I may have misunderstood the meaning of the word “denounce”. I took it more like “criticize” or “ban” by blocking. You are right saying that they will surely just don’t talk about it and block it since they will not know what data you will share with this network.
But what about government and security agencies in countries like USA, France or whatever? If the network get really popular, what will they do? Will they denounce it like they try in France with the HADOPI law for peer-to-peer sharing.
To denounce is to declare that it’s bad, so as long as there’s no law against it, who cares what they say (I’m talking about the user perspective; the Project will of course want to be cast in a positive light).
But your example from France is about law. That’s different, that’s about breaking laws (if you do whatever is not allowed).
And finally there’s the execution of said laws. With Torrent you can easily tell what’s being downloaded. With MaidSafe it’s going to be much harder (see related discussion elsewhere on this forum) and if you shutdown your client you should be well protected. So they would find it very hard to actually catch someone.
Legitimate uses for MaidSafe are many and I don’t think they’ll try anything out of ordinary. In what we consider “free” countries they’ll bust a few losers every year just to make a point, that’s all that will happen.
Criminals and illicit users of any network are always sorted and removed. Look at any system. Crime is actually also perception it depends on the laws that are applied. Anonymity has only been an issue within the digital realm;
Hopefully SAFE Network will fully afford anonymity therefore, the environment can evolve free from being stalked away by intervening entities.
Also, that the people will realize the value of social networks that are more thorough with resilient connections being made, versus spam - and connectivity based on algorithmic marketing of profiles.
If criminals are likely to join maybe we can encourage a fork of SAFE Network so criminals don’t have to use the mainstream SAFE Network?
I think the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption will be the fact that people are more afraid of crime than the amount of risk they face from it. People will sell themselves into slavery to protect themselves from mythical crimes because they don’t actually run the numbers to determine the probabilities of actually facing each scenario.
It’s another manifestation of attention scarcity as well as lack of knowledge of the actual risk. If the risks do come then I would think by that point criminals will either fork the network or they’ll be pushed to the fringes.
The fact is SAFE Network is open source. If necessary it can be forked. It probably will be forked if criminals start to take it over or if criminals decide they want the features of the network.
If I think about it like a criminal would I don’t see why I would use the mainstream SAFE Network when I could fork and customize it specifically for my criminal organization / operation.
If the network works as planned, there will be no margin in forking it, and no more downside to having criminals use it (along with everyone else) than there is just having criminals in society as a whole.
The advantage is that the criminals who gravitate to positions of power in government, etc., will have a harder time keeping their crimes hidden or controlling what people hear or see, and thus think. The fear of Big Brother will be largely lessened. That’s huge.
There will certainly be outcries from politicians, vested interests, etc., just like there has been anytime they lose traditional tyrannical advantages. But theirs protests will be impotent . . . and actually make them look foolish.
Calls to “ban Bitcoin”, or “outlaw bittorrent piracy” or “make running SAFE software illegal” are even less workable than “alcolol is now illegal, so of course everyone must stop using it”–unenforcable and stupid. I really doubt they’ll go there. But if they do, it will just make the network prosper in other places to the disadvantage of places that try it.
Years ago a popular fear was that “they” will block the Internet. Then it turned out it was completely unlikely because it wouldn’t work, it’d be too expensive (in terms of damages to legal business and the gov’t) and finally they prefer to collect all data on everyone. There is no danger whatsoever that MaidSafe will be blocked.
Alcohol, on the other hand… I live in constant fear of worldwide alcohol prohibition so I consume all I can while I still can.
I can. Hide in plain sight. Also more apps would be developed for the mainstream. And ALSO what defines a “criminal?” Is a criminal someone who believes in free speech? An animal rights activist? Are we talking about rapists and murders or some guy uploading a lolicon manga or banned book? Are we talking Chelsea Manning or the Pikting killer here? And what about people who are incredibly antisocial but haven’t been convicted of crimes? What about cops that kill innocent people? Politicians that take million dollar vacations on tax payer money and pass corporate welfare laws. Dirty lawyers and even your run of the mill abusive spouses. I mean we have this word “crime” like it means anything at all. In a good portion of the states it’s a “crime” to collect rainwater for god’s sake. In the EU I hear it’s a “crime” to sell heritage organic seeds that aren’t registered with the government. I mean really we’re going to start talking about criminals being made into fringe groups here? Are you serious? Crime != antisocial. Legal != socially acceptable. Wake up people.
Oppressive government can just ban Maidsafe by threatening the death penalty or long prison sentences to anyone who is caught using it. If for example pedophiles were to start using SAFE Network and it seems like most of the content is child pornography then governments would appear justified in threatening long prison sentences or even the death penalty on anyone who uses it. If you think about it people already go to prison for possession of child porn without even having to he directly involved in the creation of it.
I’m not saying it will happen like this but I am saying we should not fear forks. Forks will be what can keep SAFE Network alive by allowing it to evolve into different forms if it is attacked. So saying criminals would want to use the banner of Maidsafe to hide in plain sight doesn’t make much sense when they can come up with something which is like a virus which infects computers and takes resources for a criminal SAFE Network fork.
Criminals wouldn’t have to run any files. Zombie computers would be infected with a virus and they’d have a SAFE Network. Not only that but they could fund the construction of the network by randomly encrypting people’s precious local files and then charging a decryption fee.
Honestly I don’t see how SAFE Network benefits at all from certain elements who will ultimately use the technology. If they fork it then that would probably be better for everyone because we don’t want pedophiles to use SAFE Network even though there is a chance they will. If things get bad SAFE Network will run out of farmers due to media propaganda, anti-marketing campaigns, or perhaps there might even be false flag sabotage.
The point is we need to actually think about all the different possibilities. We should make SAFE Network easy to fork so that the overall beneficial social utility would survive propaganda campaigns. Forks are going to happen just as they happened to Bitcoin but with every fork the community might be a bit different and of course there will be some people who eventually will make a fork specifically for criminal activity because they themselves would be able to control every aspect of it, develop it in secret, and disguise it’s functioning.
Governments will probably simply just monitor anyone who downloads SAFE Network. Criminals who use SAFE Network would download it? Forks on the other hand wouldn’t be so easy to spot.
Bitcoin has been blocked in Russia and China. What are you talking about?
SAFE Network is definitely going to be blocked in some places. I think also SAFE Network will be forked and used by criminal organizations. Malware makers will use SAFE Network technology but I don’t think they’d necessarily use the mainstream software because the malware users have different use requirements.
I don’t think SAFE Network will be banned or blocked but I do think it will face permanent opposition. This means law enforcement agencies will not like it because it makes their job much more technical.
That being said if they want there are ways to investigate people. It’s just not going to be as cheap. I think Russia will ban SAFE Network and China also because to both it will seem terrifying. Tell me why you think they wont?
You also get long prison sentences for pirating music and movies and you can see how effective a deterent that was. Remember alchohol prohibition? What about pot? You really think prostitution is dead because it’s illegal? Probition doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or even that people don’t want it or don’t find it worth the risk.
Um what? Hold on there now. We’ve gone from wanting to view banned material of whatever kind to infecting someone’s computer and forming some kind of botnet. Those are COMPLETELY different actions. Say the government bans the book 1984 and I want to read it and I want to use SAFE as a tool to access it. Say in addition to this the government bans the use of the SAFE network, to prevent me from viewing such provocative literature and other such things. Just because I’m willing to break the law to read a book does not mean I’m willing to harm someone else’s computer via a virus in order to do so. As I said before in my previous post criminal = breaking the law it does not nessesarily equate to being antisocial. Law != moral. Legal != pro social behavior.
Wouldn’t this be an app issue? I mean if you’re against pedophiles then simply filter out pedo content on your search engine or whatever. If you’re a pedophile then search for it. As I understand it user a’s content need not ever interact with user b’s content unless they want to mutually agree to share with one another. And I don’t see the reason for creating a whole new internet because of sexual or philosophic bigotry. What did you think was going to happen when you created a decentralized anonymous encrypted internet. I might be paraphrasing here but as the saying goes “If your system isn’t being used by terrorists and pedophiles then it isn’t secure.”
Also why would ostrocized folks of any sort want their own special internet? Isn’t that like painting a bullseye on your chest for further victimization?
Such a virus would be relatively easy to detect (because it does so much, constantly active, etc), and there is no reason to do so. The security strength of a SAFE network is in the amount of nodes connected to it. Creating a SAFE fork, which will most likely be far less popular, weakens everything. Look at TOR, there is no criminal-fork of that either. Same principle.
The cost of criminal activity is negligble on the SAFE network.
It doesn’t, or at least hurts far more than it helps. The fact is that we can’t stop anyone from using the SAFE network for whatever they want to do on it, for good or ill.
For the people who are involved in illegal trade (think Silk Road) and storing/exchanging child porn, there is no reason whatsoever to start a fork. The official SAFE network will most likely have the most valuable and stable SafeCoin and will provide the best security and anonimity due to likely being the largest.
That won’t all happen through one download link. There’ll be plenty of mirrors and torrents, and most importantly, you can get the source code and compile the client yourself. It can also be downloaded through proxies, VPN’s, or TOR. Spreading the installer/source can be done in so many ways, it’d be an extremely inefficient surveillance tactic.
They’ll probably try to ban it. The question is if such a ban can be enforced. Apparently SAFE traffic can’t be distinguished from any other kind of encrypted UDP traffic.
Easy to detect? Viruses are only easy to detect if you know what to look for. If you don’t know what to look for they become very hard or maybe even impossible to detect.
I would say for now we can detect most malware, most viruses, but not advanced persistent threats specifically designed to be undetected. APTs cannot be detected unless you literally look for a needle in a haystack.
I think this community needs to have some humility. While I don’t think every government will ban SAFE network I am not going to go so far as to think China couldn’t ban it. China managed to filter the Internet and ban Bitcoin without banning it officially.
Traffic can be obfuscated but the fact that you downloaded something which matches a specific digital signature might not be obfuscated. If every ISP just tags every customer who ever downloads it or who visits the Maidsafe link then they could then specifically target the users who download it.
Honestly I don’t know why governments don’t do this kind of stuff to catch pedophiles. It seems like the threat of pedophilia is used to specifically justify invasions of privacy because if the focus is on detecting pedophiles why not simply ask Google to track everyone who searches for it? Why not ask ISP’s to flag all users who have behavioral profiles which match that of a pedophile?
But the same way ISPs can do stuff like that to capture pedophiles what would stop ISPs from treating this website as something to be not censored but as something where everyone who visited it is added to a watch list? They wouldn’t have to ban it or censor it and it might even be more effective if they acted as if they weren’t watching at all while they collect data through our ISP.
What if the ISP is run by the government along with the VPN? What if government agencies host Tor nodes? I think in theory you could use those mechanisms and they might be secure but in practice I don’t believe it’s as anonymous as people think. There seem to be ways which VPNs can be required to keep logs and other data about users and there seems to be a situation where governments can set up their own Tor nodes or systematically disrupt Tor.
Don’t you think they’d make more money if they ran their own SAFE Network specifically for their own criminal needs? For example the current SAFE Network isn’t very stealthy. It’s obvious to people who are farming that they are farming, it’s obvious to people that it is SAFE Network. Criminal versions don’t have to follow any of the same rules and can make a cryptovirus.
Why would they rely on MaidSafe developers when they probably have way more money than the funding of MaidSafe? The criminal underworld probable has hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars for development. SAFE Network source code could have potential cyber warfare uses or be used in new advanced persistent threats.
Honestly we just don’t know how it’s going to evolve but I don’t think we should assume that SAFE Network will never be forked. Governments or criminals could fork it for different reasons. It could even go closed source.
Suppose we push pedophiles to the edges and moderate them all down. Why would they want to be part of a network where they aren’t wanted when pedophiles can simply fork it? Then you have sex traffickers, drug cartels, organized crime groups, and others who have billions of dollars stashed away and who don’t care about freedom. In fact some of these groups by their very nature may despise freedom and may use their own custom versions of SAFE Network to crush freedom everywhere.
Just look at how China created it’s own version of the Internet, and how there is a great firewall. Why would you think that MaidSafe developers with their limited resources will win the development arms race if it becomes that? Suppose some organized crime groups in collaboration with governments decide to fork SAFE Network and simply outpace the developers?
We have no way of knowing what the reactions will be. In my opinion we need more humility.
Because a) Doing that would be hypocritical for a society that believed in free speech. b) Doing that would be impractical for a society where anyone could host their own site simply by sharing a file. What are you going to do? Outlaw freedom of thought and discussion? Then outlaw the private exchange of links? How are you going to enforce said things? There are going to be people that believe in freedom and will host said things. And since SAFE is DECENTRALIZED and ANONYMOUS there’s not a thing anyone can do about it. So it can’t be moderated. It would be like moderating Tor. Freedom and censorship cannot coexist.
Yes and I’m sure when someone starts selling illegally organic food on the black market and the government labels it “organized crime” you’ll have the common sense to distinguish it from the mafia. What about rainwater? Have you ever actually taken a good hard look at everything that is illegal these days? Putting up a banner for activism can be illegal and if you do it as an organized action would in fact be “organized crime.” Possessing various books is considered a crime as would be their distribution. Yes SAFE like Tor would allow for illegal drug trafficking but also like Tor that would be a lot healthier and safer, pardon the pun, than buying those drugs off the street. If you buy off the street the drugs not only do you put your physical person in danger but also you run the risk of getting tainted drugs which can be even more dangerous. And online you could develop reputation systems for the dealers and buyers therefore minimizing health and economic risks. Same goes for things like prostitution, which in turn would actually reduce sex trafficking. If you could buy sex directly from your whore of choice you could create compitition between the independent contractors and the sex trafficking circles and ultimately put them out of business. Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it antisocial.
Yes but who’s going to use a censored internet? We’ve already got a censored internet. And moreover the use thereof isn’t mutually exclusive. Just like you can have both diaspora and facebook you could also have regular censored net and Maidsafe. But who will want to use a censored internet? Also consider that once it launches SAFE will gain visibility and a lot of developers will gravitate towards it. Remember what Diaspora was like during alpha phase? Just a few pods and a few hardcore fanatics. But once it got out of beta and actually launched you started seeing pods popping up everywhere and the community took off. So the same principle applies. Once you actually make a usuable product that people can actually use and touch then you’ll get more people gravitating to it. More users equals more developers.