patrick.net

Thanks! I will check out all of those.

@Dan8267 any interest in working on uncensorability protocols? I think this site and others like it should really be content-addressable via some kind of distributed hash table like kademlia. But I don't know enough to do it yet.

rando says

@Dan8267 any interest in working on uncensorability protocols?

What would be an uncensorablity protocol? If the government can compel you to not use an HTTP link, then anything is censorable.

Content accessible via a distributed network using hashes in a link is essentially what a magnet link is. Unlike a torrent link, you don't need to link to a file describing how to get the content. The magnet link itself contains all necessary info.

www.B6e_-0PJwmg

Essentially if you can broadcast a message with "anybody have the file with this hash" and get a response, you have a distributed peer-to-peer network. Unfortunately, since the government can track all traffic in the U.S. and Europe, a peer-to-peer network won't give anyone the ability to publish a document, say the Magna Carta or a video of political crimes, if the government wants it taken down.

Even if you store only part of the file on each peer, the government can still censor it by outlawing hosting any part of the file, or for matter even doing anything that can produce the file as a result. So even if you spread individual bits on top of bits of other files in say a virtual neural net (two neurons each holding half of two bits each) and associative memory or using something like XORing, the government could still effectively outlaw it.

Every would-be publisher essentially needs a friend in a foreign nation unwilling to cooperate with his own nation. That is the only way to get around government censorship.

It might be helpful if people set up solar-powered wifi repeaters throughout their metropolitan area to form an ad-hoc network that was independent of the Internet backbone (the tier one ISPs) and all private ISPs. Then, at least in principle, you could have uncensored communication.

I just want to make it practically impossible to squash any information that someone wants to make public.

It's pretty much true already, in the sense that information that the government or a corporation tries to censor tends to propagate more quickly exactly because of that, but I'd like to improve on what we have with much better:

1. findability : if you have the content hash, you should be able to find the content (yes, magnet links already sort-of do this)
2. performance : you should be able to get the banned info essentially instantly, the way you can comments on patrick.net

It might be helpful if people set up solar-powered wifi repeaters throughout their metropolitan area to form an ad-hoc network that was independent of the Internet backbone (the tier one ISPs) and all private ISPs. Then, at least in principle, you could have uncensored communication.

Creative!

How about this as well: use the browser local storage of users to store random chunks of data, and have a set of relay servers that relay messages from browsers about what they are looking for. The main difficulty would be in getting the relays set up. Or are there some kind of proxies already out there on the internet that could do it? Web proxies don't quite work because they cannot initiate a connection to a browser. How would one browser ask for information stored in another browser?

rando says

1. findability : if you have the content hash, you should be able to find the content (yes, magnet links already sort-of do this)

2. performance : you should be able to get the banned info essentially instantly, the way you can comments on patrick.net

Torrents hosted in countries with pro-liberty culture would be the way to go. You would need a lot of like-minded people who cared enough to host the content though.

Short of that, if it's political, Wikileaks.

As Mao famously said, "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun."
All government power derives from force. The only differences between dictators and presidents is the size of their coalition they must keep happy.
This means that the only rights the people retain are the ones they are willing to use force to retain, whether that is votes or guns depends on the situation and the political structure.

How does wikileaks survive takedown notices?

Quigley says

As Mao famously said, "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun."

All government power derives from force. The only differences between dictators and presidents is the size of their coalition they must keep happy.

This means that the only rights the people retain are the ones they are willing to use force to retain, whether that is votes or guns depends on the situation and the political structure.

Ah, but tech can help free speech a lot. Bittorrent proves that it's possible to distribute content even when the government tries to censor it.

rando says

How does wikileaks survive takedown notices?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2514757/security0/wikileaks-nearly-immune-to-takedown--says-researcher.html

That's interesting. Multiple DNS names, foreign hosting in multiple countries, mirror sites.