And puts childporn on it?
Now what??
It will be there forever right?
I know there have been a lot of discussions about abuse of the network. But they are mostly related to the data itself. I think it’s not about the data, but about the ease of accessibility.
The safenetwork is a medium, just like paper. So you can store anything on it you want. Totally fine.
The problem occurs when the community gets confrontated with the wrong data at the wrong place. There is no difference here between the real world and the safenetwork. In the real world uncle Joe can print his childporn on paper, give it to someone else and there is no problem, because no one else knows.Same story for the safenetwork.
But what if uncle Joe puts his childporn on the shelf in a bookstore? Yes, now there is a problem right? It will just take a few seconds, maybe minutes and his paper will be removed. However, in the safenetwork you can publish it on a public website like safe:\donald.duck and it will be there forever as far as I know. I think this is not acceptable (for the community). This is where the problems begin for the safenetwork.
The donald duck example above is a worse case scenario, it’s like putting a childporn magazine in a toys store. You only need 1 idiot to accomplish this. If 99.99% of all users are good actors, one idiot can ruin it for us all if he picks the right address for his bad data. People will remember this bad example(because bad examples are easy to remember) and talk about the safenetwork as the ‘smart’ network that can’t even get rid of the childporn on the donald duck site. No PR-machine is gonna save you here.
For me it’s really clear that we should have a facility to fix the human error on an autonomous network. At the end we are dealing with humans, not with robots. (A webbrowser filter is not a real solution)
We don’t have to remove the data from the network. The only thing we need to do is decoupling de webaddress from the data, like removing the childporn paper out of the toys store. The uploader will still be owner of the data, but we as community say to him, we don’t want you to use this public address to publish that data. The owner is forced to use a less popular address to avoid confrontations with the general community. Just like nature, sometimes you have to stay (more) lowlevel to survive.
A simple website downvote mechanism, mentioned in other posts, could do the trick. (off topic: It can also be used to downvote on sites which are dead because the user lost the key, or the user died himself. This is also something that annoys me. Otherwise I’m afraid we will end up with a cemetery of dead websites. Popular website addresses could be re-used then. On a succesful network websites are alive, not dead.)
I really like this project and want it to succeed, but sometimes it looks so fragile to me. Just one, or a few morons can give it such a bad name. I can think even further, what if it keeps like this and someone just forks it and creates a solution for the problem described above. Which version are schools going to use? Which is the version companies want to be associated with? Who will be left behind on this network? I think we know the answer.