One way blogs - OWBs: Important points: - OWBs are, due to present tech, not anonymous. - They simply provide the possibility that something you write or some document (say an Affidavit) that you upload, cannot be easily attacked by a non-state actor, primarily by virtue of being replicated into a few 'foreign' statutory jurisdictions, and due to the contract, and default tech policies in place in the infrastructure of OWBs. - During normal operation of an OWB node, the only pages or documents that would ever be removed (for THAT node) would be those under an injunction to be removed by a $LOCAL_JURISDICTION court. - Which gives the thought that a blog creator might be provided an option to self-assess the nature of his blog as to its content, in particular so that nodes in other jurisdictions can choose to only auto-mirror content which is lawful in their own local jurisdiction - this might even be needed for (no tech) folks to be comfortable with deploying an OWB node. - Arguably it could be considered implicit that any OWB blog page could potentially come under court injunction to be removed (in local jurisdiction) - and this is the foundation cause of the OWB concept - however this doesn't really add much since this is true of all media published everywhere anyway, although naming this concept AS a foundation cause, might help steer folk's' thoughts in this direction, which might be useful to their conscientiousness around their speech and their rights in relation to speech. Notes: Most folks these days use FaceBook or Twitter as their blog platform to "talk to the world", e.g. by creating a FaceBook "Group", and also YouTube. The problem with these legacy platforms is that they censor, ban, and shut it down if you get a little too popular or some "lefty" complains. Could an auto-mirrored multi-jurisdictional platform be more censorship resistant "for Joe Bloggs"? Is it worth creating? Depends on the effort I guess... The infrastructure is probably something like: - a VM/VPS - ssh - git - user db - sync scripts, push and/or pull depending on peer conf - OWB software/platform - tor - web server to deploy blog as .onion html site and the only parts to develop are the sync scripts, user db and OWB stuff. Sync: - rsync - git push/pull - custom jobs or bundles, say each new blog entry (or update) becomes a bundle (possibly with a separate descriptor/meta file if that's useful to assist sync rules) which can be pushed or pulled - multiple bundles can be streamed - this sounds an aweful lot like a deficient git, most custom such things needs to really need to have a clearly defined benefit over the status quo (git) to be worth doing at all Scalability: - If it becomes a popular "media/blog" platform, say when the first "one way blog" goes viral in the face of a $LOCAL_JURISDICTION failed shut it down attempt, potentially 10s or thousands of bloggers might find themselves inclined to deploy/use it. - Anything on such a scale (not wikipedia scale, but certainly not small) wants to be not bound into a single git repo. - So per-blog or per-user "blog sync repos". - This also facilitates "archival" of older/ inactive blogs - we only want to sync active blogs, i.e. those with updates. - I'm familiar with the git remotes rules for bidirectional sync, which can also be made to work for more than 2 peers. - I'm not yet particularly familiar with git subrepo/ submodule/ subtree. https://github.com/ingydotnet/git-subrepo Let's say this gets to say 500,000 OWBs after a few years of popularity - how do we minimize the pain of getting to that point? What technical/ design choices do we need to make today to make such a target reasonable? One way blogs: - provide ready links to earlier versions of a page (like a wiki, but make sure it's impossible to "bury" old pages) - provide ready access to mirrors, say an entry page which does nothing but link to say a random mirror - should be mutually supportive - if the peer I normally use to add a blog entry is down, any other node should allow me to log in and add an entry to my blog, which should then turn up on other nodes - permalinks? - clearnet links can be provided with ".ws" onion extension - i.e. MyOnionblgwhe309sda.onion.ws But does this just delay pain in a not useful way - i.e. is it better to just push all users and readers to use TBB from the start? Also, for example, last night I did a dark web search and found four links to dark web hosting of one or another sort - the 2 I clicked on (within TBB) each went to the .ws site; as a brief test I deleted the ".ws" and neither site came up - tried this a few times then tried "new circuit" - nothing! So those 2 sites came up on the ".ws" version of the onion, but not on the onion version of the onion site. Such inconsistent experience is effectively an attack vector - sort of like a crypto algorithm downgrade attack, but it's an "access visibility attack" (to reduce the relative privacy/ plausible deniability when reading or adding to a blog).