"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 11:58 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: "SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services) by khim
Parent article: A note for MXroute users

Governments would like many things. Doesn't mean they can have them.

It is impossible for governments to ban decentralised, anonymous, unstoppable messaging. A number of ways to do it are well described in literature, and with running systems in open Free software. The genie is long, long out of the bottle.

They'd have to shut off the Internet. And even then, so long as people have computers with radios, there will still be decentralised, anonymous (at the logical level - radio transmitters are discoverable at a physical level though) messaging systems.

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"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 12:26 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (7 responses)

> It is impossible for governments to ban decentralised, anonymous, unstoppable messaging.

Why not? Just a few signatures and bam: it's illegal. Easy.

What you probably meant: it's impossible to reliably enforce such a ban… and that's true, but it's possible to make it so dangerous to use it that most people wouldn't care… and the only who would care would know they are doing illegal things and can be easily prosecuted.

> And even then, so long as people have computers with radios, there will still be decentralised, anonymous (at the logical level - radio transmitters are discoverable at a physical level though) messaging systems.

As long as that percentage is small enough it's can be controlled by security guys, that's also well-tested ground.

The question is not whether governments would do that but how would they justify that. There are lots of pretexts to do that: child porno, drugs, Putin spies, etc.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 12:53 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (6 responses)

They can do what they want, de jure, of course. De facto is an entirely different thing. And yes, they'd invoke 1 or more of the four horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse. They're currently playing the "Think of the children!" plank of that in the EU, in order to try make it mandatory for adults to give ID to use the Internet (they'll try do it piece by piece). As ever, they will only succeed for sign-ups to local or else v large tech services (your local ISP/access network; big tech).

I will be teaching my kids how to use decentralised apps, and will show them a few (Session, maybe Snikket - not tried it yet, website makes it sound good) and how to use Tor. And I hope they'll encourage some of their friends too.

They are going to grow up in the most powerful and unbridled panopticon humanity has ever seen, controlled by increasingly authoritarian governments. Liberalism has been attacked and kicked under the carpet by both left and right. They'll need to know the tools to cope with that.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 18, 2026 7:18 UTC (Sun) by nivedita76 (subscriber, #121790) [Link] (5 responses)

I’m not sure de facto is such a different thing. Anonymous messaging works in some places today because you can access platforms provided by companies whose members can’t be coerced by the government. If the US/UK/EU wanted to get rid of anonymous messaging, you have nowhere to hide. The internet backbone is run by companies that can be coerced by those governments.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 18, 2026 15:28 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

If governments wanted to read people's communications, they'd encourage the use of SMTP. Most emails are not end-to-end encrypted, and it's dead easy to intercept emails. You just make email providers give law enforcement a "lawful interception" method.

Back when I was in the email security business, our product had this feature, requested by a number of customers. We also ran a hosted email filtering service and while we ourselves never used the feature and were never asked to use it, it's likely that some of our customers who ran the software on-premises did use the feature.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 20, 2026 15:49 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

> If the US/UK/EU wanted to get rid of anonymous messaging, you have nowhere to hide. The internet backbone is run by companies that can be coerced by those governments.

This is not true.

You can always layer anonymous communication over the top of completely observed communication. We have robust techniques to accomplish this, robust against all but very focused attacks by very powerful nation-state actors. E.g., we can run onion routing nodes such as Tor, and host services /within/ Tor (so, even crack-downs on Exit nodes would not stop this), and we can run anonymous, distributed messaging protocols over the onion-routed overlay network (e.g., Session as one example).

That can be done robustly enough that it is infeasible for even extremely powerful state attackers to halt within a society - unless they turn off the Internet entirely, but then... packet-radio is now ubiquitous, and basically everyone carries devices in their pocket with 2+ of them. So even if the Internet were turned off, we still can run (logically) anonymous messaging over mesh networks in dense urban areas. Social attacks - i.e., infiltration, informants, etc. - are the only feasible way to really stop this.

So... these laws to stop anonymous messaging are ultimately pointless to some degree. Course, the point is to make anonymous messaging /costly/ - in convenience if nothing else - for most people. If it's niche and inconvenient enough that only nerds use it, that is probably enough so that - if the time ever comes that the need arises - the masses will not know how to use these tools to organise themselves. That is what the authorities are betting on.

What we should be doing, as technologists, is making these tools more convenient for daily use. In some cases, they're already pretty good and it's just a question of making the masses *aware* these tools exist and are useful. E.g., Session is pretty good as a replacement for WhatsApp for p2p messaging - it just needs the network effects. Or perhaps Snikket may be good enough (has groups, which Session doesn't easily have) - not checked it out yet.

Decentralised and near-impossible to stop by malevolent states *is* possible. Just network effects and social mores to get people to care and switch. But perhaps that only happens if events conspire to make it painfully clear to them - hopefully not too late.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 20, 2026 17:25 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

unless they turn off the Internet entirely

Iran has just done this. Don't underestimate a sufficiently desperate government...

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 21, 2026 13:28 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

As per up-thread, even with Internet shut-off, there's still packet radios in everyone's pocket for short-distance mesh networking, and LoRaWAN is also wide-spread and can't be banned cause it gets some use in industry and agriculture (e.g. for sensors). LWN has had stories before on Free Software systems to setup well-featured messaging systems on those short and mid range packet radio systems.

There is also a massive cost to shutting off the Internet. You can't be a modern country with no Internet. It won't stay shut off for long (as we're seeing in your example).

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 22, 2026 17:42 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

Turning off the internet is an option for a western government that doesn't care about the economy anymore.

Honestly, I think we've reached the point where if you completely shutdown the internet in a western country for more than a few days, people start starving. Setting up a mesh network is nowhere near anyone's top priority.