With LLMs, censoring internet at the router level has become trivial

TL;DR: it looks like there are routers on the market that use gpt APIs to classify new, never seen before websites and add them to the blocklist in real time

This allows everyone to run something like the “great firewall of China” - and imagine what a government could do

Full story:

At work the boss got persuaded to pay some thousands for a fortinet firewall to cripple the customers free wifi (the extremely stupid idea is to sell them an unblock code, but I live in a country where with 10 euro per month people can get 100gb of 5G connection, who’s going to pay?)

I tried that network and I was really shocked how crippled it was. Boss decided to block anything related to gaming, for example. You visit a small game developer page and it initially works but after a few minutes, you get a “blocked” page (but customers can’t see that because nowadays everything uses HTTPS and they don’t have the self signed CA on their system - they just see HTTPS certificate error). I tried multiple times but always the same result, after a few minutes is blocked.

Everything that corporate thinks it’s not appropriate, it’s blocked!

I felt more frustrated using this network than the time that I lived in China! (Left a few years before COVID, don’t know the internet situation now)

When I came back home I took a shower and I thought to it under the hot water. At home I’m using gpt4o in karakeep to classify my bookmarks… and a router can also do the same.

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts

The entire showerthought must be in the title

No politics

If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as “capitalism” and “communism”. If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion

Posts must be original/unique

Adhere to Lemmy’s Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.