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RE: Censorship You often see advocates of decentralization hail networks for being pro-immutability, battling censorship. How does it deal with data you absol

RE: Censorship You often see advocates of decentralization hail networks for being pro-immutability, battling censorship. How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? I'm talking about things like CP, terrorist media, fake news, scams/frauds, and what not.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted. An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal.
- api 5y ago
  > An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal. I've heard this called a "pee in the pool attack." Block chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have one intrinsic defense: they don't support very large data objects. So that makes inserting CP problematic. But someone determined enough and willing to spend money could insert a really horrible image as a series of transactions.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    At that point you'd need additional data (which transactions) and software in order to stitch things back together, at which point is it the (disjointed, seemingly random) data that's illegal, or the instruction set that allows you to assemble it into something illegal?
    - account-5 5y ago
      If it was the disjointed seemingly random data that was illegal I think that would make the number π illegal too.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Mens rea vs. factus rea.
  - Khartoum 5y ago
    Or adding someone's personally identifying information.. birthdates, addresses, SSN, etc.
    - Sirened 5y ago
      Or by running your botnet's C2 on it. There's no kill switch or sinkholing your botnet without killing the entire blockchain.
      - Tepix 5y ago
        You could cut off access to the blockchain instead
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    has there been a documented case of this happening yet? one would think that there must have been, at some point, by now. but then I suppose if someone were to make a program that accesses intentionally-inserted distributed immutable data in a blockchain and reconstructs an illegal file (probably an image), then I suppose that executable or source repository itself would then be taken down by authorities and its author(s) prosecuted. but to my knowledge, this hasn't actually happened yet...
    - dogma1138 5y ago
      You don’t need a program to do that, you can easily embed a BMP or an SVG without a complex executable needed to decode the image heck even for more complex file format a BASE64 decoder can do that. Also if say CP is currently distributed through compressed archives even if they are PW protected it’s not like that 7zip then somehow becomes the illicit material. If you host the archive you are on the hook of distributing CP even if it’s encrypted…
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - wildbook 5y ago
    How about cases where there's not much data involved but it's still questionable whether or not the data is legal to share? Leaked encryption keys for example come to mind, but I'm sure there's other examples.
    - corobo 5y ago
      That one Blu-ray code would be interesting to see play out in a web3 world. E: I realise after digging it back up it's what you said with encryption keys but maybe someone else wants to look at the link too or whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
    - madeofpalk 5y ago
      Has there been a case of an encryption key successfully being censored? They tried to censor the blu-ray key, but that survived 3 years before bitcoin was invented
  - cesarb 5y ago
    At least for Bitcoin, there's another defense: what the blockchain actually stores on each block is the root of a Merkle tree which has the transactions as leaves. It's possible to discard unwanted transactions, and that only loses the ability of verifying newer transactions which chain to these discarded transactions. (AFAIK, the original intention was that most nodes would discard old "spent" transactions, to reduce the size of their local database.)
    - lottin 5y ago
      How do you verify new transactions without checking every single past transaction? As far as I understand, you need to know the current balance of every wallet in order to prevent double-spending.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  This has already happened. Nobody seems to care. 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...
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  > Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted This is precisely why they'll fail (aside from technological issues): the rank and file person on the internet does NOT want a Wild West when they go to visit a news feed. Hell, the average person doesn't even really like curated content. They want a chronological list of things they decide to be relevant and nothing else. Just look at all the complaining every time Instatwitter changes an algorithm and hides the method for sorting by most recent. And what they don't know yet is that all these big companies, if they use this technology, they're going to use them in very focused ways to reward people and prevent them from abandoning their platforms. Because "free" has many meanings, but none of them are inherently exclusionary from corporate competition.
jedimastert 5y ago
I think if you look at the current decentralized options, especially Tor, the community has already made these decisions.
jeroenhd 5y ago
In most cases, the answer is simple: you don't. For example, IPFS "solves" this by allowing requests for takedowns per gateway. The upside of IPFS is that you can go after every host, the downside is that everyone knows what content you visit. The network still propagates the illegal content, so you end up with a witch hunt. It's probably a good thing paedophiles haven't widely discovered IPFS+TOR.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  IPFS would make it easier to identify non-modified content hosts since the hash is always consistent. It's far easier to bury something using standard HTTP or HTTPS or even FTP.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  What makes you think they haven't?
- pezezin 5y ago
  > It's probably a good thing paedophiles haven't widely discovered IPFS+TOR. Paedophiles discovered Freenet long time ago. Source: I took a look at TOR, I2P and Freenet years ago, and noped the fuck out.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  The “witch hunt” aspect is no different than BitTorrent, right? Or even just people repeatedly uploading the same content to various online hosts and sharing links via any channel whatsoever.
GrayShade 5y ago
How are they dealt with today? I haven't followed the blockchain tend, but IIRC there were programs that could encode arbitrary data into the blockchain history. What happens if someone puts CP in there?
ccamrobertson 5y ago
If you view 'decentralization' as a bucket of technologies underpinned by cryptographic primitives and blockchains, it doesn't. This is similar to other technologies like cash, paper, and computers* which also don't, as technological phenomena, implicitly include censorship as a feature. *it looks like consumer computing is moving away from general 'free' computing to ASICs from folks like Apple which likely will include built-in censorship features moving forward.
gfodor 5y ago
You know how most web2 sites never delete data, but just flag it as hidden? The web3 argument is to create systems whereby this is the norm, when one chooses, with the lowest layer being durable and immutable, but a variety of higher level layers (some centralized) having the freedom to mask that data when they choose. Ultimately, the relevant question is if the root layer of open data systems should allow erasure. There are good arguments to be had on both sides. If you feel that if we don’t have systems that are fundamentally censorproof, the net result will be an eventual all consuming global censorship regime in the limit given enough time, then there is little choice, however.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  > You know how most web2 sites never delete data, but just flag it as hidden? Not the ones I've worked on... Flag as hidden and delete after some number of days is the best practice which I think (and hope) is commonly done?
- BadCookie 5y ago
  If the data belongs to an individual consumer, the data must actually be deleted at the customer’s request to comply with GDPR and CCPA.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    A great theory but in practice in this specific case the legal system will be forced to capitulate. Either a country has to ban all crypto mining or not enforce GDPR on chain nodes. Seems obvious which way it will land in the long run.
    - remexre 5y ago
      didn't china already ban mining lmao
    - not2b 5y ago
      Unless much more energy-efficient methods are developed, it seems in the long term crypto mining is going to be banned almost everywhere. The alternative would be cooking the planet. Perhaps this problem can be solved somehow, but the alternatives have their problems.
rglover 5y ago
> How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? That is censorship. The correct answer is you don't. When you obscure evil, it propagates. When you shine a light on it, it disinfects. Awareness of the thing leads to discernment of the thing. Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them.
- malermeister 5y ago
  That is an incredibly naive view of the world. Just look at all the disinformation rampant on Facebook and the antivax hellscape we now live in. You can't possibly look at that and think things got "disinfected" through awareness. > Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them. This is also not correct. People aren't neccessarily evil by default, but they are stupid and easily manipulable. Just look at QAnon for another example.
  - heyitsguay 5y ago
    It also misses the point for a large class of data relevant to individual safety - if GP gets associated (truly or falsely) with [outrage of the week] and his buddy from HS recognizes the username, what happens when said buddy posts his address (or his kid's school address?) to an immutable data store. GP is a monster and the law isn't doing anything, we gotta take matters into our own hands!
    - malermeister 5y ago
      There's a lot of things this misses. It also completely misses the point on stuff like CP. I know CP is bad and I have no interest in seeing it. However, I do also know that there is a group of people out there that do want to see it. Is the "anti-censorship" approach to just "shine a light on it" and let those people watch CP that's on the immutable data store? This whole post doesn't just assume that people are by default good, it assumes that there are no bad people. That's the only scenario in which the proposed "solution" would work. Personally, that's not a bet I'm willing to make, or even entertain.
outside1234 5y ago
Does that stuff make them Dogecoin? If so, they are ok with it.
cblconfederate 5y ago
before the internet, the police would find you and put you in jail. Why is it normalized that all our communications are bugged and analyzed? This is not something that people should expect if there is going to be correspondence between the physical and the virtual world.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted. An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal.

api 5y ago
> An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal. I've heard this called a "pee in the pool attack." Block chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have one intrinsic defense: they don't support very large data objects. So that makes inserting CP problematic. But someone determined enough and willing to spend money could insert a really horrible image as a series of transactions.
- thebean11 5y ago
  At that point you'd need additional data (which transactions) and software in order to stitch things back together, at which point is it the (disjointed, seemingly random) data that's illegal, or the instruction set that allows you to assemble it into something illegal?
  - account-5 5y ago
    If it was the disjointed seemingly random data that was illegal I think that would make the number π illegal too.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Mens rea vs. factus rea.
- Khartoum 5y ago
  Or adding someone's personally identifying information.. birthdates, addresses, SSN, etc.
  - Sirened 5y ago
    Or by running your botnet's C2 on it. There's no kill switch or sinkholing your botnet without killing the entire blockchain.
    - Tepix 5y ago
      You could cut off access to the blockchain instead
- adamrezich 5y ago
  has there been a documented case of this happening yet? one would think that there must have been, at some point, by now. but then I suppose if someone were to make a program that accesses intentionally-inserted distributed immutable data in a blockchain and reconstructs an illegal file (probably an image), then I suppose that executable or source repository itself would then be taken down by authorities and its author(s) prosecuted. but to my knowledge, this hasn't actually happened yet...
  - dogma1138 5y ago
    You don’t need a program to do that, you can easily embed a BMP or an SVG without a complex executable needed to decode the image heck even for more complex file format a BASE64 decoder can do that. Also if say CP is currently distributed through compressed archives even if they are PW protected it’s not like that 7zip then somehow becomes the illicit material. If you host the archive you are on the hook of distributing CP even if it’s encrypted…
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- wildbook 5y ago
  How about cases where there's not much data involved but it's still questionable whether or not the data is legal to share? Leaked encryption keys for example come to mind, but I'm sure there's other examples.
  - corobo 5y ago
    That one Blu-ray code would be interesting to see play out in a web3 world. E: I realise after digging it back up it's what you said with encryption keys but maybe someone else wants to look at the link too or whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Has there been a case of an encryption key successfully being censored? They tried to censor the blu-ray key, but that survived 3 years before bitcoin was invented
- cesarb 5y ago
  At least for Bitcoin, there's another defense: what the blockchain actually stores on each block is the root of a Merkle tree which has the transactions as leaves. It's possible to discard unwanted transactions, and that only loses the ability of verifying newer transactions which chain to these discarded transactions. (AFAIK, the original intention was that most nodes would discard old "spent" transactions, to reduce the size of their local database.)
  - lottin 5y ago
    How do you verify new transactions without checking every single past transaction? As far as I understand, you need to know the current balance of every wallet in order to prevent double-spending.
dustintrex 5y ago
This has already happened. Nobody seems to care. 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...
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
> Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted This is precisely why they'll fail (aside from technological issues): the rank and file person on the internet does NOT want a Wild West when they go to visit a news feed. Hell, the average person doesn't even really like curated content. They want a chronological list of things they decide to be relevant and nothing else. Just look at all the complaining every time Instatwitter changes an algorithm and hides the method for sorting by most recent. And what they don't know yet is that all these big companies, if they use this technology, they're going to use them in very focused ways to reward people and prevent them from abandoning their platforms. Because "free" has many meanings, but none of them are inherently exclusionary from corporate competition.

jedimastert 5y ago

I think if you look at the current decentralized options, especially Tor, the community has already made these decisions.

jeroenhd 5y ago

In most cases, the answer is simple: you don't. For example, IPFS "solves" this by allowing requests for takedowns per gateway. The upside of IPFS is that you can go after every host, the downside is that everyone knows what content you visit. The network still propagates the illegal content, so you end up with a witch hunt. It's probably a good thing paedophiles haven't widely discovered IPFS+TOR.

chrisco255 5y ago
IPFS would make it easier to identify non-modified content hosts since the hash is always consistent. It's far easier to bury something using standard HTTP or HTTPS or even FTP.
Daishiman 5y ago
What makes you think they haven't?
pezezin 5y ago
> It's probably a good thing paedophiles haven't widely discovered IPFS+TOR. Paedophiles discovered Freenet long time ago. Source: I took a look at TOR, I2P and Freenet years ago, and noped the fuck out.
tshaddox 5y ago
The “witch hunt” aspect is no different than BitTorrent, right? Or even just people repeatedly uploading the same content to various online hosts and sharing links via any channel whatsoever.

GrayShade 5y ago

How are they dealt with today? I haven't followed the blockchain tend, but IIRC there were programs that could encode arbitrary data into the blockchain history. What happens if someone puts CP in there?

ccamrobertson 5y ago

If you view 'decentralization' as a bucket of technologies underpinned by cryptographic primitives and blockchains, it doesn't. This is similar to other technologies like cash, paper, and computers* which also don't, as technological phenomena, implicitly include censorship as a feature. *it looks like consumer computing is moving away from general 'free' computing to ASICs from folks like Apple which likely will include built-in censorship features moving forward.

gfodor 5y ago

You know how most web2 sites never delete data, but just flag it as hidden? The web3 argument is to create systems whereby this is the norm, when one chooses, with the lowest layer being durable and immutable, but a variety of higher level layers (some centralized) having the freedom to mask that data when they choose. Ultimately, the relevant question is if the root layer of open data systems should allow erasure. There are good arguments to be had on both sides. If you feel that if we don’t have systems that are fundamentally censorproof, the net result will be an eventual all consuming global censorship regime in the limit given enough time, then there is little choice, however.

sanderjd 5y ago
> You know how most web2 sites never delete data, but just flag it as hidden? Not the ones I've worked on... Flag as hidden and delete after some number of days is the best practice which I think (and hope) is commonly done?
BadCookie 5y ago
If the data belongs to an individual consumer, the data must actually be deleted at the customer’s request to comply with GDPR and CCPA.
- gfodor 5y ago
  A great theory but in practice in this specific case the legal system will be forced to capitulate. Either a country has to ban all crypto mining or not enforce GDPR on chain nodes. Seems obvious which way it will land in the long run.
  - remexre 5y ago
    didn't china already ban mining lmao
  - not2b 5y ago
    Unless much more energy-efficient methods are developed, it seems in the long term crypto mining is going to be banned almost everywhere. The alternative would be cooking the planet. Perhaps this problem can be solved somehow, but the alternatives have their problems.

rglover 5y ago

> How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? That is censorship. The correct answer is you don't. When you obscure evil, it propagates. When you shine a light on it, it disinfects. Awareness of the thing leads to discernment of the thing. Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them.

malermeister 5y ago
That is an incredibly naive view of the world. Just look at all the disinformation rampant on Facebook and the antivax hellscape we now live in. You can't possibly look at that and think things got "disinfected" through awareness. > Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them. This is also not correct. People aren't neccessarily evil by default, but they are stupid and easily manipulable. Just look at QAnon for another example.
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  It also misses the point for a large class of data relevant to individual safety - if GP gets associated (truly or falsely) with [outrage of the week] and his buddy from HS recognizes the username, what happens when said buddy posts his address (or his kid's school address?) to an immutable data store. GP is a monster and the law isn't doing anything, we gotta take matters into our own hands!
  - malermeister 5y ago
    There's a lot of things this misses. It also completely misses the point on stuff like CP. I know CP is bad and I have no interest in seeing it. However, I do also know that there is a group of people out there that do want to see it. Is the "anti-censorship" approach to just "shine a light on it" and let those people watch CP that's on the immutable data store? This whole post doesn't just assume that people are by default good, it assumes that there are no bad people. That's the only scenario in which the proposed "solution" would work. Personally, that's not a bet I'm willing to make, or even entertain.

outside1234 5y ago

Does that stuff make them Dogecoin? If so, they are ok with it.

cblconfederate 5y ago

before the internet, the police would find you and put you in jail. Why is it normalized that all our communications are bugged and analyzed? This is not something that people should expect if there is going to be correspondence between the physical and the virtual world.