Tim May wrote:
At 3:06 PM -0800 1/11/98, Adam Back wrote:
News spool services are already showing signs of getting into this "Usenet censorship" business in a bigger way. Some news spool services honor cancellations (and some don't). Some don't carry the "sensitive" newsgroups. And so on. Nothing in their setup really exempts them from child porn prosecutions--no more so than a bookstore or video store is exempted, as the various busts of bookstores and whatnot show, including the "Tin Drum" video rental case in Oklahoma City.
There is no market-based reason for a general-purpose news server to store a file once it is known it is illegal or even offensive and someone puts any serious amount of pressure on them. You end up needing to steganographically protect your data in the usenet stream, yet then you have to resort to security through obscurity, which royally sucks if you have published source :) You could use some kind of cryptographically steganographically protected data, such that you need a secret key to know stegoed data exists, but then knowing which files to extract becomes a pain -- your server needs to try to extract on *everything*. True, this also solves part of the TA problem (while making the other parts far worse) :) But it really hammers the servers, and makes it unlikely they'll continue to let you access them. You could then foil this by using a bunch of tentacles to pull in data, but this increases complexity and security vulnerability.
The solution I am using is to keep reposting articles via remailers. Have agents which you pay to repost. This presents the illusion of
This of course doesn't scale at all well. It is semi-OK for a tiny, sparse set of reposted items, but fails utterly for larger database sets. (If and when Adam's reposted volumes begin to get significant, he will be viewed as a spammer. :-) )
Yes. This (and the URN issue) was one of the initial reasons why I doubted the functionality of his Eternity implementation if it ever became popular. One of MIT's news admins was actually vehemently opposed to this "abuse of usenet", and implied he would go out of his way to not carry such articles. E-DDS should scale well because everyone involved is trying to make a profit.
- CD-ROMS made of Eternity files and then sold or distributed widely
This is an interesting suggestion, but surely would open the distributor up for liability, especially if copyright software were amongst the documents. Were you thinking of
The CD-ROM distribution is just a side aspect, to get some set of data widely dispersed. For example, if the data base is of "abortion" or "euthanasia" information (a la Hemlock Society), which various parties want suppressed, then handing out freebie CD-ROMs is one step.
Many examples of this: Samizdats in Russia, crypto/PGP diskettes handed out at conferences (was Ray Arachelian doing this several years ago?), and various religious and social tracts. Obviously, this is what broadsheets and fliers are designed to do. Self-publishing in general.
If the intent is to collect money for the data base accesses, then of course other considerations come into play.
(Critical to these "Eternity" things is a good model of the customers, the reasons for the data, etc.)
My implementation allows flexibility -- someone pays for every scarce resource, yes, but it does not have to always be the same person. There will hopefully evolve to be people willing to speculate in data, storing it for free in exchange for a cut, others willing to pay the cost of putting their own data up and making access free up to a certain point, etc. I like CD-ROM distribution. My discman carried munitions, as well as music, recently, on the same disc.
(* I say "working" in the sense that the concept was very easy to demonstrate just by using PGP and remailers. Not much more than what I demonstrated in 1993 would be needed to deploy a real system. Except for one thing: true digital cash. Not the bullshit one-way-traceable stuff that Chaum and others are now pushing, but the original, online-cleared or escrow-cleared form, a la the work of Goldberg et. al. For some of these applications, below, simple token- or coupon-based schemes might work adequately.)
There are currently-under-development systems which will meet the digital cash requirement, from people who I consider highly respectable and competent. Yes, blacknet is a perfect model of a distributed high-latency system. However, to get a system which will actually be useful to end users requires quite a bit more than just storing data -- services like reporting on the reliability of data, allowing easy access to data by third parties, etc. are all pretty essential. Cypherpunks may find blacknet highly useful, but most end users want something that works like the web, or like a database, which is the primary advantage of the current "Eternity" systems.
How these models will work using existing infrastructure (Usenet, remailers, Web proxies, etc.) depends on some factors. It might be useful to consider some benchmark applications, such as:
1. Anonymous purchase of financially important data. (A good example being the Arbitron ratings for radio markets...subscription to Arbitron is quite expensive, and posting of results on Usenet is prosecuted by Arbitron. A good example of a BlackNet market.)
2. Anonymous purchase of long articles, e.g., encycopedia results...
(I'm not sure there's still a market for this....)
3. Anonymous purchase of "term papers." (A thriving market for ghostwritten articles...already migrating to the Web, but lacking adequate anonymizing methods.)
This is an example of a very large data base (all term papers on file) which cannot possibly by distributed feasibly by Usenet.
And so on...lots of various examples.
The whole Eternity thing is interesting, but we haven't made a lot of progress, it seems to me. (I distributed a proposal a bit similar to what Ross Anderson was proposing, a proposal more oriented toward making a _persistent_ Web URL for academics and lawyers to reliably cite, with less of the "404--File Not Found" sorts of messages, the things which make the Web largely unusable for academic and scientific citations.)
Yes, having a persistent URN is highly useful. Adam's implementation kind of solves this, and I have not yet come up with a solution to it -- it would be easy to do a pretty simple persistent URL, but having something which would allow indexing to be something other than a web-search-engine style kludge is more difficult. I've been reading some papers on the topic.
It is also likely in the extreme that a working Eternity service will quickly be hit with attackers of various sorts who want to test the limits of the service, or who want such services shut down.
I agree with this prediction. Remailers have seen this pattern, with `baiting' of operators, and apparently people posting controversial materials and reporting the materials to the SPA or others themselves, etc.
Yep, it's hard to disagree with this. Any centralized "Eternity service" will be hit with various kinds of attacks in quick order.
Building a data base, as Ryan comments seem to indicate he is mostly interested in doing, is the least of the concerns.
I think perhaps this is inaccurate. I am interested in being able to subsume the functionality of a database for some applications, but I'm trying to build something more like a distributed active agents system. A database implies a single central design -- this would be more a medium in which people could place databases, agents, etc.
--Tim May
The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
-- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/