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Any back door would have to be pretty localized without the sim, wouldn't it?
What can we do to get computer to computer Internet without connecting directly to the Internet... except a base station now and again, here and there. Maybe we could have local Net without the Internet.
The back-doors I'm concerned about are sister processors with access to memory and peripheral buses and such. This would include the 'management engines' built into x86 chipsets and baseband processors on mobile ARM based SBCs. Another class would be undocumented instructions in processors. I'm hopeful that the open license model of the RISC-V processors will ultimately foster fabs which can be audited and more trusted.
The above are concerns for those who are more worried about state level spying although it's only a matter of time before backdoors which were initially available to corp/gov state actors are leaked such as what happened with Intel ME stuff. Anyway, to your question about 'connecting directly', it is relevant to the above in that secret triggers tend to open the back-doors and indirect access can interfere with such things perhaps, but in general it's not really a very meaningful concept. Most things are not 'connecting directly', but directly enough to a problematic source (an IMSI catcher, say) that some satisfactory firewall-ing could help.
I do think that '
we' will '
lose the internet' as we get farther into the Great Culling. Not that it won't exist since it is to critical to vaporize, but it won't be available in un-curated form to Joe Sixpack. Finding information about the covaids will not be as easy as avoiding Jewtube in favor of Buttchute for instance...but the actual porn-pipe will still be there. Thus, I think it valuable to explore alternate methods such as some of the mesh network stuff, and also methods of using porn-pipe infrastructure they provide us in a non-obvious way.
I would say also that streaming protocols are relatively easy to censor. Store-and-forward protocols (smtp, uucp, etc) are going to be much more difficult. Similar principle applies to large amounts of data vs. tiny amounts. Bitcoin has two things to it's favor here just FWIW.
Lastly, while IoT may be '
of the devil', it has brought about some interesting things such as spread-spectrum low power radio stuff (e.g., LoRa) which can be usable for point-to-point communications and meshes. I really like the 'modular' nature of things like this:
http://www.blakrpi.com/index.php/blak_rpi-for-system-admins/Any low production and/or roll-your-own solution, even if relatively poorly implemented, is going to be hardened to a degree simply because there are not enough resource to analyze and attack every target. Just the very existence of such thing will sap the resources of the adversary. Maybe the BCM2835 processor of a Pi Zero is found to be subverted? Probably can swap out with another SBC should such a thing happen. Obviously such a device has dismal performance and zero appeal to most people, but that's not who it's going to do anything for anyway.
