On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Ted Smith
It's "censorship-free" in the sense that a nation-state can't effectively block their citizens from using Lantern.
So, it's a censorship-free centralized distribution system, as opposed to a censorship-proof decentralized publishing system like Freenet.
And it's centralized, so as soon as the central authority (the satellites) are compromised, the whole system is owned.
IMO this is a neat first step -- it's not the whole way, but it's getting there. Now we just need Freenet or similar on decentralized microsats.
The only thing you'll ever get from space is whatever whoever owns the satnet wants you to see. The idea that people are just going to be able to bounce their own unregulated networks off transponders for free as in freedom is ridiculous unless you own your cube and all means of its control. Hint: not going to happen, let alone at any reasonable price point. If its that freedom you want today, go spend $100 and wire/wifi your residence to two of your neighbors and run CJDNS, etc on top of it. Repeat until you cover the globe in an individually segment owned meshnet, anonymized and encrypted on top for censorship resistance. Use whichever layer you want therein, the clear or anon one. It is the strict individual ownership and private peering of individual sized components of the network that keeps you free from all realistic physical/legal controls. And self-reinforcing deployment of encryption and anonymity that gives you freedom to share whatever data and thoughts you want with others and others with you... beyond just what you and your two neighbors might like chatting about. The greater percent of any network you cede to groupthink, groupbuy, and groupcontrol the less freedom you have. Launching and running shit in space involves a lot of freedom robbing group*. Homework: Do the math on number of residences / land parcels in your country. See how $100 in wire/wifi and router ports from each of them compares to the cost for each to truly own their own sat and sat link. Figure in launches, electricity, replacement, adversary HERF/laser attacks on the sats, millions of individual sat nodes colliding with stuff, network redundancy achieved, stability and speed of local wire in the ground, etc. Even at $500 to $1000 worth of onetime or amortized costs I'd bet wire/wifi guerrilla nets still win.