Everything I read here is that SAFEbrowser and network are safe… But are they anonymous ? Can anyone see what you are doing on it ? If I watch a doge video, will anyone be able to see how much wow what I’m doing is ?
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It’s made in a way that nobody can see what you are doing. Except when you make a public post under your own name and you link to it from your twitter or something saying: “This is my account on SAFE”.
But when you make an account, upload some private data or browse some safesites nobody has a clue who your are and what you visited.
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So anyone can litterally do anything and not get caught ? Aren’t you afraid SAFE gets stopped by some authorities of some kind ? Or is it impossible because of decentralization ?
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Nothing is impossible, bt its like stopping the Gutenberg press, all we are doing is making data available to everyone and more than that the ability to add to humanities knowledge in a way that individuals retain control. This individual control of their own destiny brings responsibility though.
In terms of hard fixes for “banning” we have a decentralised community and codebase, so it all helps. The more educated we all become though the more logical this will be. Governments etc. need to allow the people their own minds, it should not be a problem but an aspect of evolution. I feel there will be roadblocks, but like all natural systems evolution is not something that can be stopped.
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Well thank you very much! Last question would be (sorry I didn’t make any research about this one): are all connections in the safe network crypted like with a vpn or can an ISP see what you are doing on it ?
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Yes, all communication is encrypted over several layers and no password or login ever leaves your computer. The network won’t connect to normal internet websites so no VPN needed.
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Wow. You are selling dream ahah thank you then 
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Hmmmm, read some more, have the fortitude and modesty to challenge yourself to dig in to the technical documents and you’ll discover there is no sell nor any dream going on here.
As with everything here no one will hound you only try to help when you ask, though it’s totally your call there 
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Is it so, that one could for example publish some false or insulting data (like a video) about someone else, and the victim could not do anything to get it offline?
If so, can this also be done in a way, that the insulting data is published as immutable data, so that it is not possible to get it offline even if everybody would like to do so?
Yes
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Wow! Kind of “absolute publicity”. A new thing for a man as a social creature.
Of course even now something uploaded is possibly going to be around more or less forever - if we think from the point of view of the victim. But with SAFE it will be possible to make for example a site:
safe:Victims_Name_is_a_whore.truth
…and it is going to be up forever.
What then could practically be done in situations like these? Make a competing sites like:
safe:Victims_Name_is_actually_a_cool_person.eventruer
I guess that trying to flood the SAFEnet with non-insulting information - in order to get better search results for your name - is the only thing left. But it is going to cost a lot. So battles like these are going to be battles of economic power?
Society will have to evolve to cope with this. There is no other way really. Data is going to become immutable sooner or later, whether safe net succeeds or not.
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Yeah I guess that’s true.
Maybe there is already some signs about maturing to cope with cyberbullying? I don’t have kids, but I know that cyberbullying is a problem amongst them. But maybe they have already developed some antidotes to it, have they? I mean, “big time bullying” is of course a different matter, but on some level almost everyone has been teasing and being teased as a kid. Nowadays that happens in the web too, so maybe kids also have some preliminary culture of not making too longshot conclusions based on some mean stuff in the net? Do they?
On a more general level, it is interesting to think about what SAFEnet means as a medium, and as sphere for social human interaction. It is easy to come up with this kind of nasty scenarios but there is certainly more to it. I’m just stuck with the nasty side of it for now.
The idea of “absolute publicity” is interesting, but of course nothing is absolute in a real sense. Something is public only to a degree it is more widely known - or hot at the moment - than all the other stuff.
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The world is full of spaces, safe, dangerous and inbetween. Some grow up in dangerous lawless places, some in safe regulated places. The latter will tend to expect authority to make a safe space and to be able to stay inside it, so I imagine you @Toivo grew up in a relatively safe regulated area, or at least can appreciate benevolent authority, as I do.
Whenever a new space opens up there’s a tension as it develops from a small self regulating group, and a generally affable space, growing into something bigger and complex, until some parts become outright dangerous and people call for regulation.
The Internet is a prime example, but I think it’s a human issue. As we grow from small groups to large communities, scale throws up complexity and opportunities for bad behaviour multiply. We saw the same evolution on this forum, and plenty of tension arose in getting from ‘there’ to ‘here’
Here we are building an unregulatable foundation because authority is not always benevolent, and because there are too many problems in holding that authority to account, or in just finding ways to create our own small safe places within the current online world.
We are not in control of what lives on top of the SAFE ‘foundation’ though - that’s really the point: to ensure nobody can control that, and instead that everyone gets to choose what’s there and where to hang out. A freedom that no longer exists on the current Internet because of its many flaws.
So like a new continent that is too vast for everything to be controlled by the early settlers, those who want safe, regulated spaces will need to create them and stay within them. But everyone will be free to venture outside, and test themselves in the wilderness. Go see what’s there, create something without the control or assumptions of others, and some will perish out there, or at least be exposed to extremely nasty content and behaviour.
So yes, just like the world we live in, there will be places where a lot of bad things happen. In the real world there are places where I simply don’t want to go, and places where I would not feel safe or be safe. But I don’t think I should stop others going there - war reporters, deep sea explorers and Mars venturers are welcome to do their thing, so long as I can hang here in my boat 
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But can you hang there in your boat?
A while ago I was hanging out in a forest with a friend of mine, doing something I would not like to share publicly. We thought we were there alone, and we were, but after a while we found out that there is actually this automatic wildlife camera pointing straight towards us. I don’t know whose camera it was and what he is doing with the pictures he has of me and my friend. I felt this huge power imbalance. Luckily the thing that was private in our hanging out would have been more exposed through speech and not so much through image alone. So it was really a nevermind -situation. But anyway it was a kind of a wake up call for me. I can be deep in the forest and still someone is watching me.
With SAFEnet we could have a website titled “Private things”, that publishes anything that is private: from photos of random nosepicking to videos peeping people doing their thing at their homes to… whatever. This site could be someones business. S/he could charge visitors for looking at the page and pay for the uploaders for the content they provide. We can now anonymously reward and profit from behaviours that we really couldn’t before.
I think that this asymmetry of publicity and anonymity, that SAFEnet makes easy, is fascinating. But while SAFEnet is providing a way out of dangerous centralized authorities, is it at the same time building infrastructure for the ultimate panopticon?
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These are valid points and concerns, but not building SAFE would not protect us from somebody (or an AI) creating SAFE instead.
In addition, not building SAFE doesn’t protect you from surveillance out in the world (only your online activity), and creating SAFE doesn’t prevent someone doing what you describe above either (with current technology).
So while your concerns are valid I don’t really see them as reasons for not building SAFE in the way it is being built. We will have to deal with those things anyway (we already are), but without using internet surveillance of everyone to do so.
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I don’t really understand the “forever” part myself, or why the publisher/owner of a site wouldn’t be able to destroy it as well as just edit it, unless somebody else has taken a copy of it and he’s not the only owner anymore.
Currently only certain big actors like Google and some governments have the power to keep information up forever if they choose to. Safenet will not take that power away from them, but it will give the same power to everybody else too. Am I right?
I’m not actually against SAFEnet and I don’t think that it should be made somehow controllable. I think that progression along these lines is inevitable now that the idea is out in the wild and technical possibilites are there. It just makes me think, nothing more.
I try to think SAFEnet as a phenomenon that inevitably has also unintended consecuences on top of the intended ones. The point of thinking these is not to resist SAFE. I just like to try to figure out how things can possibly evolve.
There is a certain irony that a mediastructure, that allows freedom an privacy for everyone online, also has potential to erode privacy IRL. Though I don’t know if that potential is really something to worry about.
I think is very likely that vast majority of people are not going to get any nasty publicity through the kind of site that I sketched earlier. Anyway the possibility of exposing other peoples private life without getting caught will still change the landscape for all. Of course the possibility is already there with TOR and everything, but I think the key for the commercialisation of this kind of behaviour lies in the easiness of it.
But who knows what comes out of it? Maybe people will grow tired with gossiping and soon everybody gets uses to the idea that we all are less perfect than we would like to? I think something a bit like this is already happening in a way people present themselves in facebook-, avatar- & other photos. Of course there are some folks who always try to show the better of them, but sometimes it also seems that any kind of half hearted snapshot will do.
You know, I’m not going anywhere with this, just speculating.
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You could consider the following illustration :
If I write down some text on a paper book, I can keep the book forever, or strike what I wrote, or even burn the book. This is what happens with our regular disk drives.
If I say something publicly out loud, people will remember that, and will report what I said to their surrounding
I can’t change what I said. I can’t destroy that moment of history. My words will remain in the collectove memory : what you say is immutable. ( ok some people will try to distort it, but this is not the point here , and Safe will take care that nothing is distorted ).
You could consider regular , usual data, as something that can be erased until you transfer its property to someone else, and Safe immutable data as something that rmains in collective memory and as such cannot be erased or changed anymore.
It is a very loose comparison, but I hope this illustrates the idea of what ‘immutable’ can mean.
EDIT : As such, like it is the case for what we say, we’d better think twice before publishing something
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I guess I just don’t understand the technology well enough. If I say something out loud and nobody is there to hear it, what I said disappears. If I publish something on Safenet and nobody sees it or copies it, wouldn’t I be able to take it down and have it disappear? Or is complete version control of everything that’s ever been published a necessary part of the network?
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