western governments are getting more and more totalitarian and with the excuse of fighting child p.. and terror1sm, they come up with more restrictions every day.
So it will be just a matter of time until they come for VPNs.

there are 2 things that will need some alternatives.
1. DNS
2. VPNs

for DNS i am already using a combination of TechnitiumDNS and dnscrypt proxy. That give me anonymous DNS requests through several hops via dnscrypt proxy. DNS can still be attacked by authorities by forcing public DNS servers not to serve certain DNS entries. Here could come handshake.org into play. They work on a decentralized DNS certificate authority and naming. So they would not replace DNS itself, but the root zone file. That could finally free DNS.

For the VPN issue.. I was involved in a project as tester and support called MASQ. Development of MASQ is ongoing for several years now.
check it out here: masqbrowser.com masq.box
MASQ is an encrypted mesh network routing protocol, that has not existed before. created from scratch (for at least 5years), that allows a mesh network of nodes to route your web browsing data. decentralized, self organizing, with 1-5 hops. you choose how many hops your data has to take. 3 is minimum for being clandestine, so no node in the route knows the whole route, just its neighbors. 1 might be enough if you just need a different IP in a certain country. 5 would be snowden level paranoia ;) There is a masq browser and a chrome addon yet.

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

** On Monday 04.08.25 - 11:54, Mindsurfer wrote to All:

For the VPN issue.. I was involved in a project as tester and support called MASQ. Development of MASQ is ongoing for several years now. check it out here: masqbrowser.com masq.box MASQ is an encrypted mesh network routing protocol, that has not existed before. created from scratch (for at least 5years), ...

Never heard of it before. Thanks for the headsup. Meanwhile a
friend of mine writes:

"I just watched a review that someone did on it in May, and it
definitely sounds interesting, but it seems the caveat is that
there is *no* free offering, which basically means you can't
even try it out for free until you are willing to pay for it.
After you purchase tokens you can apparently provide serving
and exit node services to essentially sell off your cellular
bandwidth overnight (or while browsing) to earn tokens for
browsing, though, it seems."
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Re: Re: will VPNs getting banned?
By: Ogg to All on Tue Aug 05 2025 08:21:00

called MASQ. Development of MASQ is ongoing for several years now. check it
out here: masqbrowser.com masq.box MASQ is an encrypted mesh network

Never heard of it before. Thanks for the headsup. Meanwhile a friend of mine writes:

"I just watched a review that someone did on it in May, and it definitely sounds interesting, but it seems the caveat is that there is *no* free offering, which basically means you can't even try it out for free until

They just announced transition to using the Mainnet token on August 9th. That should allow you to pay for data use on the go without a prepaid subscription. You would then pay with the real MASQ token that you hold on the browsers wallet (as soon as you reach a certain threshold level of data usage).

you are willing to pay for it. After you purchase tokens you can apparently provide serving and exit node services to essentially sell off your cellular bandwidth overnight (or while browsing) to earn tokens for browsing, though, it seems."

i have to check again what exactly they have put behind the premium subscription. It is true, some features are only available if you pay for a premium subscription.

Whats special about MASQ beside the multiple hops and the decentralized mesh network, is that in the final stage, it will be completely hidden in TLS traffic, in data packets that mimic an online game or something else unsuspicious. So it is not detectable. And you would have to censor standard TLS encrypted internet completely if you wanted to prevent people from using MASQ. Thats the beauty of it.

And to be safe to be attacked as a registered compay they "created a non-profit offshore foundation called the Digital Freedom Foundation to safeguard the MASQ Network protocol and keep it open".

I hope everything works out as planed and MASQ becomes the privacy tool that can't be stopped.

The coming saturday is some kind of a big day. First time it will actually run with its mainnet (base) token.
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