-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tom Womack wrote:
Ross Anderson wrote:
A virtual datahaven could be constructed eaily provided you knew how to index controversial matter.
Publish the rude things about the Prophet Mohammed on a server in Israel, the anti-Serb rants in Croatia, the kiddyporn in Sweden, the violence in America, the Nazi hate speech in Syria and the anti-scientology stuff in Germany.
I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere; national-security stuff can be handled provided you've got a complete list of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
Tom
Additionally, you could have the Fahd family annoyed by this stuff in Israel, post the names of all the Mossad agents to the same server, and have the server have an accident. You would need to go beyond "indexing" to "enforcement" if you wanted to make it safe for people to run open datahavens. True, you could still do this regulatory arbitrage thing by having datahaven owners look at the data, see if they can store it, then price it based on how safe it would be for them to store it -- that's the kind of thing a market-based Eternity service would include (as well as people with different levels of risk tolerance being willing to take more dangerous data, ephermeal servers, etc.). A market-based system can overcome just about everything -- it will take into account the regulatory climate, political connections, size of the site, etc. The problem is that if you encrypt everything such that server operators don't know what it is, you're "selling them a bill of goods", so they don't really have the chance to correctly price their data. Plus, they have no way of knowing even if the data is unencrypted that your list of the sins of the prophet do not include a steganographically-encoded list of Mossad agents. You can't assume people in the system will "play fairly" unless there are market reasons for them to do so. Perhaps persistent identities for those committing files? Basically, in the age old contest between arms and armor, arms win every time. BTW, I don't really like the overly negative names for Eternity, like "inferno", or whatever. I like to think my data is *good* data, deserving of a better fate. Elysium, perhaps? Or just use "eternity" in place of "eternityspace" (a word I never should have used, since it means the same thing), as in "upload these files to eternity", "the collection of files currently stored in eternity", etc. Little danger of confusion with pedestrian meanings of the word eternity, too, I think, and there is no real reason to draw a distinction between eternity the location for documents and eternity the overall system for creating such a space. - -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNLuNb6wefxtEUY69AQE/Xgf8C/y82HnErTwi5UniP6oIW/4nVnlxfGyM BJZeKPb7vwK8AOdzynI+6Mj5Acrr/Ojlo9OiaBzBavVAPqvA9VcEeKeB45erhQEQ SxXwKDQL2/EBxlIM/pJkmUuggg3/7HJ1UugO6qtKIq2cKgsdLZhqKlyWpxVSdEwa JN4eC3cz3iFeUUZmeDG0Rpk4YWcXDmeKP31l0EfU6SQ2uIiOAmlX7PLdRh6rgTIW 4GbyYZRPEuQRUJ3RAqIRFExMgEXvZ1CsYsvrolJCDxcF5sluZpOCM8WolGhwpCBj HI4Zl1QofMEOojoLhEZ4jV4/uTf9VrKisYSeEEGBewnm3DOAuu1PyA== =AvF+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----