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bluesky - Re: User Anonymity

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: hal AT finney.org
  • To: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: User Anonymity
  • Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 19:06:50 -0800


[BTW is the bluesky AT ibiblio.org address working yet? I have been sending
to bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu.]

Wei writes:
> I think censorship resistance will ultimately depend on market mechanisms.
> Suppose each storage server charges money to deliver requested data. As a
> data object is supressed and becomes rarer, its price goes up and more
> servers will enter the market to serve it. What the equlibrium price turns
> out to be depends on what penalties the servers face and the probability
> of getting caught.

Popular P2P systems today are charging nothing for services. Given the
absence of micropayment infrastructure, systems which rely on payment
face great difficulties. Even the Mojo Nation has backed away from the
notion of Mojo as an actual payment medium [1]. Assuming that global
file sharing continues to increase in popularity in the next year or
two, and that some system becomes dominant, chances are that it will
not depend on payments because that is not a prospect in that time frame.

> Let's talk about how to reduce the penalties (for example through
> plausible deniability) or the probability of getting caught. To be
> concrete, let me propose an enforcement mechanism the authorities may use.
> A list of banned hashes is published. Any server found to be storing or
> transporting any object that hashes to an entry in the list will be
> confiscated. Now the enforcers periodicly request items on the list, and
> confiscates any server that responds. This mechanism seems effective
> against any conceivable storage system, so perhaps if jurisdiction
> shopping can't do the job, nothing else can.

This could have been used against Napster, but the conventional wisdom
is that going after end-users is not cost effective. In practice you
will need to observe due process, and ultimately you've got to send some
policemen to the guy's house to take the computer. This costs a lot
of money per confiscation. And with 20 million Napster users the odds
of any particular person getting caught are tiny. I think they tried
confiscations against anonymous ftp sites in the pre Napster days but
it didn't do much good.

Attempting to enforce confiscation for transporting (as composed to
storing) verboten data is going to be tricky. You can't confiscate
the Internet backbone or AT&T's phone lines just because Metallica MP3s
travelled over them. That's the point of the DMCA exemptions. But these
legal exemptions can perhaps be exploited by the P2P networks so that the
ultimate source of the data is not seen by the end user. Maybe they can
craft the laws to distinguish these cases but it is not easy. Also don't
forget that those Napster users can vote too (or will be able to in a
few years). Make the laws too Draconian and there could be a backlash.

Hal

[1] http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2001/1/21/15160/7105
"But the Mojo-payments are really like karma in the network. These are
your bonus points, your frequent flyer miles."




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