And is now more or less useless as its all mapped and packets tracked en masse.
I hope our chunks being stored in multiple places gives us a better level of security.
My god. Safenet hasnât even launched and weâre talking about how to censor it?
Hereâs a small reminder: Tor Project could easily blacklist onion addresses for known dark markets, cp sites etc in their client. But they donât.
Why is that?
Because the network isnât operated by the Tor Project. Itâs decentralized. They just publish code on github. What happens after that is up to users. Tor Project has no control over the network.
So why on earth is safenet all of sudden in such a dire need for implementing censorship?
The only reason I could see is that safenet is not going to be fully decentralized.
A decentralized network answers to nobody.
Please get your priorities straight.
PS: Anyone using the word âCSMAâ seriously cannot be trusted. The world isnât black and white like that.
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To be clear, we are not. How to do that is thankfully not simple.
Itâs not, but we are investigating the current world and the safety of the Safe network as a private (privacy enhancing) secure and free network. That means also free from the political influence and stupidity whilst also being real about what the Safe network is and always was gonna be.
Only if you can also obscure all parties involved and governments canât see it and people are happy to break government mandates not to use it.
I hope folk see deeper here. You make a good point about TOR etc. and this is all the stuff we are looking at.
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Thought this might help calm nerves
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Well said. This is where the line is for me tooâŚ
But if there is some clever manoeuvring to be done which makes regulatory and legal attacks harder, and which doesnât jeopardise the cypherpunk principles one bit, Iâm for it. Do you think this is impossible?
I could say this another way - unlike Satoshi and others, the Maidsafe people are not anonymous. Given that this is the case, surely some attempt at minimising risk, even if it ends up being a token attempt, is worth a shot?
Of course, they have control.
But they are using it to improve network health.
For example, they ban misbehaving nodes and nodes with very old versions.
They also control network parameters like thresholds for anti-DoS algorithms.
To be precise, authority nodes are theoretically independent, but in fact they rarely disagree.
If I remember correctly, they for example use the same pivate(!) ban list.
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Very important topic.
Many people do not like censorship, but at the same time use adblockers and firewalls.
If your PC is attacked, then you usually donât think that garbage packets contains knowledge, which should be free and protected.
Same applies to spam in your mail.
In other words, it is ok to protect freedom of information, until someone starts to try stuff it in your head against your will.
When spammy behaviour happens in community - itâs a boundary situation. Community both yours and not yours at the same time.
How to deal with such problems, where anyone can create thousands of identities in a minutes, I donât know. With regular websites you can at least try IP bans.
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Not sure. My point is about âcomplianceâ as well. I will reiterate my âlogicâ:
If you have a filter in upload end OR in the node (somehow via a magic fairy dust filter). Then either way this isnât going to prevent banned material from ending up being stored on the network. Hence as long as there is no download filter, then a user will always run the risk of seeing government banned data.
Governments are enforcing their data bans through corporations like google, apple, microsoft ⌠companies they can prosecute if they donât comply with gov. data bans.
Hence âcomplianceâ happens mostly in the corporate app stores.
So if SN is going to have ANY chance of getting an app on corporate platform app stores and so have any chance of attracting end-user views at scale (which economically is going to drive uploads & network growth), then that app must filter at the least at the download end - as that would be the only way to guarantee that the user isnât going to actually end up seeing the banned data.
In terms of where the user can get the app to access data on the network thatâs true of course, but itâs false in terms of getting the app through regulated corporate app stores. And those sources are currently going to be the main ways that the masses of users are going to discover the network.
Whether or not the user downloads some âofficialâ Maidsafe client or not, the app stores are the main âcomplianceâ filter of governments.
From a hackers perspective thatâs true. But for the masses of users on getting their code from app stores this is false.
Anyone should be able to develop an app and get it listed on an app store. There is no way to require that such would have any upload capability.
Donât know what you mean here by âanswers to the questionsâ ⌠we need to consider the real world and hence how information is actually being managed by governments. Governments are not going to honestly care about enforcing filtering at the upload level as they wonât be able to control what data is ultimately uploaded/stored (they conât control hacked apps or apps that arenât from corporate stores) and hence seen by the masses via this route â so IMO, itâs simply not relevant.
I think âclever maneuveringâ is difficult and not long-term sustainable for any identifiable legal entity with identifiable owners that can substantially control or influence a global network. âThe lawâ is a malleable thing with plenty of gray area in any given country. A global network is at the whim of âthe lawâ in 150+ countries, so is almost guaranteed to do something âagainst the lawâ in some jurisdiction. If not now, then eventually. The owners of said network, if known, are clear targets and points of leverage.
Things are much, much simpler when there is no identifiable owner with âcontrolâ or âbenefitâ, and all network participants are widely decentralized in global, permissionless fashion. When there is no legal entity to attack (or âregulateâ), jurisdictions must face the reality of something that âjust isâ.
Hence the ongoing joke/meme of âthe Bitcoin CEOâ.
So the âclever maneuveringâ should be to remove all levers of control by maidsafe/foundation and also remove any direct/visible benefits flowing to them. I would even suggest shutting down these organizations once the network is launched, if not before. If the network proves useful, new decentralized organizations will arise organically over time.
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To my knowledge, this isnât actually true, at least in the US. Apple has thus far refused to put in a back door for the US government, and the courts backed them up. They recently said they will implement one, because they want to, not because they have to, but they got some serious backlash from customers and have since âindefinitely delayedâ their plans.
So, in the US, I donât believe the government could force a company to comply with this type of stuff.
Not officially ⌠my view is that the State is run by the oligarchy ⌠which are the same people who own much of big tech. So the agenda is identical.
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Just to clarify, this is so the Foundation can comply with the laws on international sanctions.
Absolutely anyone can develop software for the Safe Network, as you say itâs open source. No problems there! But as you know thereâs a program of developer rewards, that will be administered by the Foundation (although, down the line, it is intended that app rewards will be automated so dev teams can get near real-time payouts.)
We have chosen Switerland to establish the Foundation because it not only has robust, clear, and useable laws around crypto currencies, but also because it is strong on privacy.
So it aims to protect the privacy of developers and contributors but the Foundation could not fund a North Korean development team for example, as this would breach international sanctions and have very harsh consequences, jeopardising funding streams for all teams. These laws are very real, and there are some cautionary tales from other projects about being naive to them.
In short, the developer programs will be opt-in, and as privacy preserving as we can make them.
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My understanding had been that the network would autonomously provide developer rewards based on the popularity of the apps developed. Now it seems you are going to have a Foundation which will collect data on developers before you arrange payment? Data which a regulator could require you to hand over.
I donât want to sound too critical but all these laws and regulations around kyc/aml etc have existed for years. I had thought that the plan was to launch a network which no one controlled and where govts would find it very difficult to get a handle on as it was private and autonomous. Now it seems to be to have a centralised entity (this Foundation) which is trying to appease the Swiss regulators, despite the interests of this project not really being aligned to those of nation states (who require to keep track of payments etc to maximise tax revenue).
Surely part of the point of this network was that citizens in north korea and other authoritarian states could transact and work freely? They didnât neccesarily choose or support their govt.
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This network is a very important clarification. There will most likely be many networks if the technology works. There is no problem with this network being maximally censored, as long as its code is open to fork.
Privacy. Security. Freedom
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That is always going to be a problem. The list entries come after the file exists and is submitted for review. So when the Safe network is widely used then the file WILL exist. Image the extra code to write, debug to then delete chunks that an employee of Maidsafe had to self encrypt to construct the Chunk list, who is the one who has to work with those files Hmmmmm.
The client can still prevent the file from being downloaded. The chunks are encrypted and no one can see the content so really the node operator is safe since they only hold a portion of the encrypted file.
And to kill that argument the nodes can have their code hacked to ignore the list. Once you entertain hacking then nothing works for this task
And what about the debugging of core code, the potential for bugs, and maintaining the list.
That is for application developers
@JimCollinson was talking of core code developers, the actual network protocols etc. And that was included in the original plan which had a separate way to reward them. Core developers do not have any way the network can determine the worth of their development work. Thus something like the Foundation has to evaluate it.
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Thatâs helpful, thanks.
I think that is also an issue in bitcoin where I belive that there various bodies/organisations which provide grants or sponsorship to core devs. That has its disadvantages too but strikes me as being more decentalized and less risky than simply one foundation which provides these payments.
Forgive me for skim reading the thread, and over-simplistic solution, but my working assumption has always been that a filter will be enabled by default and is driven by a certain number of user-clicked flags for bad content. Once the flags reach a threshold on a piece of content (threshold to be defined) - the filter removes visibility to the content. Naturally, people can choose to unclick the filter in the settings section of the browser (with a warning), but it is is on by default. Perhaps this is too simplistic - but itâs simply how I see it.
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Yes this is correct. Itâs actually already laid out in the original whitepaper, so this is nothing new, although we are updating and replacing that paper soon, as there are many facets which have now fallen well behind were the tech and the project has ended up. But the principles remain the same, including the developer rewards.
For the core developer rewards in particular there is very little way this could be automated, and some dev teams may even desire to be paid in fiat, or via an SLA. These kinds of arrangements require standard business agreements, including not breaking international sanctions (which is a quick way to land a lot of people in jail) and meeting the FATF Travel Rule.
That law in particular is six years younger than the whitepaper, so just another example of how we need to make sure we keep things up-to-date.
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Thanks for taking the time to clear that up for me. I guess those same restrictions would also apply to other projects, for example grants to bitcoin core developers.
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