You often see advocates of decentralization hail networks for being pro-immutability, battling censorship.
How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? I'm talking about things like CP, terrorist media, fake news, scams/frauds, and what not.
An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal.
I've heard this called a "pee in the pool attack."
Block chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have one intrinsic defense: they don't support very large data objects. So that makes inserting CP problematic. But someone determined enough and willing to spend money could insert a really horrible image as a series of transactions.
Also if say CP is currently distributed through compressed archives even if they are PW protected it’s not like that 7zip then somehow becomes the illicit material. If you host the archive you are on the hook of distributing CP even if it’s encrypted…
Leaked encryption keys for example come to mind, but I'm sure there's other examples.
E: I realise after digging it back up it's what you said with encryption keys but maybe someone else wants to look at the link too or whatever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
They tried to censor the blu-ray key, but that survived 3 years before bitcoin was invented
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...
This is precisely why they'll fail (aside from technological issues): the rank and file person on the internet does NOT want a Wild West when they go to visit a news feed. Hell, the average person doesn't even really like curated content. They want a chronological list of things they decide to be relevant and nothing else. Just look at all the complaining every time Instatwitter changes an algorithm and hides the method for sorting by most recent.
And what they don't know yet is that all these big companies, if they use this technology, they're going to use them in very focused ways to reward people and prevent them from abandoning their platforms. Because "free" has many meanings, but none of them are inherently exclusionary from corporate competition.
For example, IPFS "solves" this by allowing requests for takedowns per gateway. The upside of IPFS is that you can go after every host, the downside is that everyone knows what content you visit. The network still propagates the illegal content, so you end up with a witch hunt.
It's probably a good thing paedophiles haven't widely discovered IPFS+TOR.
Paedophiles discovered Freenet long time ago. Source: I took a look at TOR, I2P and Freenet years ago, and noped the fuck out.
Ultimately, the relevant question is if the root layer of open data systems should allow erasure. There are good arguments to be had on both sides. If you feel that if we don’t have systems that are fundamentally censorproof, the net result will be an eventual all consuming global censorship regime in the limit given enough time, then there is little choice, however.
People should realize that writing a law on a piece of paper doesn't make it real or enforceable
It's a bit like cryptocurrencies and banks. Because it becomes such a big burden for banks (to prove that the money obtained by selling crypto is not related to funding terrorism, crime, etc.), many banks simply refuse service to customers dealing with crypto. Either closing accounts, freezing money, or whatever.
Perhaps this problem can be solved somehow, but the alternatives have their problems.
I think if you are a business you should choose technology that allows you to be compliant with the law.
Unless the law violates personal liberty, which GDPR does.
I am very curious if you can pinpoint what exactly from it violates personal libery.
It's a cookie cutter rule that restricts contract liberty to create more regimented social interaction.
Not the ones I've worked on... Flag as hidden and delete after some number of days is the best practice which I think (and hope) is commonly done?
Practices may vary by organisation and type of removal requests, but the claim that no removals occurs is absolutely false.
For legally-proscribed content, platforms will go to extraordinary lengths to remove not only the backing store but all possible CDN copies of content. This can ammount to millions or billions of items of content (multiple sizes and versions, replicated across multiple geographic locations).
Other instances in which UGC / USC (user generated/supplied content) have been removed are quite public, as with Google's shutdown and data deletion of its Google+ social network.
This is similar to other technologies like cash, paper, and computers* which also don't, as technological phenomena, implicitly include censorship as a feature.
*it looks like consumer computing is moving away from general 'free' computing to ASICs from folks like Apple which likely will include built-in censorship features moving forward.
If so, they are ok with it.
Why is it normalized that all our communications are bugged and analyzed? This is not something that people should expect if there is going to be correspondence between the physical and the virtual world.
That is censorship. The correct answer is you don't. When you obscure evil, it propagates. When you shine a light on it, it disinfects. Awareness of the thing leads to discernment of the thing. Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them.
> Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them.
This is also not correct. People aren't neccessarily evil by default, but they are stupid and easily manipulable. Just look at QAnon for another example.
I know CP is bad and I have no interest in seeing it. However, I do also know that there is a group of people out there that do want to see it. Is the "anti-censorship" approach to just "shine a light on it" and let those people watch CP that's on the immutable data store?
This whole post doesn't just assume that people are by default good, it assumes that there are no bad people. That's the only scenario in which the proposed "solution" would work. Personally, that's not a bet I'm willing to make, or even entertain.
It's the same thing as any other infectious disease, really. If you don't do any covid prevention and hang out with a bunch of unvaccinated people in close quarters, you're more likely to find out if somebody had covid, but at the cost of potentially infecting everyone.
This is about reducing harm by reducing infections.
Your argument boils down to "oh well, now there's CP forever accessible because its on this immutable data store, but at least we now know that somebody wanted to post CP".
That doesn't make any sense for CP. It's not like people who weren't into that crap before stumble upon it and are like "oh, now this is MY THING."
What I'd propose is having a "known bad content" (as flagged by users/operators) list that gives node operators a rating they can filter what they propagate by.
For example: if you have A, B, C, and D ratings (A being harmless, D being CP), you'd get a self-policing network because node operators could say "I only host/seed B+ content." Very few people given the choice would even want to seed D-rated content (and if I'm wrong, then we have a much bigger problem at a societal level).
It'd be imperfect, but so is blatant censorship. Arguably this approach would help you to find the worst stuff fastest.
What you are proposing is just censorship with extra steps, it seems to me, where the operators are the censors. What's the point, other than making everything more complicated and difficult to work with?
In essence. Except it's by consensus, not by decree. That's my personal issue with censorship. One or a few people deciding "this is bad," which starts out with good intentions eventually gets abused and used to subjugate groups of people. In this design, it's voluntary. You can be on the network, but that doesn't mean your stuff will be propagated.
It's not. When you silence ignorant people, they get more radical and more willing to do things they otherwise wouldn't because they no longer have an outlet. Silencing a neo nazi forum increases the likelihood for "those f'ing j*s shut us down, let's get em!" behavior. And even if that didn't happen, it's far easier for law enforcement to surveil people planning violence if it's out in the open.
> Just look at QAnon for another example.
I know multiple people who went down this rabbit hole (one of them is still down it). And what I said above applied exactly when they started getting booted off social networks. Before then there was no plotting or aggressive stance. They just thought they were "on to something."