Is there any way to access the web without going through an ISP?

I ask because ISPs are one of the main factors in internet censorship. If we were able to connect directly to servers, it would be significantly harder for governments to block websites. Pic unrelated, I just thought it was funny

What you're thinking of is "mesh network" or "distribute network" where every client and server is just a node connected to one another. This way even if one "branch" is destroyed then you can get from A to B using a different path. This literally democratizes information and sharing of it and no authority can control it.

>>9851 maybe that is impossible due to lack of ipv4 addresses. things may be little different with ipv6

It might be hard to drive a car without road network. ISP or censorship, which one is the real problem? Or is it the law? Voted wrong, have we? If you are not comfortable having all your secrets open, then you need to hide them. You cannot bypass the network while using it, but you could hide your traffic.

>>9851 No it is impossible and you probably don't really understand how internet works. You can however build your own network with IP protocol, whenever you like, and manage the ownership and rights of any of the layer, parts and members of it as you like, such as the "mesh network" presented as the first poster. (as long as government or other organized crime syndicates don't find it, then this aspect will be seriously limited by "law"). This is essentially an intranet, and you have to build it from sratch, regardless of the phisical layer being coppper, optics, or radio. However if you want to access any other computer, and that computer isn't part of your intranet, but connected to the internet, you have to connect your intranet or your computer alone to the internet, then your packages will go through at least one ISP working withing the boundaries of "law", but most of the times your packages have to be routed through several ISPs.

>>9859 continuation: so if you want to be part of the internet and avoid censorship, cryptography is your best bet. if your local "laws" prohibit cryptography or make it obligatory to decrypt on demand, a combination with steganography is your best bet.

>>9851 The best you can do to "bypass" ISPs is use Tor.

Why not just use Tor? You still need an ISP, but they're out of luck if they want to surveil your traffic. All they know is you're using Tor. You'd need to learn some opsec, also, nothing too hard. If you want a website, just make it a Tor onion service. If you limit yourself to using only Tor onion services, and don't make dumb mistakes, you have a completely isolated, encrypted, anonymous internet, while still making use of all the corporate/spook infrastructure. Imo, that's exactly what everyone should start doing. Screw surveillance capitalism/government. Btw, running onion services is far simpler and easier than registering a domain name,' and setting up DNS records. You're up and running in ten minutes without doxing yourself to a registrar, or paying for it.

OP here. For me, it's less about privacy and more about acess. I already have taken the steps to anonymize myself online, I don't post anything that I think could be used to identify me, and even if I didn't do any of that, I genuinely have nothing to hide. The government ain't out to get me. My concern is moreso one of acess. If an ISP doesn't want people on a site, they can easily block any traffic to it. And I know that there's ways of getting around it, but they're not guaranteed to the degree I want them to be.

>>9851 The internet is a network of computers. or to be more precise, a network of networks of networks [...] of computers. The ISPs (among other things) build and maintain the "net"[1] and the customers connect their computers to the ISP in order to access other customers computers, such as servers. If you want to access another computer but do not want "go through an ISP", you will have to build your own net. If I take a 50m ethernet cable and use it to connect my ethernet switch to my neighbours computer, I can connect to him without an ISP - add the next neighbour, and another, the whole street, and a router to manage this mess, and a 2km cable to reach the next town, a router there, more people, it gets expensive and you start charging money... Sooner than later you end up becoming an ISP. The internet as we know is not designed to be 100% decentralized. Central authorities such as ISPs or various agencies in charge of certificates are its Achilles' heel. You will need to use something like a mesh network, a HAM radio station or the "independent" network I described above to directly connect to a server. Though this network would be seperate to the current internet as connecting to that would require an ISP. [1]"net" in this context refers the cables and fibers that connect everything.

>>9864 If you're using Tor, your ISP doesn't know what your destination is, so they can't block acces to it.Their only option is to (try to) block Tor. If they allow Tor, you can visit any site in the world without their knowledge. They see some gibberish activity between your computer and a Tor node, period. Even the guy running that particular Tor node can't read your traffic or know your destination. He sees some gibberish coming from your IP address and heading to another Tor node. The third (last, exit) Tor node can see your destination if it's not an onion address, and can read your traffic if it's not encrypted with ssl/tls or something, but he can't see your IP address. He could block access to destinations on the open net if he wanted to, but why?

>>9866 Let me make sure I'm following: What you're saying is that ISPs have no knowledge of what sites exist or are being acessed over tor. From their point of view, nothing is being sent to or from a specific server or address, it's just a bunch of nonsense being sent "some place" by "some person". So if, for instance, if your country blocks access to 8ch, the ISP wouldn't be able to block requests to 8ch because they don't know what a request to 8ch looks like, nor do they know what 8ch's servers themselves look like. If I'm wrong, please correct me. I have a rough idea of how tor works to anonymize me on the clearnet, but I don't really know much about tor hidden services and the like.

>>9867 The only thing your isp would see, is that you're sending packets that ( the tor staff takes great pain to ensure ) look like a basic bitch TLS session to some ip address that happens to be the address of a tor entry node ( or a bridge, but they wouldn't know that ) and that box is answering back. They don't get to know anything else. That's true of both .onions and clearnet websites.

>>9867 If you connect to HTTP, your ISP can see everything >http://lainchan.org/sec/res/9851.html If you connect to HTTPS, your ISP sees the domain >https://lainchan.org/ If you connect via Tor, your ISP sees you connected to the IP address of the Tor node. They will now it's a Tor node, but nothing other than that. They see the same thing if you are using a VPN. >So if, for instance, if your country blocks access to 8ch, the ISP wouldn't be able to block requests to 8ch because they don't know what a request to 8ch looks like, nor do they know what 8ch's servers themselves look like. Yes, one of the uses of Tor is bypassing things like government censorship. For casual browsing where you don't have to log into anything personal, there's no reason not to use Tor. All that you might encounter is CDNs that block access to Tor nodes, and if you log into your bank account, they might lock it down because they see a login from another place in the world. In these cases I just switch to a regular browser. Other than the Tor network, the browser is just Firefox without all the third party stuff.

>>9867 Pretty much what the last two guys replied. >What you're saying is that ISPs have no knowledge of what sites exist or are being acessed over tor. From their point of view, nothing is being sent to or from a specific server or address, it's just a bunch of nonsense being sent "some place" by "some person". When you're using Tor, your ISP knows that the IP address they assigned to you is sending and receiving encrypted and otherwise obscured data to/from an IP address that they might or might not know is a Tor entry node, or "guard node". Period. If your actual final destination is Fudchan, your ISP is unaware of it. >So if, for instance, if your country blocks access to 8ch, the ISP wouldn't be able to block requests to 8ch... Correct. >because they don't know what a request to 8ch looks like, nor do they know what 8ch's servers themselves look like. Because they can't see past the Tor entry node and they can't decipher your packets to get the destination, and they can't check your DNS traffic because that's going through Tor too. >If I'm wrong, please correct me. I have a rough idea of how tor works to anonymize me on the clearnet, but I don't really know much about tor hidden services and the like. If your final destination is an onion address, even the "exit node" operator is out of the loop. The only guy who can read your traffic then is the onion service operator, and he doesn't know your IP address. Again, it requires some basic oosec to work well. Disable javascript. Don't put identifying info in your traffic. Don't torrent or do anything else that sends traffic outside of Tor. But as far as simple access to blocked sites is concerned, you might or might not care about that part.

Networking noob here, could somebody point me towards a good book or other resource that explains how ISPs actually connect people's home networks to the internet and technology behind it?

>>9873 >Again, it requires some basic oosec to work well. Disable javascript. Tor newbie here. Everything works fine, but what if I decide I want to enable all the javascript and third parties for a specific website and take all the tracking js and css, what's the worst that can happen? Can't I just reset my identity and move on? Everything I do here is casual browsing, nothing questionable, but I'd like to know if this is any worse than allowing everything on a regular browser.

>>9877 If you trust a particular website enough that you don't mind them identifying your machine individually, and trust them not to run or install malware on your machine, then it's up to you. But if a site uses javascipt to install malware, then your machine is going to stay infected until you fix it. Just changing identity and moving on isn't going to help. Like anything else, it's a matter of trust and risk assessment on your part. There is no perfect, one-size-fits-all security for every situation. You just learn the odds and play the odds, like any other game of chance.

Something thats not talked about nearly enough that many dont know about is how ISPs can still know what youre doing through DNS, SNI, OCSP, DPI and Traffic Analysis. And I'm sure theres a few other things that I dont know about that would be nice if someone revealed to me.

>>9886 >how ISPs can still know what youre doing through DNS, SNI, OCSP, DPI and Traffic Analysis. W-what's everything other than DNS? I thought with HTTPS they could only see the domain?

>>9864 If you're just concerned about access then using DNS servers other than your ISP's should resolve that in almost every case. While it's true they could technically deny you access to a site, realistically they don't want to invest money into doing that and just do it the cheap/easy way, they set DNS records of blocked sites to non-routable IPs or their own infrastructure.

>>9893 not him, so I should switch to OpenDNS or something?

>>9887 Server name indication : that's your browser telling the server on the other hand what website it wants to be connected to, in case it hosts several. It's done during the handshake, before anything gets encrypted, probably because of the usual *muh cpu cycles* and *it'll be fiiiiiiine* reasons. Online certificate status protocol : that's your browser looking up if a cert is valid. That means you have to query some third party service. Deep packet inspection and traffic analysis are by and large the same thing, and I think the term " traffic analysis " is pretty self explanatory. How that applies to tls or tor traffic : remember that scene in the matrix where the guy says he's been staring at gibbersish moonspeak for so long he sees patterns and shapes instead of garbage ? It's basically the same idea. Assuming you have the resources necessary to record and analyze a fuarrrkton of connections, you'll eventually see patterns emerging. You won't know what they really mean until you start taking guesses, generating your own data and analyzing it looking for similar patterns. That's basically how china blaps tor every now and then. The tor guys try really, really hard to make tor traffic to looks like they're standard TLS connections, but some pattern eventually emerges.

>>9895 I wonder if things are different in Europe.

>>9896 Not sure what you mean by different. 'm sure that on paper european citizens are better protected against that than american or chinese citizen, but paper armor isn't armor.

>>9894 OpenNIC is probably ok: 192.95.54.1 192.95.54.3 or Quad9: 9.9.9.9 149.112.112.112

Note: by ``driving'', I include other road usage, such as walking, cycling,, and by ``road'', I include other ways, such as streets, autobahns, sidewalks, terraces, highways, driveways,, but my paragraphy is complex as it is---this simplifies it while keeping my meaning. Perhaps I should have used ``going'' and ``ways''. >9858 >>It might be hard to drive a car without road network. That analogy fails, in that ISPs are not the ``road network'' on which you ``drive'', but the government that administers them. Some road usage is included in your general ``taxes'' (ISP subscription fee), but there are some ``toll roads'' (high-speed lines). You could have a road network which consists of myriad independent owners. Each road owner would set the price for using his road, and you, the driver, can choose which paths would be cheapest. (I hate when people talk about mesh networks, but they assume everyone would be willing to pass traffic for free. Sure, it wouldn't cost that much per bit, but it still costs, and by having it payless, it's apt to abuse, by some people not passing traffic, but using others' path-parts to send their traffic) Sure, every road becomes a toll road, but there is also vast competition---oligopolistic practices, as seen in ISPs, cannot survive---so prices, inevitably, are driven (pun unintended) down to where there is minimal profit. And if you want the service to retain the monthly ``unlimited'' subscription with a fee, you can buy that from another company, who will buy road usage in aggregate from the independent road-owners. (This even keeps some roads as toll roads, because the aggregate buyer might not buy road-usage from some more expensive roads,, or they buy different price-levels of roads, and offer the different price-levels to their clients.) Et cetera. So, without an ISP, you can have access, by sending data over media owned by 3^rd parties, remote computers, just as, without an oligopolistically-administered road system such as exist in most places in the world, you can still access, by going on ways owned by 3^rd parties, remote things. The question becomes, how to maintain the infrastructure in an effective way. For example, in decentralized networks (whether for physical or informatic travel), how to incentivize persons to offer his through-way, to maintain it's quality such that is efficient for the connections in which it's used.

>>9895 >The tor guys try really, really hard yo make tor traffic to looks like they're standard TLS connections, but some pattern eventually emerges. It used to be like this, but nowadays you can use obfs4, and China can't detect whether you're connecting to a bridge or just sending traffic that looks random. However, they have been able to block all public obfs4 bridges, so you have to use a private bridge. Alternatively, you could use meek-azure. A Chinese user on a forum told me that meek-azure worked, but not all the time, which might mean that China might be able to block Microsoft Azure some of the time. This is only speculation, though.

>>9857 Nah. IPv4 or IPv6 / logical addressing isnt the issue. The issue is the physical layer connections. You can rent dedicated lines and build networks both wireless and wired but there isn't an easy way to communicate globally. How do you deliver frames across a city ? Some people struggle to get wireless across the house. You can build a neighborhood internet easily but the benefit of the internet is its global. A meshnet run by users could fix this at a macro scale but transcontiental links will probably never be wireless or user operated. A decentralized meshnet is still preferable. Its insane that we all pay ISPs monthly and have no open wifi.

Is there any way to access the web without going through an ISP? >Be the ISP https://startyourownisp.com/

>>9893 I don't want to rely on anything that is based on someone probably not doing something. I need a solution where things _can't_ go wrong, not simply one where they won't. And I get that the former is impossible, but ideally things should be way closer to it than the latter.

>>9851 Your ISP pays other ISPs who pay other ISPs you can't possibly take ISPs out of the equation completely because even ISPs can't connect to the entire internet by themselves without other ISPs. The physical layer is too complex and too expensive for you to do it alone.

Kind of. I assume when you say ISP you mean just the guys that run cable into your house. You can bypass them by peering directly on an exchange. Doing so is not trivial. With your ISP out of the picture you are on the hook for getting a physical link between your house and the datacenter. In the city this can be as "simple" as leasing a fiber line. In the country you're going to probably have to run your own line. This involves a lot of legal right of way type issues, not to mention the cost of actually purchasing, installing, and maintaining the cable. One you are connected to the datacenter (which will have its own fees and red tape to deal with) you then have to convince other networks to peer with you. This is actually usually free because everyone has an incentive to peer with everyone they can, however the big exception is transit providers. These are the metered links between datacenters and you will absolutely have to pay them if you want to access anything that isn't local to the IX. In effect, the transit provider becomes your new ISP. Depending on the specific circumstances, the transit provider may literally be the same ISP that services your home, since lots of ISPs have their own backbone. At every step of this process you will be fighting regulations, corporate policies, and pricing schemes designed for players much bigger than you. It would be a bit like going to Lockheed Martin and asking to buy a single attack helicopter. However, there are relatively small organizations that have done things like this. Universities are the most common examples, but I've even heard of small local communities banding together to make it happen (usually because they are outside the broadband coverage area of the major ISPs). Mesh net is a way around some of this, but you are still usually dealing with transit for uplink since the alternative would be a mesh that doesn't have access to the rest of the internet.

>>9901 >decentralized networks Even then, where are you going to go? Your target server's only connection is through an ISP anyway, so your traffic is unavoidably going through that service provider in the end. Only when your other end is not relying on ISPs can you truly dream of a decentralized implementation. And even then, try figuring out a way from e.g. Vancouver to Luxor. How would you try to decentralize a network over Atlantic? Start to send your own satellites?

>>9972 Not him but shortwave radio reaches really fuarrrking far. A decentralized shortwave packet radio system could easily stretch across the entire planet.

>>9973 Isn't it illegal to encrypt anything transmitted on ham radio? Also, the bandwidth would be pretty low. Aside from that, a lot of local meshnets connected globally by packet radio would provide a way around corporate infrastructure. Not sure how useful it would be.

>>9974

>>9974 Independent mesh implementations usually operate on the unregulated frequencies wireless home electronics use, avoiding HAM frequencies for this reason. Depends on the country of course. The FTC is more zealous than most.

Like others say getting on the "internet" without an "internet service provider" of some kind doesn't really make any sense. There are community meshes, ham radio, transport agnostic store-and-forward gossip protocols (thinking of Scuttlebutt), etc that are to varying degrees similar or bridgeable to the internet. But not the same. >>9859 There are plenty of community mesh networks around the world. They are especially prevalent in places where all utility service is unreliable (South Africa) or where the national government is hostile to a particular region (Catalonia) https://wind.ctwug.za.net/index.php/nodes https://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map And sometimes because people just feel like making one, e.g. Freifunk in Germany or NYC Mesh (which is bridged to the internet): https://www.nycmesh.net/map/ It's important to note that creating or just being on one of these requires interacting with people in the real world.

In theory couldn't someone just make a copy of as many blocked sites as they can on a server from ISPs that are not blocked then simply hook this up to the internet for others to access? Sure this too could become blockable but being that it is built with this intent wouldn't that mean whoever maintains this server only has to change how it's accessed from some ISPs each time it's blocked? Though this only makes sense for certain types of sites since it merely acts as an archive.

>>9862 CIA owns most Tor nodes >>9863

>>10554 Can you provide sources to your claim? I'm genuinely curious because Snowden leaks say otherwise.

>>10555 The phrase "limited hang-out" comes to mind.

>>10555 It provides a way to flag certain people with tor traffic, thus narrowing the search space when other methods are used like latency and whatever else. I don't know if there's any way to know who has most nodes, though it can be known controlling the majority of nodes isn't strictly necessary.

ISPs block CP, it isn't a stretch to think they block other things in concert with the "authorities".

>>10560 The "authorities" you speak of are private companies/non-profits.

>>10560 Wow this is the best argument ever

Take a class in computer networking

>>9971 This is a good post, thank you for sharing your understanding

>>10485 There are many mirrors of the most popularly blocked sites, so yes this is common

>>9858 >>Voted wrong, have we? This naive thinking, and self absorbed thinking, is pointless. Also, about that metaphor you use, why not fly? Radio signals can be broadcasted to people via non-profit neighborhood towers. The issue is that no one bothers, but with today's bandwitdh you could have the people passing along information wirelessly to maybe one community wifi hotspot here and there. Like extending it all to the local libraries across the land randomly. Or just to one guy's house that has proof that "it wasn't me it was the guys on my network". We used to just leave wifi networks open before the news got to people over paranoia, freedom has been dead since about then, the early 2000s. 2007 onward nothing has been getting better for society in any way. Back around then I just would turn on my computer and there'd be more than one signal to try out in my house from all directions of the neighborhood. It was neighborly to share them. fuarrrk you I've got mine happened also, other than just the news making people scared that something would happen to you over sharing.

>>9974 What if it were encrypted to the point of looking like noise?

>>10609 Purposeful noise generation on radio frequencies is even more punishable than sending encrypted packets. There is LoRa standard which is designed for encoded communications and encrypted data is allowed, up to 20 kilometers in open land.

>>10609 Modern encryption already accomplish this.

>>9852 >What you're thinking of is "mesh network" or "distribute network" only tangentially related but the problem with most internet-less mesh networks is that few people use them and those that do are far apart the only mesh network that has tons of people on it already is ham radio

There is this tech company called Volk Fi and they're trying to do that with smartphones. I haven't heard of anything for actual computers, though.

Some countries do not require a passport/id to buy and access cellular network. Wardriving is another but it suck cause most routers would know your CID generated by your bad OS containing your LAN MAC along with other identifying bits even if you change MAC or cards/dongles. Both still rely on ISPs, maybe if you could splice in their networks and access WAN directly from either a undersea cable or some Base Station. Other way is to unironically just find a abandoned WW2 bunker with free electricity and 56k (or higher) wall ethernet which somehow also works.

>>10555 Not the anon but CIA and NSA are I think at some kind of war. CIA is said to have most nodes while NSA hates it. Human trafficking is the worst possible crime and I think those who partake in it rely heavily on Tor and promote it to anons/others to give them some sort of cloak so I think there's a commercial version and another more evil versio. Jeff E. had his own ISP and frequencies registered for his island and it's even in FCC registration/spec documents.