It is not exactly a change. The initial vision of the project is nice and clean, but as we are getting closer to launch, there are many specific things that need to be addressed and things get more complicated.
It is easy to see what the ideal solution would be, but world is not the ideal place and we are not the ones who will be facing consequences. Can we blame the team they don’t want to end like the ThePirateBay crew? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t mean goals of Safenetwork are changing. Galileo Galilei had decided to publicly deny his teachings rather then die and that allowed him to continue his work.
We may not like it, but it is better to have this discussion now than later. What I see as a biggest problem is that the censorship game cannot be won, we should be avoiding it not trying to play. We should do everything we can to present Safenetwork as a base protocol (like TCP/IP), not as a service (like gDrive or RapidShare). Bittorent trackers are taken down all the time, but bittorrent protocol is fine.
Nicely summed up. I feel that technically Safe will show that such censorship does not work and cannot really work when you have an autonomous network. However it is up to us to address regulators and perhaps the best will be there are client apps that filter out stuff, even privacy-minded folk may want to use these if the stuff is indeed horrific. However there will also be people who say no to any censorship/blocking and use a non-filtering client.
I am starting to feel that is the answer and perhaps non-filtering clients will be attacked and then the idealists and purists who say no to regulators (I am not demeaning these people in any way here) can have that fight, but Safe the network is not involved.
It may be the most sensible way forward. Keep safe agnostic and allow ways for people to choose the type of client access they wish.
Ongoing discussion though so good to have all views, even the extreme sides of the discussion.
Also I have been told by one in the know that the various laws out there have the clause “knowingly having horrific files on servers they own”. Basically the ability to identify when onramped, like google cloud storage or microsoft forums etc.
“Random noise” chunks cannot normally be known to be that since one, they are not a file nor a part of a file that can be put together. They are random noise, unknown data. Like trying to say the gains of chemicals on a photo can be identified. The person in the know (much experience) said that there is no way that chunks will be considered knowingly storing anything and that there is no way Maidsafe will be allowed to created the chunk hashes from the files. The files once hashed are never accessed again and even prior only by one or two authorised people once determined it is a horrific file.
This means doing it at the client level of the Safe code. OR doing something like
will be the only technical ways of doing it.
Now of course it would be better to get Safe classed as a storage level system rather like disk drives or internet storage system. Then any compliance is done at an application layer.
This is all sensible, and the outline David just gave above has always been the likely and best outcome.
Legislation in these areas has been notoriously bad since computers began to be connected together, criminalising people who only had good intentions as if they were Mafia, and misused by law enforcement and politicians for their own purposes.
Recently laws and regulations have gone from slowly improving in this area to needlessly authoritarian, and atrociously ill considered.
MaidSafe must navigate this. The only certainty is uncertainty. Even if we see the sensible, practical way to operate this I don’t expect it to turn out that way. Expect more twists than a top TV drama.
There’s something to be said for having an ex Lifeboat Captain at the helm in such unpredictable waters!
If the way Maidsafe wants to move forward is to place it all on the client to blacklist files, then more power to them. That’s an acceptable way forward which still allows for freedom. They could even choose not to supply an uncensored client to protect themselves under the assumption that others could circumvent it and write their own clients if they so choose. That’s perfectly fine with me.
Once we start talking about identifying chunks and having nodes blacklist data, that’s where I (and it seems many others here) take the offramp.
That’s your choice but it seems an absurd position to me even before you listen to why xxxx is being talked about. I get the concerns but not extreme reactions.
Talking is not a betrayal of anything. You keep behaving as if MaidSafe are no longer committed to the fundamentals and refuse to believe that’s not the case whatever they say, because of a discussion that’s been undertaken for good reasons which have been explained.
Something I really have to ask here is how would you censor a decentralized system if you don’t monitor the content and who makes what? The key feature of censorship and regulation is centralization and some kind of filter so it occurs to me that in any practical sense Maidsafe CAN’T regulate the network unless they compromise the privacy of the SAFE network somehow which would undermine the core tennents of the whole network they are attempting to code.
From my understanding PtP worked based on download statistics. So the more an app was downloaded the more the creator got rewarded. And the Maidsafe foundation got their cut the same way. But the network in no way revealed who made what or made any kind of judgement about content. It was just a download numbers game. But now, if I’m understanding the problem correctly, the EU wants SAFE to weed out offensive and dangerous content which it CAN’T do if it’s to ensure Security And Freedom for Everyone. Am I missing something here?
In short I think this whole thread demonstrates how the SAFE network will be deemed illegal before or on launch day. It’s fundamentally incompatible with how centralized government operates. Like i don’t think there is a government anywhere that would be okay with you launching a network that would allow you to completely circumvent their authority.
And that is the number 1 reason why this project should go ahead and launch regardless. Just like bitcoin, or the original intent at least. The idea is not to fall in line with authoritarianism, but to circumvent it. Do we have the balls? Will We? It certainly is what I am rooting for.
If the authoritarians don’t like it they can kick rocks who cares other then them and those weirdos who love to embrace being under their ruler-ship for whatever bizarre reasons.
Not yet, you can use onion routing and similar. At this time it’s not a big concern for us as it’s a “solved” problem using many techniques, but I feel we need to focus on stability right now and then tie up the fundamentals like this.
I think this is why several (many?) of us had such strong reactions when statements were made to the effect that censorship on the nodes themselves (as opposed to client rating/filtering) was on the table for consideration/exploration. If I have understood this convo correctly, that appears to no longer be on the table.
You are probably right about getting a stable launch. I just worry that farmers and users may get targeted if they can be identified. But if we can upgrade to that not long after that would be great.
