except you know who won't >.>)

[humanpuff69]

Yes , sort of . the internet now start or probably already controlled by goverment , isp and big corporation like facebook and google , opposite of what internet is created for = decentralized

First isp can block whatever site they want and throttle any site espescially that net neutrality is gone . also Goverment can request site to be blocked
And second big corp like google is the search engine and what you find is depend on them

[TrK]

And the only reason i am changing my habits of relying on big brands, i mean i am shifting to duckduckgo although i carelessly have google spying on me through my so called android phone. Also the use of Proxifier and windscribe seriously becoming handy by the day and i am not gonna with tor again because of some privacy concerns with their so called nodes but would love to see a better version of tor which can resolve my doubts about their node distribution. As for the government controlling the internet yeah its true have you ever heard of ICANN rely with legal rules that means if your government thinks there is website needs to be deleted they can do so(although i only seen the cases that involved FBI and US agencies), our freedom is gone i mean if there is a facebook button on someone's website that simply means facebook can track you if you are logged in your browser while the organizations like mozilla are trying to build a neutral environment they can't do anything as the governments of each country have their own agenda when comes to DNS based website blocking(there are plenty of websites blocked on DNS level in India) so they can't do any thing big when comes to unblocking the websites i mean now can you access torrent without using proxy or VPN? and the answer is i guess no cause i can't not even torrent but some content providers websites are also going down by the day cause they were sharing the pirated content?? but youtube is full of pirated content and i can't see it getting down any time soon, maybe cause its owned by google? whats your thoughts?

[deanhills]

but youtube is full of pirated content and i can't see it getting down any time soon, maybe cause its owned by google? whats your thoughts?

I hope the genuine pirated stuff - like movies - will not be going down soon.  It's the one place where I feel a certain measure of freedom, however I'm holding my breath as not sure how long it is going to last. I'm hoping that since YouTube has grown much huger than possibly any one can even imagine, it's too huge for some of the videos to go down easily.  Like there would have to be a specific action by any one including authorities requesting YouTube to take it down for XYZ reason.  For me YouTube is even more huge than Google.  Even when Google is the owner.  Thing is Google only recently in the last few years got to be the owner, so who knows, what they will come up in the future.  Maybe more algorithms as we speak.  Like for me Google is a major threat in robbing me of my privacy on the Internet.  Symbolically I'm just looking at my e-mail account, and how easy it is for Google to block it.  I just go to a different device in the same city and try and open my e-mail account, and it blocks it instantly.  It's got so many bots running in the name of security, I think those bots are sometimes out of control and running wild, and being in their own right a threat for the security of my e-mail account.  Like Google doesn't care, I'm sure people like me who have to suffer through that are considered collateral damage.  That's why I'm always happy when a new organisation does something to go against Google.  I'll support them any time of the day.

[LightDestory]

Freedom of the Internet eh?
You just touched a ready-to-explode bomb.
I am from Italy, so Europe, and GDPR scares me, how can a 20 year old person that works with Internet knows every ASPECT of that set of rules? I am scared to host my client's data, I am scared to own a VPS outside Europe.
But... is Internet a safe place? NO
I like to think about these new laws as a way to protect WHO OFFERS A SERVICE AND THE CUSTOMER. Why? Let's make some examples:

• I sell a service such as VPS, I need to know my client. I don't need to know every point of his life, just on thing: can I trust him?
  
• I am a web designer and I need a place where put my client's project and data. I need to know who is behind the service I am going to buy, I need to see that he is following the laws and that he knows what happens if he breaks it.
  

We created a splendid world like Internet but nowadays the malicous uses of it is increasing.
I don't like Europe behavior regarding the management of Internet laws but I have to say that some of the news laws are a good thing speaking of security and assurance.

Still if Europe set these laws it needs to put on first place the security of the systems that are going to store people data. I am not giving my data because I want, I am forced by Europe to do so and I don't want to worry about something that I didn't want to do.
But still Internet is a chameleon, it is hard to handle it.

P.S I didn't speak about DeepWeb because... well, If you know what it is, you know how it is.

[deanhills]

I am from Italy, so Europe, and GDPR scares me, how can a 20 year old person that works with Internet knows every ASPECT of that set of rules? I am scared to host my client's data, I am scared to own a VPS outside Europe.

I'm not from Europe, and it scares me too.  As Governments are known for their urge to control everything, and I haven's seen much resistance from anyone to the GDPR.  In fact, WordPress even before GDPR was officially launched, started having special pages in its new WordPress installations.  I was speechless.  Like why bow and curtsy to the EU?  When you're basically from the US?  So the part that scares me are people who are like sheep just accepting these rules, and no doubt with WordPress and many others very soon all of those GDRP laws will get to the rest of the world.  Worse.  The GDRP laws apparently cover more than thousand pages.  So if you get investigated, you'd have to employ an expensive lawyer to try and figure out what the law is.  I'm sure you must have read somewhere where one of our sponsors, Jordy (@Pacific Spirit) tackled those privacy rules with the help of his friend Greg, in the Netherlands.  Now that makes me happy.  I wish there were more people like him like the Davids of the world, prepared to tackle the Goliaths like the EU rules and regulations.

I like to think about these new laws as a way to protect WHO OFFERS A SERVICE AND THE CUSTOMER.

 Now isn't that a very popular promotion tool for Governments to just get more control - all in the name of safety and security of the customer.  Are we more secure?

Like let's take our computers and Websites?  For me it is symbolically the same.  In the beginning we only had one anti-virus software, "TO PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER", now we have Anti-Malware, we have all kinds of scripts and bots for protecting our servers and websites.  It's got so bad that Google and Mozilla Firefox are more or less controlling how I surf the Internet.  Google is worse, as it seems to be breaking all Privacy rules, but of course getting you to tick a box somewhere that you agree to allowing them to have access to your info.  Same with Windows.  I think there is a very VERY thin margin between protection and control by the person who says he is protecting you, right through to getting into your Computer system with your permission, "to protect your computer".  Time and again I've had situations where those protection measures have actually created a problem for my computer.  So I disagree.  I don't feel safer.  The more spam police there are outside in the Internet, that wants to blacklist you IP automatically when a bot sees something and get you registered with all of the spam listers even when it was a false positive.  When this happened to me with Contabo, I felt utterly powerless to defend myself.  And this is against all those guys who are supposed to protect you.  I still maintain that there was nothing on my Website.  That one of those Internet anti-spam organisations picked up on something that could have been there before I took occupation of the VPS.  

And the same for Governments out there.  Let's take Income Tax.  Like that many centuries ago was considered a loan from the people supposed to be short-term.  The people were then in a position to protest - i.e. the Boston Tea Party in the US is a good example.  Now even your people from the street have nightmares about their Income Taxes.  And it's going up every year.  Governments are also fiddling with their currencies, printing more of their currency, to the extent that we're mostly living on debt and Government fun and games with the debt.  

So sorry I'm cynical about "protection", and VERY cynical about the EU.  And I wish that every one will stand up against it and question it when they have a real case to protest.  I then take my hat off for them and salute them.  

My greatest fear are all of these billions of sheep all of the world following this and that rule.  And giving their power away all of the time.  We now have given our power away also to those anti-spam, anti-malware bots who can creep into our computer registries, and all but paralyze our Websites by getting them blacklisted not only with one network, but a whole list of them - like who wants to go through all that trouble to get their Websites delisted from those many many blacklists.  I certainly don't feel protected by those organisations.  I feel threatened by them - and particularly those who give their power to those anti-spam organisations and corporations like Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc and Governments and allow them to do what they are doing.

P.S I didn't speak about DeepWeb because... well, If you know what it is, you know how it is.

I don't know the DeepWeb.  I wish I knew the part that is the good part of the DeepWeb.  What's happening with the Internet now apart from deep concerns also is very disappointing to me.  Why do people always follow rules slavishly?  Why don't they question them.  Like if a server host was told by all of its customers, we're not doing business with you if you insist on having our personal information, how long will the host stay in business?  Like that's where our power goes.  Tomorrow we wake up and we have no more power.

[Sn1F3rt]

While talking about freedom of the internet, I am really feeling we are losing the real meaning of the term 'Freedom'. With such laws being propagated by the European government, its really confusing whether to share our details or not. I do understand that it's been done so that the companies know to whom are they selling their products. BUT... how do I know that the person, whom I am sharing my personal details with, doesn't have malicious intentions? How do I trust him?

As @LightDestory said, the malicious use of the splendid thing we've created is increasing day by day. A few days ago, one of my neighbours became a victim of phishing. He has lost INR 10000 which is around $140 dollars when he entered his card details into a legit-looking bank website.

I do agree that a part of these new legislations will be greately instrumental in controlling the increasing frauds, but there should be some measure for users to trust the company to whom they are revealing their details. Only then can this law be properly implemented.

@deanhills: As you are asking about Dark Web, you just have to configure your server to recieve Tor connections. Rest of it Tor itself will handle. After this there are lots of tutorials to instruct you how to setup forums there, where the governments laws cannot creep in.

[youssefbasha]

Well i cant get the point of this post but i will answer on the topic name, Is our freedom of the Internet gone?
Yes, its gone long time ago.
Where is the freedom in being tracked?
Tracked on the sites you go
Tracked on the search engines
How can it be a freedom and the ISPs can block anything they want.