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...everyone knows child porn is bad. It's existence though, does not negate the usefulness of a system. Not that cryptosphere is going to be the open government

...everyone knows child porn is bad. It's existence though, does not negate the usefulness of a system. Not that cryptosphere is going to be the open government revolution, but your comment is a useless vomit of emotional blather.

api 14y ago
Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? Hard problem. Trying to solve it would be interesting. Not trying to solve it would make you identical to FreeNet and Tor and all the other efforts in this area, and thus less interesting. I agree that there is no 100% solution to this problem, since all data can be converted to any format. There is also no 100% solution to pollution in a city, for example, or public health, or usability of a GUI. But there are 90% solutions that could make the problem marginal rather than severe. BTW, on my "emotional vomit:" Tell me. If these networks are for real human beings to engage in open communication, what happens when one of these real human beings comes across... say... a picture of a little girl being cooked over an open fire like a pig. (I didn't see this, but I was discussing the Tor .onion network on Reddit and someone claimed they came across this. I believe them.) Do you really think that person is going to return to this network to discuss... say... politics or economics or their local election? It is a problem. To strip away the "emotional vomit," let's call it a usability problem. How do we make a freenet that is usable for non-psychopaths? Edit: what I'm really saying is this: Freenets have been done. It's a solved problem. Add some PK crypto and some hashing and some onion routing and shake. What isn't a solved problem is: make a darknet/freenet that your mom would feel comfortable using. Make one that your average person -- maybe one with kids and thus really turned off by CP -- would want to one-click install from the Mac app store and browse. THAT would make a serious political impact. Now you'd have hordes of average people using an utterly uncensorable chat system that was also hard to data-mine and tie to identity. Right now, most people are going to start browsing the offerings that already exist (Tor is pretty easy to set up) and see stuff like "world's largest archive of hard-core lolita!", close the app, delete it, and never return. That's why these networks are not very popular, and it severely limits their political impact.
- user49598 14y ago
  The problem is thinking that there is a way. You can't. Data can easily be obfuscated. As long as bits are flowing through your machine from sources that you don't control, you could be middle man to anything.
  - davorak 14y ago
    API stated it was a hard problem. Hard problems dealing with cryptography can take years and some times produce PhDs when they are cracked. It is easy to tell it is a hard problem, it is hard to say for sure it is not possible. If you have done the hard work of show it impossible please share and save others from repeating your work.
    - user49598 14y ago
      This isn't about cryptography, this is about what data can be pulled out of bits transfered through your computer. There is no requisite that they be encrypted, they can be obfuscated, hidden, or just not recognizable as illegal to you. There is no way for you to verify that a collection of bits, put on your computer by a 3rd party, does not in fact represent something illegal. You would have to have access to every existing and theoretical encoding, encryption and obfuscation technique, and use them in every theoretical combination to verify such a thing.
    - api 14y ago
      There is at least one free Ph.D thesis topic in this thread. I think solving this problem and creating a darknet that most people would want to use would be at least as impactful as the development of Bitcoin. People said that was impossible too.
    - ktizo 14y ago
      The hard work has already been done and it is easy to demonstrate the problem and the impossibility of telling 'good data' from 'bad data', assuming the system is cryptographically secure, as by definition a cryptographically secure system resists analysis of content. Consider the problem of one time pads. If I have two messages the same length, one made of 'good data' and the other consisting of 'bad data' and I encode them both with different one time pads, then it is possible for the resulting ciphertext version of each message to be identical. Another way of putting this is that for any given ciphertext that has been properly encoded with a one time pad, the only information available about the plaintext is the length of the message (assuming you know already that a one time pad was used) and nothing else.
crusso 14y ago
I disagree. I found his post to be very informative. I like the idea of an encrypted anonymous network precisely because I have this romantic notion of people of the world sharing important information with each other that can't be stopped or even tracked by governments or big corporations. If the reality is that my contribution of resources to a project mostly just benefits a bunch of child-porn creators doing horrible things to innocent human beings, then I have to admit that my romantic notion is naive and behave correspondingly. Sometimes you just can't have nice things because the worst members of society will criminally abuse them.

api 14y ago

Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? Hard problem. Trying to solve it would be interesting. Not trying to solve it would make you identical to FreeNet and Tor and all the other efforts in this area, and thus less interesting. I agree that there is no 100% solution to this problem, since all data can be converted to any format. There is also no 100% solution to pollution in a city, for example, or public health, or usability of a GUI. But there are 90% solutions that could make the problem marginal rather than severe. BTW, on my "emotional vomit:" Tell me. If these networks are for real human beings to engage in open communication, what happens when one of these real human beings comes across... say... a picture of a little girl being cooked over an open fire like a pig. (I didn't see this, but I was discussing the Tor .onion network on Reddit and someone claimed they came across this. I believe them.) Do you really think that person is going to return to this network to discuss... say... politics or economics or their local election? It is a problem. To strip away the "emotional vomit," let's call it a usability problem. How do we make a freenet that is usable for non-psychopaths? Edit: what I'm really saying is this: Freenets have been done. It's a solved problem. Add some PK crypto and some hashing and some onion routing and shake. What isn't a solved problem is: make a darknet/freenet that your mom would feel comfortable using. Make one that your average person -- maybe one with kids and thus really turned off by CP -- would want to one-click install from the Mac app store and browse. THAT would make a serious political impact. Now you'd have hordes of average people using an utterly uncensorable chat system that was also hard to data-mine and tie to identity. Right now, most people are going to start browsing the offerings that already exist (Tor is pretty easy to set up) and see stuff like "world's largest archive of hard-core lolita!", close the app, delete it, and never return. That's why these networks are not very popular, and it severely limits their political impact.

user49598 14y ago
The problem is thinking that there is a way. You can't. Data can easily be obfuscated. As long as bits are flowing through your machine from sources that you don't control, you could be middle man to anything.
- davorak 14y ago
  API stated it was a hard problem. Hard problems dealing with cryptography can take years and some times produce PhDs when they are cracked. It is easy to tell it is a hard problem, it is hard to say for sure it is not possible. If you have done the hard work of show it impossible please share and save others from repeating your work.
  - user49598 14y ago
    This isn't about cryptography, this is about what data can be pulled out of bits transfered through your computer. There is no requisite that they be encrypted, they can be obfuscated, hidden, or just not recognizable as illegal to you. There is no way for you to verify that a collection of bits, put on your computer by a 3rd party, does not in fact represent something illegal. You would have to have access to every existing and theoretical encoding, encryption and obfuscation technique, and use them in every theoretical combination to verify such a thing.
  - api 14y ago
    There is at least one free Ph.D thesis topic in this thread. I think solving this problem and creating a darknet that most people would want to use would be at least as impactful as the development of Bitcoin. People said that was impossible too.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    The hard work has already been done and it is easy to demonstrate the problem and the impossibility of telling 'good data' from 'bad data', assuming the system is cryptographically secure, as by definition a cryptographically secure system resists analysis of content. Consider the problem of one time pads. If I have two messages the same length, one made of 'good data' and the other consisting of 'bad data' and I encode them both with different one time pads, then it is possible for the resulting ciphertext version of each message to be identical. Another way of putting this is that for any given ciphertext that has been properly encoded with a one time pad, the only information available about the plaintext is the length of the message (assuming you know already that a one time pad was used) and nothing else.

crusso 14y ago

I disagree. I found his post to be very informative. I like the idea of an encrypted anonymous network precisely because I have this romantic notion of people of the world sharing important information with each other that can't be stopped or even tracked by governments or big corporations. If the reality is that my contribution of resources to a project mostly just benefits a bunch of child-porn creators doing horrible things to innocent human beings, then I have to admit that my romantic notion is naive and behave correspondingly. Sometimes you just can't have nice things because the worst members of society will criminally abuse them.