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bluesky - Re: User Anonymity

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Wei Dai <weidai AT eskimo.com>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: User Anonymity
  • Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 23:23:08 -0800


On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 07:06:50PM -0800, hal AT finney.org wrote:
> [BTW is the bluesky AT ibiblio.org address working yet? I have been sending
> to bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu.]

No it's still not working. I've changed the list options so that it
doesn't mention ibiblio.org anymore.

> 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.

I think Mojo Nation's approach is a good one. There is no need to tie Mojo
in with real money in the beginning. Just using it as karma is good enough
to solve many problems. Eventually if the system becomes popular enough
people will naturally start to buy and sell Mojo on their own.

> 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.

Couple of points here. In the Napster case it's obviously much more
cost-effective to go after the central server instead of end-users. But
here we're talking about decentralized systems so going after end-users
will be the only choice. About anonymous FTP sites, I think those tend to
be either private (invitation only) or on someone else's server so going
after them would be difficult or ineffective.

> 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.

I think it is possible to craft the laws to distinguish between these
cases. It just has to say that in case the ultimate source of the data is
not known, the last known source is responsible.

> 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.

My point is that if the authorities were willing to be Draconian enough,
then jurisdiction shopping is the only defense available. Is there
some intermediate threat level where it would make sense to try to hide
the physical location of the server?




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