Subj : Re: will VPNs getting banned?
To   : Mindsurfer
From : neva
Date : Tue Aug 05 2025 05:01:50

 Mi> What Tools are in your belt to keep your data and browsing habits
 Mi> private, especially with governments and 3 letter agencies overstepping
 Mi> constantly? 

To be perfectly honest I don't think you can keep anything private when it involves electronic technology. From what I remember McLuhan argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy that privacy is a product of gutenberg tech, books, and will not survive the transition to the electronic. Think about young people today, they broadcast everything they think and do to the world without a second thought. They don't even have a concept of the private.

That is not to say you should not take some measures but I think anything
involving the Internet, especially HTTP, is going to be monitored. If you want privacy or as close as you can get I think it would be best to stick to the old and the obscure. BBSes, Gopher, and Gemini are all good examples. They are protocols that few will use and are not on the radar of the powers that be. Even with the help of AI tools they can not monitor everything and a encrypted visit to a gemini capsule has a greater chance of being private than a visit to a website. 

Are you familiar with the Pareto distribution, the 80/20 rule? The powers that
be will capture 80%+, more like 99%+, of all the people as long as they monitor HTTP. Trying to monitor the rest will be expensive and require more effort and people are lazy and cheap. 

While I think the Internet will survive the web(HTTP) as we know it is dead.

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