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Nice post, thanks for making it :) I'm always curious, though - there are some things that we want to censor for good reasons. The usual poster child (sorry) f

Nice post, thanks for making it :) I'm always curious, though - there are some things that we want to censor for good reasons. The usual poster child (sorry) for this is kiddie porn. But there's other stuff - revenge porn, libel, etc that we as a society might want to censor. How do we do this on infrastructure like IPFS?

necrotic_comp 5y ago
There's the unfortunate reality where if you make one thing censorable, you make the entire thing censorable ; there's no notion of only letting the 'good stuff' through.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I think there needs to be. Because the consequences of keeping the bad stuff accessible are worse than the consequences of censoring the good stuff.
  - necrotic_comp 5y ago
    Conceptually, though, how would it work, and who becomes the arbiter of what's good and what's bad, and what can be shared and what cannot ? In no way shape or form am I defending the nasty stuff or saying that it should be allowed, but when defending privacy and liberty, there's a real question about how we deal with hidden lawlessness that uses the same tools people use for legitimate purposes, or, more importantly, how people use these tools in a way that a government views as illegitimate or a thought crime but are in the defense of liberty. I think there's a notion of policing that comes out of this discussion that is not part of the technology but rather a complement to it. I don't know what shape that would take.
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      Well, that's where we have laws, and elections, and all that stuff. We similarly have a complete ban on violence, except for the state which has a monopoly on it. This does get abused sometimes, the system isn't perfect. But it's better than allowing anyone to use violence whenever they want to resolve disputes. I agree that there's a discussion that we technologists need to have about policing and censorship, which we're currently not having.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      Such complement cannot really exist. If it will exist and actually be effective, the technology as a whole would be pointless. An analogy can be made to WhatsApp. It's known to be used to coordinate terrorist attacks in Europe yet not a single government intelligence agency has managed to legislate Facebook into opening a back door. Because a backdoor makes encryption quite pointless. Similarly, the case with Apple. Whom categorically refuses an unlock ability to authorities, and so far has won. There's no public outrage. The public seem happy to be protected from the prying eyes of their governments. And I guess the public implicitly accepts that as part of this protection, some very nasty stuff goes around these same platforms. That's why I believe we should separate content extermination (which is fully impossible) from hiding said content from view. The latter is doable and common. For example, terrorist videos are almost immediately removed from social media platforms upon detection. This stops it from spreading and its damage and shock effect is contained. However, should you specifically seek out such videos, they can still be found in several places, and you don't even need to go to the darkweb. Censorship, in the practical sense, should be seen as hiding from view. Not deletion.
    - uncomputation 5y ago
      From what I’ve seen, you would basically just unpin or force unpin undesirable content. As long as no one requests that content, it will be garbage collected/deleted.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Countries which have more censorship tend to end up being less desirable places to live than places with less censorship, and I dare say that a country with no censorship at all would be better than a country where the government has complete control over all media (even if both of those scenarios would be worse than the average liberal democracy).
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      I disagree, having lived in countries with pretty severe censorship (e.g. Australia), and countries without (e.g. Cambodia). I think this truism is actually false.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        I'm not sure how you are measuring censorship levels, but Freedom House ranks Australia as "Free" with a score of 76, and Cambodia as "Partly Free" with a score of 43, in their latest Internet Freedom Scores: https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores
        marcus_holmes 5y ago
        Well, Australia's Federal Police raided the state broadcaster [0] and has a whole bunch of laws against hate speech that get regularly used. While Cambodia really only cares about whether or not you say bad things about the ruling party on Facebook. It depends on what you consider "free speech" I guess. I think the larger picture here is that censorship really doesn't impact how pleasant a place is to live in. I currently live in Berlin, and there's a whole heap of sensitive history here, but that doesn't really affect you if you just want to live a normal life. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        I think it is misleading to cherry-pick an extreme example of the Australian government getting a search warrant to look for copies of leaked defence documents, while ignoring Cambodia's complete crackdown on independent newspapers[0] and radio stations[1]. Even more worrying is Cambodia's recently introduced internet censorship decree, which "requires all internet traffic in Cambodia to be routed through a regulatory body charged with monitoring online activity before it reaches users."[2] [0] https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-cambodia https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-cambodi... [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-switching-off-independent-radio-stations https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-switching-... [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-internet-censorship-control-expanded https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-internet-censor...
  - smabie 5y ago
    Really? The bad stuff is already accessible.
netr0ute 5y ago
There's no way to if the system is designed specifically to be uncensorable, but maybe you could blackhole routes on the BGP level.
exporectomy 5y ago
Whoever's hosting it can still be found by law enforcement in the usual ways. Or maybe more idealistically we change society to remove all those taboos about people's bodies.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  I’d say child porn being illegal is more idealistic than the alternative.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Taboos about people's bodies and the right to not have pictures of yourself posted to the Internet are fairly orthogonal.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Images of child abuse are not a "taboo about people's bodies". Wow.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  OK, so someone posts a video of a child being abused. The person is prosecuted, tried, found guilty, and banged up for the rest of their days. What happens to the video? Because if the answer is "it stays accessible" then this technology is fundamentally broken and we need to stop using it or promoting it immediately.
  - hytdstd 5y ago
    This isn't a totally hypothetical question, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    I tend to agree with your comments here, but note that it's not an easy answer: I don't think this problem only indicts technologies like IPFS, but also E2E encrypted communication services like Signal and WhatsApp. Are those also "fundamentally broken and we need to stop using them and promoting them immediately"? Maybe so, but it seems a heavy lift to me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 5y ago
> we as a society might want to censor Before the internet, all of that stuff could be (and was) published using traditional printing presses and distributed like everything else that was printed. We dealt with the outliers then the same way we ought to deal with them now: find and prosecute (or sue, in the case of libel) the people that were responsible for publishing them, not try to outlaw the printing press itself for not having a "no bad stuff" backdoor. Because, really, if somebody comes up with a truly uncensorable distribution platform, the point of whether or not it can be used to distribute "bad stuff" will become moot: it will be uncensorable by definition, and we'll have to go back to the "old way" of handling the edge cases.

necrotic_comp 5y ago

There's the unfortunate reality where if you make one thing censorable, you make the entire thing censorable ; there's no notion of only letting the 'good stuff' through.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
I think there needs to be. Because the consequences of keeping the bad stuff accessible are worse than the consequences of censoring the good stuff.
- necrotic_comp 5y ago
  Conceptually, though, how would it work, and who becomes the arbiter of what's good and what's bad, and what can be shared and what cannot ? In no way shape or form am I defending the nasty stuff or saying that it should be allowed, but when defending privacy and liberty, there's a real question about how we deal with hidden lawlessness that uses the same tools people use for legitimate purposes, or, more importantly, how people use these tools in a way that a government views as illegitimate or a thought crime but are in the defense of liberty. I think there's a notion of policing that comes out of this discussion that is not part of the technology but rather a complement to it. I don't know what shape that would take.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Well, that's where we have laws, and elections, and all that stuff. We similarly have a complete ban on violence, except for the state which has a monopoly on it. This does get abused sometimes, the system isn't perfect. But it's better than allowing anyone to use violence whenever they want to resolve disputes. I agree that there's a discussion that we technologists need to have about policing and censorship, which we're currently not having.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Such complement cannot really exist. If it will exist and actually be effective, the technology as a whole would be pointless. An analogy can be made to WhatsApp. It's known to be used to coordinate terrorist attacks in Europe yet not a single government intelligence agency has managed to legislate Facebook into opening a back door. Because a backdoor makes encryption quite pointless. Similarly, the case with Apple. Whom categorically refuses an unlock ability to authorities, and so far has won. There's no public outrage. The public seem happy to be protected from the prying eyes of their governments. And I guess the public implicitly accepts that as part of this protection, some very nasty stuff goes around these same platforms. That's why I believe we should separate content extermination (which is fully impossible) from hiding said content from view. The latter is doable and common. For example, terrorist videos are almost immediately removed from social media platforms upon detection. This stops it from spreading and its damage and shock effect is contained. However, should you specifically seek out such videos, they can still be found in several places, and you don't even need to go to the darkweb. Censorship, in the practical sense, should be seen as hiding from view. Not deletion.
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    From what I’ve seen, you would basically just unpin or force unpin undesirable content. As long as no one requests that content, it will be garbage collected/deleted.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Countries which have more censorship tend to end up being less desirable places to live than places with less censorship, and I dare say that a country with no censorship at all would be better than a country where the government has complete control over all media (even if both of those scenarios would be worse than the average liberal democracy).
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I disagree, having lived in countries with pretty severe censorship (e.g. Australia), and countries without (e.g. Cambodia). I think this truism is actually false.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      I'm not sure how you are measuring censorship levels, but Freedom House ranks Australia as "Free" with a score of 76, and Cambodia as "Partly Free" with a score of 43, in their latest Internet Freedom Scores: https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores
      - marcus_holmes 5y ago
        Well, Australia's Federal Police raided the state broadcaster [0] and has a whole bunch of laws against hate speech that get regularly used. While Cambodia really only cares about whether or not you say bad things about the ruling party on Facebook. It depends on what you consider "free speech" I guess. I think the larger picture here is that censorship really doesn't impact how pleasant a place is to live in. I currently live in Berlin, and there's a whole heap of sensitive history here, but that doesn't really affect you if you just want to live a normal life. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        I think it is misleading to cherry-pick an extreme example of the Australian government getting a search warrant to look for copies of leaked defence documents, while ignoring Cambodia's complete crackdown on independent newspapers[0] and radio stations[1]. Even more worrying is Cambodia's recently introduced internet censorship decree, which "requires all internet traffic in Cambodia to be routed through a regulatory body charged with monitoring online activity before it reaches users."[2] [0] https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-cambodia https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-cambodi... [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-switching-off-independent-radio-stations https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-switching-... [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-internet-censorship-control-expanded https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-internet-censor...
- smabie 5y ago
  Really? The bad stuff is already accessible.

netr0ute 5y ago

There's no way to if the system is designed specifically to be uncensorable, but maybe you could blackhole routes on the BGP level.

exporectomy 5y ago

Whoever's hosting it can still be found by law enforcement in the usual ways. Or maybe more idealistically we change society to remove all those taboos about people's bodies.

long_time_gone 5y ago
I’d say child porn being illegal is more idealistic than the alternative.
adrianN 5y ago
Taboos about people's bodies and the right to not have pictures of yourself posted to the Internet are fairly orthogonal.
Nursie 5y ago
Images of child abuse are not a "taboo about people's bodies". Wow.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
OK, so someone posts a video of a child being abused. The person is prosecuted, tried, found guilty, and banged up for the rest of their days. What happens to the video? Because if the answer is "it stays accessible" then this technology is fundamentally broken and we need to stop using it or promoting it immediately.
- hytdstd 5y ago
  This isn't a totally hypothetical question, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I tend to agree with your comments here, but note that it's not an easy answer: I don't think this problem only indicts technologies like IPFS, but also E2E encrypted communication services like Signal and WhatsApp. Are those also "fundamentally broken and we need to stop using them and promoting them immediately"? Maybe so, but it seems a heavy lift to me.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 5y ago

> we as a society might want to censor Before the internet, all of that stuff could be (and was) published using traditional printing presses and distributed like everything else that was printed. We dealt with the outliers then the same way we ought to deal with them now: find and prosecute (or sue, in the case of libel) the people that were responsible for publishing them, not try to outlaw the printing press itself for not having a "no bad stuff" backdoor. Because, really, if somebody comes up with a truly uncensorable distribution platform, the point of whether or not it can be used to distribute "bad stuff" will become moot: it will be uncensorable by definition, and we'll have to go back to the "old way" of handling the edge cases.