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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly?

Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage?

P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.

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Although this is a very fair question, I cannot help but notice that the first thing people associate with the word freedom today is with a negative angle. This is really troubling me, as it used to be a more cherished value.

True, unlimited freedom in this sense inevitably means the ethically very worst use cases, because this is the limit of freedom in any society: Material that is illegal and will have the authorities use all reasonable efforts to stop its spread. Whether that's political discussion or CP depends on the society.

If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of even evading the most capable authorities, but their user experience is absolutely horrible.

Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also designing provisions for removing "material that is really bad". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to not risk being shut down wholesale.

A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a technology.

I think it’s because people end up asking “what can I functionally do on this platform that I can’t functionally do on another platform”, and it’s easier to think of these ‘negative’ examples.

I think this maps reasonably well to a rise of both technological abuse and accountability when producing things for the internet now, compared to what it used to be.

Yes, particularly after observing how poorly society is adapting to pervasive social media.

3-4 years ago, I was nearly a free speech maximalist. I hope we figure out a way to properly educate middle school and high school students about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, statistical fallacies, and other tools needed to properly deal with social media. Right now, society is just adjusting very poorly to the advent of social media.

I wish more schools taught us the tools to deal with social media.

At my school we're just given stale advice about cyberbullying and about posting things we'd regret.

People don't even question the legitimacy of things often or think critically about it. It's as if their critical thinking is numbed. I don't know how else to put it, but it's rather interesting.

The Internet is like we've suddenly invented sugar, alcohol or firearms, without any of the societal tools to limit its damage. Laws, norms, defense forces, taboos.

It's really something straight out of singularity-related philosophy. A technology with massive benefits and dangers that's rolled out worldwide in only a couple of decades. If you look at social media as a whole, let's say it was in effect a single decade.

I'm sure we'll get a handle on social media eventually, with some damage along the way. But the underlying driver, fast technological change, won't disappear. This is not the last time we'll get into similar trouble.

Who control the controllers?

One of these days, I'm going to actually sit down and read through Juvenal's Satires[0]. I've read Plato's Republic and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but not any of the Roman classics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satires_(Juvenal)

I would skip and opt for Stoics:

"Don’t want the world to work like you want it to work. Love how it actually works and you will be happy."

Skynet can be used for any sort of data.

Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.

People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.

It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.

It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.

The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.

Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.

> It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.

I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?

As a user you have the ability to control what apps you use, what feeds you use, who you follow, etc. Decentralization doesn't mean it's completely free of moderation, it means users have the ability to pick their moderators and the ability to decide what is allowed on their feed and what is not.

I'm not sure I understand the way it works then.

I was assuming that if I run a node serving content, I do not deal with curating that content at all. I just offer my bandwidth/storage for compensation, like a CDN.

I don't want to be involved in curation or moderation at all, I just don't want to be held liable in case I inadvertently serve something that is illegal in my jurisdiction.

Nodes don't serve content. They serve blocks of encrypted data to other nodes. Portals run a node AND piece together content from blocks received from many nodes THEN serve the content.

You could also piece together content yourself by being your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate running a portal.

Thanks for the explanation. I suppose that's close to how TOR nodes work from a liability standpoint.

All files are stored encrypted. You can use it for privacy as well as storing child pornography.

Edit: Above is about Sia. Apparently Skynet is different.

That is incorrect. Only files on the basic Sia client are all stored encrypted. Skynet stores all files by default in cleartext. It is up to Skynet users or app developers to ensure files that are uploaded are encrypted client side.

On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.

Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.

It's not really correct to say that Skynet stores all files 'by default in cleartext'. Skynet is a platform for building applications. Whether data is encrypted or cleartext is up to the app developer.

The files uploaded via https://siasky.net/ are cleartext, but the files uploaded via https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ are encrypted. There are also entire dropbox-like apps that are encrypted by default, for example https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/

Most Skynet usage is app-driven, and therefore whether or not things are "encrypted by default" will depend on the apps that are used.

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