On 23/12/10 19:52, Len Sassaman wrote: [snip]

...

The critical Eternity Service (and Freenet) issue of hosts being ignorant of the data that they carry will be important in resisting more legal attacks.

I'm not sure we should get hung up on that; that argument always stuck me as "legal cleverness" of the sort judges laugh at.

Fair point. I'm equally dubious of legal arguments that treat "beyond reasonable doubt" too mathematically. (Even in those locations where "beyond reasonable doubt" holds.) Having said that, this approach forces an all-or-nothing approach on the legal system. If you can't reasonably link a person to a given chunk of data then your only option is a blanket ban of the system.

If the purpose of this platform is to disseminate documents in the public interest, which happen to upset some legal entities be they corporations or governments, the "public interest" argument is what's going to keep them online, imo.

Public interest will work as a /mechanism/ if you rely on wide distribution of data. As a legal argument in the "first amendment" sense, though, you're limited to places with first amendments. :) It seems to me that, from an anti-censorship perspective, keeping the system ignorant of the location of given data prevents targeted technical, as well as legal, attacks. On the other hand you might consider broad distribution to make that a moot point.

Further, "But I don't technically know what I'm hosting" isn't going to change Amazon's mind when they want to pull the plug on you.

With hosting companies almost always having "we can disconnect you for no reason" clauses, this attacker is too strong to take on anyway. As I said above, though, you can at least force an all-or-nothing policy. Joss _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE