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bluesky - Re: deployment vectors

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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Adam Back <adam AT cypherspace.org>
  • To: hal AT finney.org
  • Cc: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: deployment vectors
  • Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 09:29:00 -0500



Hal writes:
> Adam Back wrote:
> > A distributed web space able to cope with flash-crowds seems like a
> > fairly killer app.
>
> But how do you get censorship resistance from this? Under the DMCA
> if you are notified by a content owner that you have a certain
> document that he owns, you must remove it. Streamline this a bit
> and you have Wei's proposal for a global index of forbidden
> documents which everyone must check against. I don't see that a
> system which spreads popular data over multiple servers would avoid
> this threat.

That is certainly technically possible, I'm less sure about
politically possible. Looking at existing systems for predictors: I'm
not sure if we can read the fact that USENET doesn't have this
streamlined global content block list as due to the fact that USENET
is transient anyway (except for dejanews et al), or due to the fact
that USENET doesn't have persistent URLs so it's not so in-your-face
to motivate the censors to build such a block list.

But either way, users can always make minor changes to the document
and republish it. This would lead to some kind of race as the
identification is human and manual, and may even involve a court
determination, and the service and distribution is lots of comptuers
acting very quickly.

So this is the kind of pragmatic censor resistance property I was
thinking about. You try to engineer an arms race in which the censor
loses ultimately, and can never more than inconvenience you.

It may also be worth building at least two levels into the system: the
convenient fast but fairly vulnerable to censors system, and the slow
less convenient system designed to be more ultimately resilient. This
would discourage censors as removing the content from the fast system
would have limited practical value.

Adam




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