SAFE Network and Illegal Content

…Thanks…

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If it were up to me, I’d blast all new users with operational security guidelines at some point in the launcher before or after log in. So even if they are already infected, they would then have the tools necessary to apply whatever level of security and anonymity the require.

Give a man a fish and he eats that day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life. I’m sure you’ve come across that expression before. :wink:

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I couldn’t agree more!

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What happens when safe network opens and the usual trolls start uploading pedo pictures for public access? Is there a way or a will to delete this sort of content ?

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Public sites can be made with admin control so if the creator of said public site sees something inappropriate, the admin or appointed mods could delete the content. Although if the site is created to be immutable then nothing can be done. As far as I understand it.

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I imagine people will provide content filtering services to help people avoid content they’re not happy with, plus communities who can flag unwanted content, and people could choose their filtering to their preferences.

However, there won’t be anything to stop those who want to access any kind of public data from accessing it if they want to.

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There’s no way to stop any types of people from using the internet, SAFE or not.

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I would argue that while individual picture/story/whatever sharing sites (or forums!) can do what they want with content moderation, it would be of benefit to the Maidsafe network to not moderate anything. Remember, this is a new internet model not a new forum or website or whatever. It is intended to supersede the internet, and since the internet already hosts all that junk, a measure of the success of the network would be whether those groups that share that stuff switch over to Maidsafe.

Which reminds me. Is there a thread for how search engines would work on the Maidsafe network?

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So true

If the network were able to moderate anything, eg enforce copyright, or some other law or audit system, then it will be forced (attempted) by authorities to do so. And we all know that leads to in the end.

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I came to think about how intelligence agencies around the world will start to cooperate in order to monitor the SAFE network. :smile: By monitoring all traffic they can put together all data chunks and keep track of all users. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Personally I will follow the laws even on the SAFE network, but yeah it will be tempting to break copyright laws for sure.

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Not happening anytime soon. Why not monitoring all traffic you ask?

  • Not all SAFE traffic will pass through cooperating governments. Too much distrust for the forseeeable future. Big fail just with this one
  • Not all traffic will go through ISPs Even without mesh there will be plenty of traffic through more private networks. Ever so many private networks (>1000 PCs) have public IPs for each machine and IPv6 makes this more likely and SAFE routing will sometimes occur within a “private” network.
  • To monitor and record all ISP traffic is a billion times more demanding than the NSAs recording of less than 1% of international traffic. They only record according to key words and flagged parameters and then only are able to capture a portion of that. They rely on laws demanding servers/hosting companies to give them any data they ask for.
  • Only the person storing the data knows the order that the chunks are stored in. Just because you see packets dispatched in an orderly manner does not mean that that order is consistent with the order of the chunks. Hell the packets could be from many chunks at once and they have no way to piece them together because the XOR address is encrypted. So they have to record it all and wait hundreds of years to be able to decode the XOR address let alone the order in order to know the chunk order.
  • Where are they going to store more data (packets/headers * 8) than is stored by the people of the earth when they all use SAFE. Lets face it the authorities are not concerned with a small SAFE but one that is used my a large portion of the earth. Even then the numbers using SAFE will be so much more by the time they even get agreement let alone install infrastructure that effectively duplicates the world’s stored data.
  • ANY missed packet causes them problems, and just one missed packet will stuff up so much trying to order things and makes impossible to decode a whole file.

Basically its all or none. They need >80 to 95% of the SAFE network’s traffic in order to make any useful sense of it. And that is 80-95% of the individual traffic streams, if they only got 95% of each and every data stream then its unlikely to make SAFE readable.

Now to monitor one person and their uploads they might have better chance to work out what the are doing, but its likely to be way too late before they can detect wrong doing if their only source of information is captured SAFE data. Maybe 100 years too late. So tehy will do as they always do, investigations outside of “internet”

Agreed, but the copyright laws are becoming so extensive are you sure you haven’t (accidentally). Playing your CD loud enough for the neighbors or the car next to you or another person on the street to hear the CD is a breach of the performance copyright laws, and in Australia can actually be a criminal breach.

Most copyright laws (not sure about the recent changes) are only infringement violations and a matter for the civil courts. Criminal breaches is typically where you are producing for distribution. And this is why the copyright trolls go after bittorrent since that typically includes distribution to others. Disclaimer the recent changes have widen the criminal breaches a little and I am not sure exactly how much.

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I meant public data stored on the SAFE network. Private data is protected (although I suspect agencies like the NSA and GCHQ can easily break today’s digital signatures).

So for public data even the chunk maps for files are accessible if they can snoop on all traffic, if I have understood it correctly. But yes, it will be difficult or even practically impossible to monitor all traffic on the SAFE network. In theory they could do it. In practice probably not.

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Well anyone can read that.

And I am sure that eventually the agencies will work out how to read the public data too /sarcasm

For public data they have a better chance to see who might be reading them IF and only IF they control enough nodes. But of course by that time its their network since they are running over 70% of the nodes. Otherwise they are unlikely to reliably to trace from the chunk store to the one reading it. Too many hops around the world and the chunks are encrypted again until the last relay node next to the one reading the public data. This encryption between nodes makes monitoring almost impossible to trace where a chunk came from or is going to and even what chunk it is.

Of course most illegal stuff is going to be private and shared datamaps. Copyright stuff is likely to be public, but governments don’t care so much about that and the media companies employ copyright trolls to track. Now these types have no hope of even controlling enough nodes to get out of a wet paper bag (ie < 0.0001% of nodes)

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What would happen if someone was posting / broadcasting serious crimes on the future safe network? With the complete autonomy is there anything that could stop / prevent? Could this be a potential negative we must deal?

Thanks

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A funny (or not so funny depending on how we look at it) possibility is that the NSA will launch their own decentralized network with 100% backdoor snooping before Maidsafe releases the production version of the SAFE network. :smiley:

From a conspiracy theory perspective the NSA (and corresponding agencies in other countries) already snoop 100% on all internet users. How? By having a secret (for national security reasons [as usual, sigh]) agreement with every single internet service provider (ISP)!!! So before your information even has reached the internet, such as the first Tor router, the NSA has already swooped up all your information. Ha ha.

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You’re talking about censor resistance. Avoiding this problem with the centralised paradigm is a positive imo. There will likely be people breaking the law, just as there are today on clearnet and as they were in the days before the web. Some of those laws will be worse than others, some might even do more good than harm to be enforced (although personally I think that would be rare). It’s immaterial though, law enforcement will need to stick to real world evidence and investigation if they want to catch criminals, just as they did for thousands of years before the internet existed.

The state will certainly be frustrated when it first realises that it can’t turn SAFE off. I should imagine it will also get a lot of publicity for that fact. Privacy, security and freedom for everyone has huge implications… waaaay more positives than negatives though. We’ve all been able to have private conversations, share information and exchange value privately (with cash, gold etc) since societies have existed. That freedom and natural right to choose what we share and how we share it is fundamental; it has always had a lot more positive than negative implications.

I suspect some states might make SAFE illegal for a time, although that won’t put users off and is more likely to offer free advertising than stop growth.

I reckon we’ll see the usual reaction evolution… they are currently ignoring and/or laughing, the next stage will involve them getting very angry and putting up a fight, then finally, as Ghandi says, ‘you win’. :wink: The state will eventually realise it wants truly robust security even more desperately than the people do.

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That made me think about how the web is merely a tool that enhances our capacity as humanity. Just like how the invention of fire made us more powerful, both for doing good and bad. Demanding that the SAFE network should be prevented is like demanding that the use of fire should be prevented just because a few people do crazy stuff with it.

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Yep, completely agree. It feels like posterity will mark these technological transitions similarly to the evolution through the stone, bronze and iron ages. We seem to be on the cusp of a shift. :smiley:

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Hi James,
Thank you for your response. I truly believe in the vast benefits of the SFAE network vision. If SAFE works as intended there will be change throughout the world on a scale hard to comprehend.
As you said, some of this change good and some bad. I just wonder though how terrorists could use this for propaganda, recruiting, etc… Classifying “Terrorists” is in a way subjective to some degree. But that is a different conversation.
Again, it is really hard to understand the degree of change SAFE could bring to the world. With some many positives possible I don’t want to underestimate the power of government and their need for control or get blind sided by only looking at the benefits of SAFE. Even if nobody can currently see a way to control SAFE some(body/entity) eventually will. True freedom has never been free and I presume it will never be free.

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