If not then how do you roll updates without forking? If so how do you keep the loaded gun from being pressed againt your head? You must cut the umbilical cord no?
I’m 200% sure the answer here is “No.”
I don’t think any further replies are necessary 
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Clearly not. Though MaidSafe might conceivably provide some kind of accreditation, based on author track record, app permissions, source code license etc. A bit like a MaidSafe run app store - but no veto.
Open source code can always be forked.
Its a great relief of which @jreighley might take note. It seems after all that regardless of an app’s marketing gleam relative to SAFE or how likely it is to be produced it is not merely optional under some veto waiting in the wings.
Its not so hard to understand that the same privacy facility that allow an end user to enter their private data for safe keeping on a public network also protects the privacy of some one reporting anonymously on the same widely destributed network public network.
Nobody will need permission to use SAFE… That’s the way it ought to be.
Anonymity is hard to maintain - especially when you are in the business of spilling secrets… My point has never been that leaking cannot be done – My point is that leaking happens all of the time right now – and that it is more often de-shoveled muckraking than anything world - changing…
I don’t see “ability to leak slightly more securely” as being the world changing killer app that Warren does.
Protecting your data from snoops that would leak it is the world changing the killer app… And it is baked right into the architecture of MaidSAFE.
I am all for openness. I am all for people putting their necks on the line to fight injustice. I am less attracted to the idea that people can effectively fight injustice without putting their necks on the line. Remember the Bush National Guard papers? Supposedly printed in the early 1970s with Microsoft Word fonts? That is the kind of crap that you get when people leak without their necks on the line… Weather your cause is right or wrong, crap like that undermines it… I can show you conspiracy theory crap all over the internet… Most of it is a joke… Making that stuff easier to propagate isn’t going to change the world.
@jreighley If its as you say I agree, but it won’t be. “You’re the only one who had access to the data” won’t fly for conviction as things could have been hacked or there could always be other explanations. Its also as unlikely as the silly ticking time bomb scenarios that there would only be one person. Let say someone has the rare sole full access situation, well that person will generally need a replacement at some point.
A more common scheme is probably compartmentalization. No one from this unit has access to what that unit is doing. That’s all we’ve got. But we tend to have hundreds of people in each unit. And one from each unit will leak and the jig saw gets put together.
They are calling it already a web of trust. Trust is all currency is based on when you come down to it. What will revelations about what its took to prop up the dollar do to trust in the dollar and its value?
@Warren If the documents chain of ownership is disputed the validity is suspect. Much of the reason Snowden’s leaks have credibility is because he put his neck on the line to leak them. There is no shortage of people leaking all kinds of evidence of chemtrails and 911 inside jobs and fake moon landings and nobody cares, because nobody believes.
If the game is played without necks on the line, there will be no preventing various interests from flooding the conspiracy marketplace with all kinds of disparate storylines and false leaks so that it would be difficult to discern what is legit and what is gibberish.
All in all, it all becomes noise…
Where the value is is that even if the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or more importantly the great firewall of Chine doesn’t like the fact that everyone’s file are encrypted, there is zero that they can do about it. That is the killer app. Privacy. The ability to keep your business your business.
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There will be no privacy without transparency. Sleight? No, if you poke enough pin holes in the ship it sinks.
I think you’re massively under estimating what is about to happen, but I agree its already happening with less than optimal tools. Ballmer called open source a cancer. Call it decentralization, or data liberation or some sort of fire but I think it will feed on itself. With Assange and Snowden the US acted mortally wounded, and that’s quite telling.
Sony was hacked multiple times culminating in a huge data dump. At first it was reported as said 9 gigabytes and then it was 20 terabytes and now I think I heard 100 terabytes. I am clear that the size isn’t necessarily all that important but it does show volume being moved on a company that after each hack (a prior one took a major service down for three months) must have got more focused on security and still seems to have been defeated. It was focused and fighting back and still got decimated. I see that happening in some form or other to every large organization in the world including intelligence agencies and I never ever see it ending. If its a web of trust it will be based on transparency. The fog wont stop it at all and the device to sift it will be stronger than Google.
As MLK said “nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.” It was already happening. I’ve notice the way Face Book gets used relative to the work place, the stuff that happens in work spaces gets dumped to that incredibly foolish service once happy hour starts. It might be something sociological, our mother tells her friend things in front of us that embarrass and worse when we’re not around and that’s a bonding process that continues, but the ladies seem to be brutal with this. That stuff already runs on Face Book and its already dumping the bureaucratic life blood. But what runs in face book is a petty version of what is coming even as its damage to organizations has no doubt been cumulative.
I expect that courts will try to protect people who thought they were operating under cover and national security rhetoric but I think those courts end up caving quickly to public outrage. This won’t be like OWS but the same kind of disgust with corporatism will drive it. I think its the dawning realization that corporatism at its core and in its marrow is psychopathic and criminal and its people wanting new systems that we can trust because they work against oppression instead of fostering it. Look at the way MaidSAFE is organized.
Its not really a corporate model. Organizations that don’t want sunshine and don’t want open source won’t have a choice. Its already happening with technology, look at the way Microsoft is being presented in the new Wired spread out today.
James Rickard’s book “The Death of Money,” seems apropos (thread in other section) This guy’s whole vision comes down to squeezing the middle class to death and finding ways to tax the poor. He really thinks the role of other people who are not rich is to act as shock absorbers for people who are. He doesn’t believe in liberty for everyone, its all about liberty for the few made possible by getting rid of it for everyone else. This type of mentality is sinking in with the average person, and they know this arrogance is made possible by info asymmetry. For Rickard its all about crowd control, the answer to his group’s insecurity is always taking what in the days before agriculture amounted to food prep time and turning it into 8 to 16 hrs of drudgery for less and less pay. They don’t want the corporate austerity bullshit anymore. People have to suck it up so fat cats can have more luxury. I keep thinking of Brit elites saying their youth were just being lazy when they rioted and picked up criminal records because as the kids said they had not future anyways. The Brit elites insisted on their getting exemplary sentences, they can’t seem to see the lights in the tunnel.
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If everything is everybody’s business, then everything is everyone’s business, and that includes all of your private information, because you do business with entities that are required to be transparent. If everything is transparent you have no privacy.
Target, Home Depot, Michaels, Albertsons, and a very long list of other entities where forced to be transparent in recent months and as a result there is a good chance I can find most anybody’s credit card number on TOR. Woo Hoo for transparency!
We are off topic. This is a pointless argument as what will be will be… And there is no censoring it… Breeches in privacy are largely offensive… What you wish upon others will eventually oppress yourself.
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You always have personal privacy - what you don’t share is kept to yourself by default. It is who and when you do share information that things get interesting.
As the group with access to information grows, the security of that data becomes more and more at risk. The web of trust grows. If it is potentially damaging information, even more so.
This is as it should be too - the weight of burden then falls on the data owners to convince others to keep it secret. If the ability to leak anonymously and quickly becomes easier, the cost to retain the web of trust increases - this is an equaliser; a way to ensure that secrets cannot make the few rich at the expense of the many.
Currently, the rich fall back on the state and the laws they influence both in creation and implementation. This is incompatible with a distributed system, as it clearly centralises power. Giving people the ability to short circuit this hierarchy redistributes the power to influence the outcome.
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