Regarding Safe as a grand commons is this discussion now WHAT to implement rather than WHETHER to implement?
What if certain governments/states reject maidsafes global approach and want individual rules?
Will those countries still be ‘allowed’ to run a node/use safe? Or will it be at the users discretion?
If the censoring of this horrific material is successful will it lead to new material having to be made to replace the censored material and in a way contribute to the very thing it was trying to stop?
Couldn’t agree more with this. It may take many years but we are talking about humanity here and one day whatever system gets put in place will be compromised to benefit a certain few.
A whistleblower may still be able to blow the whistle but their leaked data could be considered against “societal norms”.
Whatever mechanism you are planning to implement against the obvious kind of cursed data will also be used against Tiananmen Square content or “pirated” Metallica music. There’s just no way to prevent it.
Lots of folks here are not getting the censorship thing here or the network’s ability to resist state bad actors.
Think like this.
A gov (or several) decides WikiLeaks is bad. They force “their” citizens to censor that, even provide Safe nodes written to censor that. What does Safe do?
Well, those nodes don’t return data when asked as they don’t have it (they censored it). The other nodes that are geographically spread and not censoring it, penalise them. The censored nodes are voted out!
If you see deeper like this you will see that searching for global consensus defeats local authoritarianism. It may be a good thing, so I suggest folk don’t just glance, knee jerk and take an extreme stance. If Safe is to provide privacy, security and freedom for all of the world people, then perhaps this exercise emphasises just how it does that. Don’t be fooled that the only nodes are written by maidsafe, they will not be. What we need are global rules/functions that resist localised nonsense.
Let’s not cut off our noses to spite our faces, facing this head-on will lead us all to a much safer network and yes, one that allows humanity to move forward with as much information as possible.
I’ve been here since near beginning because I trust the SAFE team to think this far. How many projects have promised the moon then failed? Why? Break things and go fast mentality. This is definitely not that. And rather than random IT threats, this faces threats from that, nation state actors, coordinated botnets and more. It has to be correct. Huge effort has been spent to simplify onto algorithms that will work, come what may. One thing that has kept me here is that the vision has never been betrayed, and, rather than put lipstick on a pig, the bandaid gets ripped off. Despite the insane crypto market pressure etc. Please just keep going.
edit: I am deleting this post which was a bit snarky.
I will just say that I am deeply disappointed by this update and the present direction. I stand for content neutrality and against censorship. I hope project leadership will reconsider, embrace a more cypherpunk position, and avoid any form of censorship in the node/server software.
This is getting ridiculous. There are too many logical fallacies and fantasies in this week’s update related to perceived non-technical issues. It’s no longer amusing and hurting the news of the great technical progress being made. This was supposed to be an autonomous network. Now it’s a grand tragedy of the commons. What happened to the perpetual web? Course correction needed. Honest feedback. Sincerely.
I haven’t meddled into the whole censorship conversation yet, but I too find it troublesome. There used to be a time where I’d believe that if one country would sensor something, a different country wouldn’t. However, I think that the pandemic provided us with a valuable lesson. There have been plenty of people that have been forced into things they did not want to do, and they couldn’t just leave to some other place, because this rapidly became the global picture.
There have been plenty of countries censoring things against the will of the people and it’s only getting worse. Where does it end? And then on a side node, aren’t you worried that once the network goes live with censorship, even in the tiniest form, someone will just fork it and remove the censorship entirely and becoming the main adopted network?
I don’t worry much about any of this, actually. I am encouraged to see the way the network works, then the opposite is also true.
If somebody forks the code and adds censorship that is not globally accepted by the existing network, then those forked nodes will be ejected.
Like everything a view is needed from both sides and then technically what does that actually mean. If the network has the correct design it must refuse those forms of censorship, but do so naturally and not in some forced way.
i.e. I don’t worry, but I do like to look at these things for sure. If we are to deliver the vision we need to understand the environment safe will operate under. The approach of extreme anarchy/liberalism on one side and censoring everything we don’t like on the other are both likely wrong.
Firstly a welcome to the team @bzee and nice to just see another progress update. Chugging along towards objectives and launch of a stable public network.
This censorship theme was inevitable. It’s easy to see this genuine discussion as capitulation to the “oh please think of the children” pandemonium and thus a compromise of the objectives themselves. That is misplaced from my view. As much as I’d like to see this as a cypherpunk network this topic must be resolved without compromising the core tenets of the network. I have no clear idea of how this would technically be done but the discussion needs to be had.
If this is to be a network controlled by no one so it can be for everyone we as a community need to work through this, support the team and find a philosophically aligned and technical path forward.
Whatever pathway is taken, I trust it will be a very well considered one that will lead to network success rather than demise.
I get that people have concerns that things might have changed regarding censorship, because the regulatory issues and potentially technical impositions are being investigated. But it surprises me that people persist with thinking the fundamentals have been abandoned after the reasons and intentions have been clarified several times.
Maybe if you’ve only read the update and not the discussions of the past week or so that needs stating again, but that doesn’t explain this in all cases.
TL;DR: MaidSafe have confirmed that they are committed to the original vision and the Safe fundamentals, and that recent investigations are necessary to ensure delivery of the network in an increasingly hostile legal and regulatory environment. What is the problem people have with that? Do they want MaidSafe’s officers and developers to stick their heads in the sand and risk the project as well as their liberty?
If the information can be deleted, whistleblowers cease to exist.
If you can delete information, you can also force software modifications to block or remove certain DBCs. Once you introduce censorship in the core, there are no limits.
This can now be done using encryption. And since IPs are no longer hidden, the safe network will not be more secure than other solutions currently available.
Maidsafe can try to justify it in any way, but introducing censorship into the core is a betrayal of the fundamental principles of this development.
As it seems that this decision has already been taken, it would be better to stop mess about and to tell us clearly what is going to be done.
The problem is that these laws aren’t new, the laws around AML for example have been around for a number of years. Now the team are acting as though these issues around regulatory compliance are novel. When they took those positions within the company then they would have know that’s what the laws were.
Storage layer is essentially “random noise” of a group tiny portions of any file.
Also a Chunk can easily belong to two or more files with only one of the files being the bad one. So blocking/deleting chunks from the bad file will also break the good files. Thus a broken network. Also you CANNOT separate the chunks that only belong to the bad file but leave the ones belonging to the others since you do not before hand all the possible good file chunks that there will ever be that are the same chunks in the bad (EG the edit of a good file to make a bad can have over half the chunks the same as the good file. And the good file not yet uploaded so no way to compare)
Doing it at the node introduces a mechanism that will also destroy good files in the process of censoring essentially random noise and can be done at the client/upload. Even doing it at the Quote stage is much better. A bad file will never get the quote required to upload. This removes the responsibility from the client back to the internal core nodes. But never requiring the nodes to delete existing chunks or good chunks A good file, even with some of the same chunks as in the bad would still get a quote since its not the bad file. Censoring has to be done on the whole file since that is what the bad file lists are (hashes of the whole files)
Thus on the network side it is the data map that has this info and by refusing to store the data map the (unique) bad chunks are just “random noise”
Agreed, just the above analysis shows that and I am sure there are others. Faulty list can destroy so many files.
Just it cannot be done successfully at the node level only, it can technically be done at the client level. The node level is safe since its only chunks which essentially are random noise (just like single bytes/words/octets are)
These are issues going through governments in the USA and UK as well as others (EU) as we speak. THIS IS HAPPENING NOW, when we ignore things or take a stand then the world changes around us and we are on our own.
Can I restate we are not bringing a knife to a gunfight here, we are trying to be as best prepared as possible in the interests of everyone and ensuring the vision of digital freedom is Safe.
… and just to give anyone who is actually interested an example. This should help people understand why MaidSafe are investigating this, and why they recently employed @Heather_Burns to do just that. See below her blog today outlining just one important aspect of the UK’s Online Harms Bill.
It’s long, but worth a read because the Bill will force identity verification on everyone in the UK who wants to access a website where users can create or share content, which is just about everywhere these days. Even your own little blog, if it has comments will have to verify the identity of every visitor before granting them access to content. And if you allow children access, you’ll have to implement content blocking!
and nice to just see another progress update. Chugging along towards objectives and launch of a stable public network.