Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

The easiest way is to not make a "site" but a collection of files which can be distributed by others. You could possibly include offline-executable content, or if you must have it be online (some kind of transactional thing), make it easy to set up mirrors, especially for people to set up mirrors without your cooperation or awareness.

The hierarchy of resilience:

It's trivial to censor an (average wealth, average risk tolerance) individual -- just harass and prosecute for unrelated things. Everyone is a criminal, once you have enough laws...

It is fairly easy to censor a commercial organization (just cut off their payments and banking...)

It's harder to censor a free site (it can do what everyone is suggesting here; hosting offshore, non-US domain name, etc.)

It is much harder to censor something which can be readily mirrored by others.

It is very hard to censor distribution of a dataset. Even harder if the dataset is very small (sony keys, dvd-css, etc.)

It's almost impossible to censor an idea.

How about introducing viral replication qualities to the content. Instead of malicious intent, snippets of content can be deployed all over the web with some mechanism for a simple retrieve/compile. Ideally, the content packets would not even be stored anywhere but would just constantly travel the "wires".

I'm not sure about that in the long run (it's easy to make the argument that hosting pieces of this data is the same as hosting all of it), but one thing which does work really well is time shifting -- basically, encrypt your data so it is innocuous seeming and get it widely distributed, then leak the key (much smaller amount of information, much easier to distribute) which then retroactively makes all the previously distributed innocuous data awesome.

Another trick is to make the data you want to distribute "viral" in the social media sense -- make it catchy and funny, or at least easily understood, so people want to distribute it on its own merits. Or, attach the boring thing you want to distribute to something catchy and funny (stego, or just make it an element of it somehow -- like make a cool t-shirt with the secret key on it).

rdl is exactly on the nose here. No place is as hard to attack as everywhere.

Right.

The Magnet URN scheme is helpful here — no tracker needed

> collection of files which can be distributed by others.

You mean like the Anarchist's Cookbook that was passed around on BBS' in the late 80's/early 90's? I was 12 when I first had it emailed to me on AOL in the early 90's. Pretty sure it's still floating around all over the place too.

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