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My god Chris, you're seriously interpreting this action as a business strategy? If being docile in the face of evil is Keybase's business strategy, I strongly u

My god Chris, you're seriously interpreting this action as a business strategy? If being docile in the face of evil is Keybase's business strategy, I strongly urge you to re-prioritize, because if the government goes rogue, it's going to kick down your door looking for access to encrypted communications from dissidents, whether you're polite about it or not. How many John Does have you waffled on because it was a "better business strategy" so far?

eriknstr 9y ago
What he's saying is, IPFS will never be useful if it gets blocked before it has a chance to spread. If IPFS is blocked and the people that need anti-censorship tools can't use it then they might as well not have bothered.
- kyledrake 9y ago
  So nobody should have done anything and we collectively should have just let Turkey censor Wikipedia with zero alternatives, that's the better solution here?
  - shallot_router 9y ago
    No, he's just saying they probably announced this at a point where their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want, so they may be shooting themselves in the foot a little bit. They're still doing the right thing, no doubt.
    - kyledrake 9y ago
      > their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want That's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but without evidence, definitions of words like "weak" and a proper wash through the scientific method, I'm not convinced we can make conclusions like that at this point in time.
      - geofft 9y ago
        That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method). It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - inimino 9y ago
        You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion. Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.
  - geofft 9y ago
    That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms. We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either. If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.
    - _prometheus 9y ago
      There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.
      - geofft 9y ago
        What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country? (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)
        lgierth 9y ago
        Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).
        bigbugbag 9y ago
        I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.
  - derefr 9y ago
    "Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins. But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now. Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I don't get it. Once blocked does this now render ipfs useless regardless of spreading ? I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
In this case, business and political strategy unify in their mutual interest in IPFS's survival. Screaming and being outraged doesn't produce change. Methodical, contemplated action does. Flying under the radar until you're strong enough for conflict is a sensible strategy.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wamatt 9y ago
The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective. Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time? Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out? Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  This stuff can lead to race-to-the-bottom issues. Consequences are different on a micro or macro scale. The optimal answer is to figure out how to stop others from doing the dishonest approaches. But in a macro context where everyone else is cheating, it's a lot more fuzzy and complex whether it is right or wrong to cheat as well in order to compete…
- inimino 9y ago
  GP suggested that IPFS might not want to openly circumvent a specific country's censorship system, and blog about it, and you're comparing not doing that to the use of fake accounts by reddit? The issue is not as complicated as you're making it.
  - jychang 9y ago
    Well, yeah. The consequentialist viewpoint is if IPFS fails to succeed because it jumped too early, then ZERO people benefit from it. That's arguably the greater sin. There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      The greater sin is not failing, as failing is expected on the road to success. The greater sin would be to not jump when the opportunity presents itself. Maybe look at it from a different point of view, if to someone in Turkey trying to access wikipedia it makes a difference then it's already a success. It's a question of where you want to dray the line, and maybe the consequentialist drawing the line when ipfs takes over the world and gets 3 billions daily users is far fetched.
geofft 9y ago
He said nothing about "business". And I'd hope Keybase's strategy is to be effective in the face of evil than just performatively non-docile in the face of evil.
Paul-ish 9y ago
It's not just about business strategy. Pretty much all censorship circumvention that I am aware of leverages "collateral blocking" to achieve their goal. A determined enough state can block anything they want if they are willing to accept the collateral damage it causes. Turkey could try to shut down the entire internet inside their country in order to prevent the spread of information, but it would have serious economic consequences. Therefore, Turkey probably wouldn't block the whole internet. Those trying to circumvent censorship leverage the fact that most countries can be modeled as at least somewhat rational actors. For a rational actor, censorship is a delicate balancing act. But this also means those interested in circumvention are also in a balancing act.
mappu 9y ago
Why did you bring his company into this? Casting aspersions on his company, over a personal internet comment... this is a chilling effect. I will now ensure my business persona does not overlap with my personal one and avoid technical discussions where i could otherwise contribute.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kyledrake 9y ago
  I absolutely do need to know that Keybase is going to take privacy and censorship resistance seriously, and posts like this are not helpful in that "strategy". I depend on them for key distribution and so do a lot of other important, likely-to-be-targeted people, many of whom probably live in Turkey. When the Turkish dictatorship starts demanding information on political opponents from Keybase, what is Keybase going to do? Send the info to avoid being blocked? Wait until they're "strong enough" before fighting the important fights? We're in a dark political period right now, this stuff is deadly serious. There's 110,000 people that have been detained in Turkey, they're not waiting for a future resistance, they need one right now. Stop spreading FUD about censorship resistance.
  - ergothus 9y ago
    ...I'm not understanding your rancor. He(?) said that drawing attention to yourself while vulnerable is risky. Nowhere did he say anything about being less secure. Arguably it's the same security with more utility - better to be secure and available only to a few (because of limited advertising) than to be equally secure, and available to none because you got blocked early. Now that last point is definitely arguable, and I think that's what you want to do, but that argument has no connection to the security of the information. Even if you think vocal advertising as an anti-censorship platform is the greater good, it doesn't make the information any more secure. So what am I missing that explains your vehemence?
    - smokeyj 9y ago
timthelion 9y ago
Speaking as someone who watched this come together on IRC, it definitely was NOT a business decision! This is just a problem being solved by smart people with great tools! That's how it should be!
benjamincburns 9y ago
I've downvoted you because I feel the tone of this comment has upended what could have been a constructive, well-thought conversation and turned it into somewhat of a shouting match. Ignoring your tone, it seems to me that you're drawing a false comparison (however to be clear, this isn't the reason why I'm downvoting). Chris's comment recognizes the importance of critical mass of adoption in network effects. He's pointing out that at this stage in its development, censoring governments would have no need to strong-arm IPFS. Simply blocking their domain is much lower profile and as such, much lower risk. In this scenario there's no point at which "being docile" or "being strong" comes into play. If you think otherwise, then I'd argue that you may be mistaking the primary goal of the effort in question to be an open protest, rather than providing residents of Turkey access to censored information. I think you'd agree that the primary goal is for IPFS to give the people of Turkey Wikipedia, and while it might be nice if they also gave the Turkish government a big bold middle finger in the process, that's not in service of their primary goal. If you accept that premise, then I'm not sure how you can take this idle musing from Chris and construe it to be evidence of how he'd behave when being legally strong-armed by a government while at the helm of KeyBase. The situation upon which that conclusion would be predicated just simply isn't represented in his original comment. Finally I'd argue that if this is of critical concern to you, then why are you trusting a third party with your key storage in the first place?
- geofft 9y ago
  > while at the helm of KeyBase 'cjbprime (cjb on Keybase) is an employee of Keybase; he's a different Chris from 'malgorithms (chris on Keybase), who's a founder.
inimino 9y ago
You should really keep your outrage in check until you have a better grasp of the issues. Blind ideology-driven attacks without any kind of strategy may make your hind brain feel all tingly, but they are routinely squashed like a bug by the censorship apparatus, which has plenty of resources to block IPFS at the protocol level. Rational strategy is not "being docile in the face of evil". It's just not openly marching into battle against a vastly stronger adversary who was only dimly aware of your existence. Given the exposure and that this is Turkey, the IPFS project may be making the right call here, but strategy, not blind ideology, is the way to make those calls if you want to win.
- spangry 9y ago
  This idea isn't even a particularly new or unusual one. When faced with a superior enemy, fighting opportunistically is an old as dirt strategy. People have continued to use it for literally millennia because it's effective. Force is tilting the balance of power to your side by gathering advantages. Warfare is the Way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near. If your enemies have advantage, bait them; if they are confused, capture them; if they are numerous, prepare for them; if they are strong, avoid them; if they are angry, disturb them; if they are humble, make them haughty; if they are relaxed, toil them; if they are united, separate them. Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect. This strategy leads to victory in warfare, so do not let the enemy see it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War Relatively speaking, I'd say 'our enemies' are extremely strong. Probably best avoided (for the moment) if the overall objective is victory.
jameskegel 9y ago
Settle down

eriknstr 9y ago

What he's saying is, IPFS will never be useful if it gets blocked before it has a chance to spread. If IPFS is blocked and the people that need anti-censorship tools can't use it then they might as well not have bothered.

kyledrake 9y ago
So nobody should have done anything and we collectively should have just let Turkey censor Wikipedia with zero alternatives, that's the better solution here?
- shallot_router 9y ago
  No, he's just saying they probably announced this at a point where their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want, so they may be shooting themselves in the foot a little bit. They're still doing the right thing, no doubt.
  - kyledrake 9y ago
    > their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want That's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but without evidence, definitions of words like "weak" and a proper wash through the scientific method, I'm not convinced we can make conclusions like that at this point in time.
    - geofft 9y ago
      That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method). It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - inimino 9y ago
      You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion. Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.
- geofft 9y ago
  That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms. We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either. If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.
  - _prometheus 9y ago
    There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.
    - geofft 9y ago
      What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country? (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)
      - lgierth 9y ago
        Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.
- derefr 9y ago
  "Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins. But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now. Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?
bigbugbag 9y ago
I don't get it. Once blocked does this now render ipfs useless regardless of spreading ? I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

In this case, business and political strategy unify in their mutual interest in IPFS's survival. Screaming and being outraged doesn't produce change. Methodical, contemplated action does. Flying under the radar until you're strong enough for conflict is a sensible strategy.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wamatt 9y ago

The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective. Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time? Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out? Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.

quadrangle 9y ago
This stuff can lead to race-to-the-bottom issues. Consequences are different on a micro or macro scale. The optimal answer is to figure out how to stop others from doing the dishonest approaches. But in a macro context where everyone else is cheating, it's a lot more fuzzy and complex whether it is right or wrong to cheat as well in order to compete…
inimino 9y ago
GP suggested that IPFS might not want to openly circumvent a specific country's censorship system, and blog about it, and you're comparing not doing that to the use of fake accounts by reddit? The issue is not as complicated as you're making it.
- jychang 9y ago
  Well, yeah. The consequentialist viewpoint is if IPFS fails to succeed because it jumped too early, then ZERO people benefit from it. That's arguably the greater sin. There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    The greater sin is not failing, as failing is expected on the road to success. The greater sin would be to not jump when the opportunity presents itself. Maybe look at it from a different point of view, if to someone in Turkey trying to access wikipedia it makes a difference then it's already a success. It's a question of where you want to dray the line, and maybe the consequentialist drawing the line when ipfs takes over the world and gets 3 billions daily users is far fetched.

geofft 9y ago

He said nothing about "business". And I'd hope Keybase's strategy is to be effective in the face of evil than just performatively non-docile in the face of evil.

Paul-ish 9y ago

It's not just about business strategy. Pretty much all censorship circumvention that I am aware of leverages "collateral blocking" to achieve their goal. A determined enough state can block anything they want if they are willing to accept the collateral damage it causes. Turkey could try to shut down the entire internet inside their country in order to prevent the spread of information, but it would have serious economic consequences. Therefore, Turkey probably wouldn't block the whole internet. Those trying to circumvent censorship leverage the fact that most countries can be modeled as at least somewhat rational actors. For a rational actor, censorship is a delicate balancing act. But this also means those interested in circumvention are also in a balancing act.

mappu 9y ago

Why did you bring his company into this? Casting aspersions on his company, over a personal internet comment... this is a chilling effect. I will now ensure my business persona does not overlap with my personal one and avoid technical discussions where i could otherwise contribute.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kyledrake 9y ago
I absolutely do need to know that Keybase is going to take privacy and censorship resistance seriously, and posts like this are not helpful in that "strategy". I depend on them for key distribution and so do a lot of other important, likely-to-be-targeted people, many of whom probably live in Turkey. When the Turkish dictatorship starts demanding information on political opponents from Keybase, what is Keybase going to do? Send the info to avoid being blocked? Wait until they're "strong enough" before fighting the important fights? We're in a dark political period right now, this stuff is deadly serious. There's 110,000 people that have been detained in Turkey, they're not waiting for a future resistance, they need one right now. Stop spreading FUD about censorship resistance.
- ergothus 9y ago
  ...I'm not understanding your rancor. He(?) said that drawing attention to yourself while vulnerable is risky. Nowhere did he say anything about being less secure. Arguably it's the same security with more utility - better to be secure and available only to a few (because of limited advertising) than to be equally secure, and available to none because you got blocked early. Now that last point is definitely arguable, and I think that's what you want to do, but that argument has no connection to the security of the information. Even if you think vocal advertising as an anti-censorship platform is the greater good, it doesn't make the information any more secure. So what am I missing that explains your vehemence?
  - smokeyj 9y ago

timthelion 9y ago

Speaking as someone who watched this come together on IRC, it definitely was NOT a business decision! This is just a problem being solved by smart people with great tools! That's how it should be!

benjamincburns 9y ago

I've downvoted you because I feel the tone of this comment has upended what could have been a constructive, well-thought conversation and turned it into somewhat of a shouting match. Ignoring your tone, it seems to me that you're drawing a false comparison (however to be clear, this isn't the reason why I'm downvoting). Chris's comment recognizes the importance of critical mass of adoption in network effects. He's pointing out that at this stage in its development, censoring governments would have no need to strong-arm IPFS. Simply blocking their domain is much lower profile and as such, much lower risk. In this scenario there's no point at which "being docile" or "being strong" comes into play. If you think otherwise, then I'd argue that you may be mistaking the primary goal of the effort in question to be an open protest, rather than providing residents of Turkey access to censored information. I think you'd agree that the primary goal is for IPFS to give the people of Turkey Wikipedia, and while it might be nice if they also gave the Turkish government a big bold middle finger in the process, that's not in service of their primary goal. If you accept that premise, then I'm not sure how you can take this idle musing from Chris and construe it to be evidence of how he'd behave when being legally strong-armed by a government while at the helm of KeyBase. The situation upon which that conclusion would be predicated just simply isn't represented in his original comment. Finally I'd argue that if this is of critical concern to you, then why are you trusting a third party with your key storage in the first place?

geofft 9y ago
> while at the helm of KeyBase 'cjbprime (cjb on Keybase) is an employee of Keybase; he's a different Chris from 'malgorithms (chris on Keybase), who's a founder.

inimino 9y ago

You should really keep your outrage in check until you have a better grasp of the issues. Blind ideology-driven attacks without any kind of strategy may make your hind brain feel all tingly, but they are routinely squashed like a bug by the censorship apparatus, which has plenty of resources to block IPFS at the protocol level. Rational strategy is not "being docile in the face of evil". It's just not openly marching into battle against a vastly stronger adversary who was only dimly aware of your existence. Given the exposure and that this is Turkey, the IPFS project may be making the right call here, but strategy, not blind ideology, is the way to make those calls if you want to win.

spangry 9y ago
This idea isn't even a particularly new or unusual one. When faced with a superior enemy, fighting opportunistically is an old as dirt strategy. People have continued to use it for literally millennia because it's effective. Force is tilting the balance of power to your side by gathering advantages. Warfare is the Way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near. If your enemies have advantage, bait them; if they are confused, capture them; if they are numerous, prepare for them; if they are strong, avoid them; if they are angry, disturb them; if they are humble, make them haughty; if they are relaxed, toil them; if they are united, separate them. Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect. This strategy leads to victory in warfare, so do not let the enemy see it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War Relatively speaking, I'd say 'our enemies' are extremely strong. Probably best avoided (for the moment) if the overall objective is victory.

jameskegel 9y ago

Settle down