Compare and Contrast: SAFEnet and Tor

Never mind intentions; how, exactly, is it functionally different? You might plausibly argue that SAFEnet is a whole lot better, but in terms of access (download, click), how is it easier or ever going to be easier? And if the access is no easier then how will there be a perceptual shift with the mainstream?

I agree that governments will probably use SAFEnet. Why wouldn’t they use something that works?

Anyway, “plausibility” is not what I’m asking, since, as we have seen in this thread, it is inevitably interpreted as armchair speculation detached from evidence. I want evidence.

Ok, this is the issue that separates our train of thinking regardless of your claim to want evidence. Evidence is hard to produce on what we envisage as the aim of SAFE Network!

I see SAFE as a tool to replace the present internet rather than a niche product like Tor, used by a very tiny minority for their own particular purposes. How far SAFE Network gets towards that I can’t say, but that is how I view it when discussing what it is or how it will perform “out there”, what adversaries it might evoke, what benefits it offers etc. (all of which are armchair speculation).

3 Likes

@Bluebird, the Tor network only offers anonymization of your network, encrypting only the application layer. Its purpose is anonymous browsing, period.
SafeNet has a whole different purpose: descentralized and redundant storage, anonymous internet and an autonomous network.

The benefits of the TOR network is only to conceal your web activities, appealing only those who are privacy nutjobs.
The benefits of the SafeNetwork are more appealing to the mainstream as the practical benefits are more evident for the laymen: it is a real “cloud”, not just a marketing gimmick from datacenters. It has all the benefits that cloud storage has brought to us, the ubiquitous access to our data, but without of the disadvantages of centralized storage which threatens legitimate privacy concerns such as medical records, commercial espionage, and leaks. There are a lot of reticent businesses that panic at the thought of SaaS: How can they trust a third party with all the accounting system (eg Quickbooks), what would happen with your company if the company goes bankrupt? They don’t even allow exporting the database for your local usage.
With MaidSafe, if it ever gets released, would make backups a thing of the past. That by itself is a whole industry that becomes obsolete.

So with all the structural disruption that MaidSafe can potentially bring, privacy and anonymity becomes a side effect and a nice added feature from the perspective of the common people.
The potential appeal for the masses is very clear, and that’s why I think it must promote its practical applications and not emphasize that much on the anonymity and security as it may generate the attack and the comparison to Tor’s externalities. And if they insist on attacking by saying “child porn and drugs”, we should say “medical records and trade secrets”, because that is the truth and that is in short the big gap between Tor and Maidsafe’s mission.

(just to clarify, I am not saying that there won’t be abuses and that probably the sleazy bastards from the Tor Network will drop their hidden services and migrate eventually to the SafeNetwork, probably it will happen. But the point is that Tor’s scope is more limited and Maidsafe is way more broad.
It is akin to comparing between a gun and a knife. A gun’s single purpose is to kill and nothing much else. It is easier to criticize and ban guns than to ban knives. An imperfect analogy, but I hope you get the point.)

8 Likes

OK, you have cited many uses of SAFEnet that don’t apply to Tor.

That does address the topic of the thread but, let’s face it, the primary area of discussion and concern is the sleaze and scandal and the resulting impact on public perceptions of the network. No-one except the backup companies or the cloud services care about their respective business models going away.

I never said there are not great functional differences, but that was not the point I was making.

I wrote:

Conclusion: there no reason why SAFEnet can’t do the same [edit: be an unintentional haven for sleazy bastards], in the same way, with the same glow of virtue.

Public perception is the elephant in the room, and I say that the evidence (attention @happybeing ) is that it is the same elephant (maybe a bit bigger one).

As I said, people will definitely kill with knives eventually, but as the perception of knives being obviously multipurpose, the same should be the perception of MaidSafe.
It will eventually become self-evident, we just have to be sure to start presenting these knives as useful kitchenware and camping tools before the crazy ones start misusing them for crimes.

2 Likes

And there are topics already discussing that. Please continue the perception and haven for evil doers in the topic left open for it.

The subject matter typically gets out of hand very quickly as it can be a sensitive subject for some. And at times attract the doomsayers using this as a handle.

So discuss the topic at hand “compare and contrast: safe & tor” here, but leave the perception for the HUGE topics already.

The current one
https://forum.autonomi.community/t/recent-questions-about-safes-societal-implications/7146

Others you can look at

[code]https://forum.autonomi.community/t/what-if-i-dont-want-to-store-child-porn/4306
Tor Dark Web Survey and Paedophilia
https://forum.autonomi.community/t/potential-way-to-weed-out-illegal-content/568

https://forum.autonomi.community/t/we-pledge-to-protect-children-and-hunt-terrorists/7613
[/code]

7 Likes

The OP deals with public perception. Read it again. Are you saying I didn’t give it a proper title? That it should not have been posted because of duplication? OK, so merge with the alleged duplicate.

Subtle

In relation to the issue I addressed you were talking how Tor with all the bad stuff on it can still come out as something good and how can we do that for SAFE.

That is difficult without going into what those other topics dealt with, but possible hopefully.

That is what I was addressing. We have had too much trouble from trolls in the past when discussions go into the public perception because the evil doers will put this illegal stuff on it.

You seemed to be discussing on a higher level and I believe being reasonable. Is it possible to discuss this without getting into doom/gloom of evil stuff will destroy SAFE.

If it cannot be done (& I understand) then I will move the topic to off-topic and let it continue as a parallel but different to the existing topic on that stuff.

But it isn’t off-topic, so it doesn’t belong there.

If you consider it too troublesome for the longterm welfare of the SAFE project, and for the past-proven potential to attract trolls, and I can see how both of those things could be (I haven’t read most of the earlier forum posts) then delete the thread. I won’t take it personally, if that’s a concern (it shouldn’t be). I tend to just ignore unpleasant communications that I can’t do anything about.

1 Like

I’m not going to interfere or suggest how this should be handled but will throw my thought out there.

Public perception of SAFE is an important topic, though I wonder any compare and contrast with xyz is rather narrow, especially where the OP not familiar with them. SAFE’s ambitions are beyond what Tor does, for example; Tor sites unreliable and its access to clearnet hampered by too many captchas. Inference on first pass is liable to error, obviously; there is more to Tor than suggested in the OP, which is rather more to the point why it does have a ‘glow of virtue’.

Public perception of SAFE will be relative to its delivery - not just on notions of Privacy; Security; and Freedom etc but technical considerations like Usability; Accessibility; Support.

So, there are two classes of topic, relative to public perception:

  1. Perceptions of technical usability, that need addressing over time to ensure there are no unnecessary hurdles to adoption.
  2. Perceptions about how having privacy; security; and freedom, impact society… and that thread above talking of societal implications useful then as umbrella that… for now. However, I would expect in time, when SAFE community is deeper and broader, there will be much to discuss and to the point that it will likely need its own sub forum - if not its own forum.

Another approach would be to note that there are different threads that follow from considering privacy; security; and freedom, more broadly than just SAFE. That however then becomes more suited to a politics forum… and for the forum setup as it stands is off-topic - that’s not a comment that off-topic is not interesting or what is put there is not worthy but that it’s beyond just focus on SAFE.

So, I would suggest that which is solely focused on SAFE, is on-topic; that which is comparisons with SAFE, or beyond just SAFE, are put off-topic, until we have capability to host a forum that can talk politics and philosophy; morals and ethics; weather and football. Perhaps some forum will spring up on SAFE itself, so that we are all free to discuss such matters as we prefer. :smiley:

2 Likes

What? :smile: If anyone else can interpret this, feel welcome.

Which bit didn’t you understand!?

Guess all I am saying is stay away from the “xyz evil will destroy SAFE or stop people using it” because that is another topic hotly debated by trolls and good people alike.

This is an important topic you raised and it deserves to kept out of off-topic. Show how like Tor people see it for a whole lot more than criminal use and as such see virtue in it, or not.

I think the answer to your OP is simply how useful will the public find it. If we take the “internet” as an example, it too was touted by some as the haven of the evil doer and interpol even has a few taskforces dedicated to it. Mind you many times they create the scare campaigns to justify their existence/growth. Don’t get me wrong they do their job but as always wish to increase their size and to do so have to convince the members of interpol to spend more money on their task force.

But the internet over a few years became so useful to the general public that the claim it was 99% porn and 1% criminals didn’t really hold water and people just ignore it except as a joke at parties.

druggies

The drug market is actually one of the coolest things to come from tor/bitcoin.

1 Like

I’m inclined to agree, but there’s no denying that many druggies are a lower class of person, with non-existent impulse control, and who blame everyone except themselves for their (sometimes) terrible condition.

Core TOR Browser Developer Leaves Project, Shuts Down Critical Node Relays

1 Like

I think you all have this backwards, childporn is not going to hurt safenet.

Think about it, before bitcoin and drugs what use did anyone have to use Tor? What to stalk girls on myspace or email bomb threats to ones school? None of those things warranted Tor. But around 2000 when Tor was coming out the previous generation of filesharing, emule and all that was getting attacked constantly by undercovers, pedos had no where to go, freenet existed in 2000 but it was new and had always been so much slower than emule.

Then finally Tor comes out, the government released it to get it to grow so it could hide its operatives in the field, and yet no one had any reason to use it, even the threat of filesharing lawsuits hadnt reached the public yet. But there was a very massive population of disenfrachised people who did have a use for it, and so the network grew in a massive way, once hidden services had been implemented sites hosting many thousands of hours of video and hundreds of millions of pictures sprang up and existed for years before getting scared off by other lesser sites being hacked and shut down.

Had these sites not grown tor to where it is today or not proved that hidden services worked, the likes of silkroad would have never been created, being a much bigger target than any pedosite since it involved money and appealed to the general public. Had silkroad or these pedosites never existed Tor would still be where it started.

TL;DR - New networks need positive use cases to get people to join, no normal user has any incentive to move from the clearnet, so new networks need people willing to take big risks for big rewards, however new networks may want drug sites, the operators of this are risk adverse and dont jump onto new networks, so these operators need pedos to prove the integrity of the network. Networks need users need drug sites need pedos.

1 Like

Here’s a difference no one seems to be talking about. SAFE incentivizes you to create sites on the SAFE network (PtP) and it also incentivizes you to devote resources to the network (vaults/safecoin). Tor does not. In fact with tor you still have to pay for hosting since it’s still based on centralized server architecture.

The truth of the matter is you can produce and transmit all manner of illegal content on the clearweb. It’s been and is done. Child porn, pirated software, activist materials, the works. You’re more likely to get caught but it can be done. And let’s please not forget that we had all these things BEFORE we had the internet. The internet is simply a new form of data transmission but it is not the only form of data transmission. What we are discussing is not a new issue. We are discussing the control of data for the sake of a subjective moral ethos. That has been debated since the middle ages ever since man has learned to put pen to paper. Quite frankly it’s an old arguement and very much an overly beaten dead horse in this case. The reason we are all gathered together supporting this project is we believe in freedom. We want privacy security and freedom. I don’t think the public will be as concerned with he potentials of child porn as they will be with making safecoin or hosting web sites for free. What would appeal to the average joe about SAFE? Safecoin! Datahosting, and being able to easily create their own website quickly. Also they’d love the rapid streaming and downloading speeds.

But these aren’t the only benefits. Anonymous communication, data transfer and money transfer means private peer to peer markets can spring up. Private individuals can start developing businesses who might not have been able to have stared one before due to government restrictions or regulations, or simple financial costs. Microbusinesses could spring up and flourish. Small businesses could grow. There are all kinds of possibilities here.

The analogy between the gun and the knife is quite apt. Tor’s application is quite specific and limited in scope. SAFE on the other hand is infinitely broader and has much greater implications. Would you stop using the internet because there were pedophiles and terrorists on it? No, obviously not because there ARE pedophiles and terrorists on it. Therefore the notion that people wouldn’t use SAFE for the same reason seems rather ludicrious.

1 Like

I’ve previously said something similar, that the presence of scum that nearly everyone would want to kill is a proof of the network’s security, a kind of canary that might otherwise be impossible to achieve; i.e., you might never be able to be certain the network is 100% secure, all you can really know is that there’s this group of people that the best police resources cannot capture.

When I was indigent in Amsterdam, I was able to acquire (200 euros) a sony laptop that runs 64 bit OS’s just fine. It’s only those stupid atom things that still have b0rked 32 bit UEFI BIOSes, at least, that was a problem 3 years ago, not sure if the new ones have fixed that.

Unfortunately, you do have to have a piece of hardware to work with any network system, because you have to install software. Though this is starting to change also because of how much can be done inside a browser’s ECMAscript interpreter. Also, I heard stories while I was on skid row about dumpster diving (from an estonian) about the wealth of discarded electronics you can find if you look. Er, he was talking about Norway, specifically. I bumped into him while stuck in Budapest waiting for my passport to get replaced. On the street, yes, sleeping in the metro stations. Danged homeless people put their blankets on me one night and for months I had body lice.

Oh yes, in Budapest, I could beg for about an hour a day and get enough money to eat some food and spend several hours in an internet cafe. Maybe in some ways it’s better in poorer countries?

1 Like