Were people sceptical or optimistic? Or did people generally just want more information?
Overall, this was a very optimistic event. Mostly about bringing projects together to share ideas.
3 Likes
It may seem trivial but the Internet and the World Wide Web are two completely different things. The Web rides on top of the Internet and it the exclusive user interface of the Internet for much of the world. But, donāt forget that the Internet began life as a US DoD project. So the fact that the US government (and others) are on it and monitoring it ought not to be so surprising.
I think you nail it here. In prior discussions I saw a lot of relativism based on the assumed agnostisism of technology. Likewise the fact that the network is going to be misrepresented by certain actors is no apology to work for better communication and social measures like blacklistings - quite the opposite. Itās good to see that you have this in mind.
1 Like
The technology certainly is not agnostic: its development requires non-IT choices at every step.
And I certainly donāt advocate moral relativism. I rather have an absolute framework, but one that I donāt wear on my sleeve nor try to ram down othersā throats.
The network will either be uncensorable or it wonāt work: if not in a mathematically perfect sense then in a computational feasibility sense. Grey- or black- listing will help participants to selectively direct their attention but not to shut others down.
2 Likes
I wasnĀ“t talking about you specifically, on this board are several people who believe technology is agnostic. We had this discussion repeatedly. The question is also not whether the network WILL be uncesorable or not, but how we deal with content that we find (individually or collectively) unacceptable. āJust deal with itā is no real answer (if that would be the conclusion).
It is obvious that the network will be confronted with the accusation of hosting hazardous content and that is precisely why it is good to consider social strategies and measures to deal with content beforehand. This includes marketing.
1 Like
Iām afraid I missed a lot of this discussion, so Iām sorry if my points have already been stated. First, if the content of vaults is encrypted, how will it be possible for the people running them to know what kind of content they contain? Isnāt the whole point of SAFE to provide users with a way of storing their data in a way that is anonymous and canāt be hacked?
Second, in my view, if a new technology brings something positive to the world then it almost certainly brings a lot of negative too. I generally feel that net/net itās a positive, but the point stands. Paper money was an incredible invention and a viable replacement has only recently been invented. It gets used to buy or do all kinds of things āwe find (individually or collectively) unacceptableā. Perhaps even the paper bills that are sitting in your wallet. Is there a way of not accepting those that have been used to pay for guns or child porn? Obviously not as the ātechnologyā was designed so you canāt know. Thatās what makes it fungible and why it works as every bill (that isnāt forged) gets accepted along with every other bill.
1 Like
The idea of greylisting as proposed by some people here is to detect what *.safenet site a chunk came from (i.e., metadata) so that a vault can ban any such chunks, and not necessarily to read the data.
It isnĀ“t possible from the perspective of the vault. It will be impossible in the case of private data. This is only about public data. Elsewhere David stated
All private data is via data maps (actually directory listings which contain datamaps). Public shares are open to all. The data is still encrypted but the directory listings are not encrypted, thereby allowing access to all of the data. The reason data is encrypted even in this public share mechanism is the shards of info are stored on machines. We do not want any data at all visible on peoples hard drives, only heavily encrypted and obfuscated shards.
(Redirecting to Google Groups)
The directory listing is the leverage for blacklisting, but we still have to see the implementation, so no final judgement here. We musnĀ“t conflate private and public data. Storing is one thing, publishing another. What one does for hisher own is hisher private business. Anyhow, blacklisting wouldnĀ“t āhackā data. It would merely blind it out.
When I wrote about āthe question (ā¦) how we deal with content that we find (individually or collectively) unacceptableā I didnĀ“t say that the conclusion necessarily has be a ban of every bad content. What I said and meant to say is that it is an important question and that ājust let it happenā isnĀ“t a proper answer to me (morally, well thatĀ“s my personal issue, but more importantly marketing-wise).
Imho the comparison to paper money is good, but not applied correctly: The fact that the coin you are keeping in your wallet to transact value could have been used to purchase immoral/illegal/whathaveyou goods isnĀ“t problematic, because there is no mutual knowledge about the chain of transactions and the particular use throughout the userbase. If there was, it would be much more problematic. The use of cash is pretty much like private content: you only know what you use it for. Everyone knows that there COULD be content that we (individually) find problematic, but there is no mutual knowledge so we can adopt a neutral position. Once there is mutual knowledge as we have with public content, our disposition changes qualitatively - we are forced to adopt a certain position, whether we like it or not, because neglecting also turns into a position. (Sorry, if I express myself in a too abstract way. When dealing with these issues, i often came back to this talk by Steven Pinker in particular this part).