Solutions don’t have to be about breaking anything. Unknown unknowns.
Off-topic for sure. Perhaps the rigidity of the SAFE network will force alignment in other domains.
In other news:
https://twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/1065375879122046976
Chris showing his true colors. Just taking a look at his other posts, you’d think he was part of a clandestine Soros counterattack. Soros did sell FB and Netflix at the top…cutting strings to hold down the fort?
No hiding this time, GS. When you fund both sides, you always win.
https://freedomfromfb.com/
As for Facebook, I think I called it back in January, but no one wanted to pay attention. Even Dug thought it was a crazy idea on a conference call that some of these tech companies might fail or be broken up. They all have huge targets on them.
All tech & no politics. Hopefully history won’t repeat itself with SAFE.
tl;dr A social network based on linked data and linked identities is going to be cool. Reality Mimicry.
Having been thorough this argument on a national scale concerning the internet filter our government wanted to implement on a national scale by installing it in the ISPs, I know that all this talk of safe will enable the sickos and crims is gobbledegook. Some reasons are
- These crims can already do all they want on the current internet.
- Actually there are some very intelligent crooks as indicated by recent arrests in Australia of pedo rings where judges, lawyers, doctors, accountants, IT plus a lot of others have been arrested.
- they actually create tools for others to use for encrypted communications etc.
- The police here and International Police use good old fashion techniques to infiltrate these criminal rings.
- These crimes have to interface with the real world and thats where police now and on SAFE will have to do their excellent work in apprehending these criminals
- International Police makes these terrible crimes globally enforceable.
- Crims will find any opening to commit their crimes
- Crims don’t care what governments make illegal they will still use whatever they feel safe using. The safenetwork is not going to be trusted for a long time and they will continue to use the encrypted comms they have been for years now and feel secure in using those
- the safenetwork will for a year or two will be treated like a government honeypot simply because its “its too good to be true” and they cannot place trust in it till its proven safe.
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By hiding the crimes it actually makes it harder to catch the criminals.
- One example of this was the Catolic Church abusing children. It took the internet and social networks on it to allow unrelated victims to realise they were not alone and that they had a common attacker.
- Not having the crimes in the open allowed the crims to operate in secret. By allowing the crimes to be seen then they are dealt with.
- Evidence cannot be destroyed by the criminals on the safenetwork and is one good reason the smart crims will not use it for their crimes.
- and so on and so on and so on.
Private communications should always be a basic human right and only revealed in very special circumstances. The western governments have been overreaching this for quite a while now and have polluted our minds with all the reasons we should not have privacy and it will be the downfall of society if it is allowed to exist. There was a time when it was the person’s choice if they kept conversations private or not. It should not be up to third parties to decide that - which is the world we are living now.
That’s precisely the type of thinking and knowledge worth sharing on the subject.
There seems to be a lot of questions posed in this thread, which, if you take your time to think about the purposes of the SAFE network, answer themselves.
1. The proliferation of child porn and other such undesirable content over the network.
At the moment I can honestly say that I have never stumbled across child pornography, or hardcore pornography for that matter. In my day to day use of the internet it’s just not an issue. There have been times that adverts for “The Tinder of Sex” or similar have appeared on my screen, but that is usually when I’m searching for torrent files or similar, basically using websites which are questionable in their content anyway. Also, one of the aims of the SAFE network is to monetise websites without the need for advertising, so this content won’t necessarily appear in front of the average user anyway.
2. The safety for child porn creators behind the anonymous SAFE network
The fact that there are no log files or content identification and tracking can be viewed two ways.
While it may lead to the undesirable conclusion that more people will look at child pornography, it could also be looked at another way.
If the police can’t access databases of who has viewed which websites or who is sharing which content then it forces them to go after the source instead. They will NEED to focus on using the content to identify the creator. This can only be a good thing. Surely stopping someone creating pornographic images and videos of children is more valuable than stopping people looking at the results? It means the police will need to revert back to the old fashioned idea of investigating in the “real” world. Collaborating with schools, carers and social services the world over to identify and protect vulnerable children. Arresting those who look at child pornography doesn’t stop its creation.
3. TOR already exists.
Paedophiles (yes, i’m in the UK and that’s how you spell it!) and others who may wish to use the SAFE network for nefarious purposes already have the Dark Web for that. There are thousands, if not millions, of services online who offer to shield your IP address by bouncing encrypted content around the web before it arrives at your computer. Yes, this can be reverse engineered to eventually find a source IP, but that doesn’t stop them. I find it hard to imagine that someone with such desires will currently be stopped by the risk of getting caught so I don’t imagine there will be a massive surge in numbers if the SAFE network succeeds in offering total anonymity.
4. EVERYONE will be anonymous
There has been talk of crimes being committed against people on the SAFE network. This is highly unlikely since any personal details will be encrypted and broken into pieces before being distributed. The only way this can happen is if someone manages to access your username and password to log into the network (in my understanding - correct me if I’m wrong). This information isn’t held on the network so it will come down to either someone in close proximity to you watching you type, a keylogger being installed on your computer by the traditional web or a dodgy .exe file, or you writing down your username and password somewhere and it being intercepted. Either way, the crime didn’t happen on the SAFE network!
Basically what this amounts to, IMO, is a big fuss about nothing. There’s no need for a content filter - just don’t go looking for it and you won’t see it.
You’re right, but it won’t stop the media and politicians conveniently ignoring those facts, in order to present their narrative. Sad, but true.
Its very much like conflating bs secrecy with privacy. With the one there is no liberty but without the other there is no liberty. Kennedy was persuasive on secrecy. I believe secrecy and privacy are antithetical. Secrecy is utterly incompatible with liberty. Want a criminal state? Then allow the state the crime of state secrets.
Same in (several states of) Germany. Secret services know no limits.
This!
(20 Characters.)
This ignores that this crap exists not because of the sources but because of the demand they serve. The ones making those videos are not always pedo sickos but people who don’t value other people’s lives. They are after the money, and those children are just tools for them. Yes, they need to be stopped, but they will be replaced by others because those wanting to pay for it are still out there.
You’ve missed the point of my post. I’m not trying to debate whether or not child porn will exist and frankly I don’t want to. I’m simply saying that the focus will shift from catching the consumer to catching the producer, which in my eyes is more important as it will help the children that the producer is preying on. I know it’s not a problem that would be easily eradicated but that’s an off topic discussion for another day.
All I’m saying the solution does include going after the demand side as well, those who finance the exploitation, not just those who use those funds.
I already expressed I don’t believe this would be possible on the Safe Network, and I’m also aware Tor already does that job well. This whole thread is meaningless in a way as we can immediately conclude that illegal content will be untraceable on the Safe Network, once it’s there it’s always there, and there’s nothing anybody could do about it, case closed. Anything beyond that is more-or-less off-topic.
Knowing that it’s impossible doesn’t justify, and this is my point, that we should resort to the intellectual dishonesty of explaining this impossibility is actually serving the solution. No, it does not. It goes straight against it.
Very good thread with excellent debate and nuance (and possibly needs reviving now that the Beta network is up and running).
I would like to add to this discussion the observation that [censorship / legal measures / law enforcement] often serve the purpose not of ending a Wrong but of cornering the market for that Wrong in the hands of those above the law, whether by virtue of corruption or because they possess the rare skills or tech to bypass it.
Most law enforcement succeeds in curtailing the “low hanging fruit” Wrongs by moving them out of the reach of the average citizen, while failing (by design) to remove them from the reach of the super powerful (intel agencies, politicians, oligarchs (and not by design, tech savvy autists)). The collateral damage is borne by the broader public (in loss of rights, surveillance etc), while the wealthy and powerful now dominate the criminal landscape out of reach of the [censorship / legal measures / law enforcement]. This may be why we are now dependent on billionaire oligarchs to save freedom of thought.
So the War on Drugs for example, gave the CIA and its partners a monopoly on the drug industry while removing the lowest, but also broadest level of survivalist competition. When your threat model is a psychotic biosurveillance state, you need to operate on the principle that the purpose of a system is its effects. Now look at the crime and suffering in our so called advanced democracies with finely tuned [censorship / legal measures / law enforcement] and ask yourself what the purpose of those systems really are?
As much as I dislike to talk about censorship, for the benefit of those arguing for it, I will speculate on what the minimum design considerations should be for a hypothetically reasonable censorship framework. This will show you just how far away we are from “reasonable” censorship on the internet today, by accident or by design:
- clear projection of benefit over cost for broader society of the measure
- disclosure of the censorship algorithm and mechanics
- transparent monitoring mechanism to remove the censorship should benefit thresholds not be reached or should cost thresholds be exceeded
- deep, multi-layered analysis of costs (e.g. direct, indirect, secondary effects, medium term, long term)
- differentiation between bad actors viewing or consuming illegal content, versus those facilitating it, creating it, or funding it
- weighting of the costs of the censorship measures on the more powerful actors in society versus on the average citizen
This topic is super crucial. There are valid points on the optimistic and pessimistic side. For me the optimistic camp will win only when the network becomes used for a majority of good cases. Yes, there is TOR, but this serves no good purpose whatsoever (you do not have good apps and services there). Autonomi will have good use cases (we hope), and we expect those to dominate.
To put it schematically:
Pre-TOR’s internet: Goods + bads coexisted
Post TOR internet but pre Autonomi:
Goods (default internet), bads (TOR)
Post Autonomi internet:
Goods (default internet, and Autonomi), bads (TOR, and Autonomi)
I use TOR often, and for very good purposes.
The question the illegal content uploaders have to answer, do they trust it?
- is it a huge honey pot?
- because its forever data will it be used for evidence against them?
- since the upload app has access to their computer can they trust it is not uploading their details along with the file. Again to be used for evidence
- they want to share the files so public upload means they cannot sell the files
- sharing will be with everyone, which includes the international police
- how is it better than the encrypted networks they already use, which can be use as a once only share mechanism?
I think the biggest restrictor to being used for illegal content, that other communications mediums cannot, is the fear of forever data, honey pot, potential for tracking in the client/nodes.
And the next biggest is that while apps do not exist for “shopping” the illegal content will be files which are kept forever. I doubt these people wanting to share bad illegal everywhere content do not want it forever stored allowing it to be used in evidence, and so on.
It would seem to me that for at least a year or two the bad illegal content will be minimal and this allows the good content to build beyond that tipping point you suggested.