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Comment by fooqux | Hacker News Reader

So, which 9 countries? Which 9 admins? If the US wants info on a user, would 9 of its allies that generally do what the US wants be enough? Would the servers / admins all be government controlled? If so, I fail to see how this wouldn't just be another rubber stamp.

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Yeah, and given the amount of cooperation the various Western intelligence agencies have demonstrated, distributing "control" over N governments is just about as dangerous as one.

The world does not need more sophisticated tools to pursue criminals, it needs more sophisticated tools to advance freedom which is ultimately the best deterrent of crime to exist.

I'm curious as to what happens if one of those nine servers suffers a catastrophic failure, like a server room getting flooded, or a weird hardware failure, or a team of people with machine guns rapidly installing lead-based hardware.

Would all previously sent messages be completely irretrievable?

From the limited information, it's rather impossible to tell for sure. But considering you need 9 different admins in different countries, I'm presuming they are basically using a kind of DHT with a bit of extra brains controlling where the various bits and pieces are hashed. So, that said, I would presume it's at least somewhat fault tolerant.

However, it's Chaum we're talking about, so we likely won't know until the patent is filed.

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