[117739] in Cypherpunks
black designs (Re: Once you go black, you'll never go back)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Back)
Thu Sep 9 17:15:50 1999
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 21:56:15 +0100
Message-Id: <199909092056.VAA22343@server.cypherspace.org>
To: tcmay@got.net
From: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Cc: eternity@internexus.net
In-reply-to: <v0313030bb3fc48c58eae@[207.111.241.123]> (message from Tim May
on Wed, 8 Sep 1999 10:16:08 -0700)
Reply-To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Tim writes:
> > [news report of guy in UK gets prosecuted for distributing porn in
> > US, by yet another extraterritorial legal decision]
>
> Which is why "our" approach (remailers, nyms, data havens, digital cash,
> etc.) has the advantages it does.
>
> [...]
>
> The longterm solution for the British porn site operator--if there's a
> future in Internet porn sites at all--and for other purveyers of sensitive
> material is to "go black."
Indeed.
(btw. I do reckon there is a future for porn sites -- these people
must make money, a few months ago in there UK was a report of someone
who was put out of business who was taking 1.5 million pounds / year
(~2.5 million US$) selling porn access. Was charging 60,000 users 25
a year each or something like that if I recall.)
> Counting on regulatory arbitrage over technical solutions is not a viable
> long term strategy. Especially not as states become increasing desperate.
> Whether the sensitive material is abortion information, Holocaust denial
> literature, money laundering services, pornography, military reports,
> whatever, only technical means will protect those involved.
I have a couple of designs in progress, which perhaps people could
comment on. (Bear in mind this is crude first cut stuff, but you've
got to start somewhere to have something concrete to think about.)
Consider we have a number of internet nodes serving fixed size (say
10k) blobs of encrypted data via http. Each blobs has a unique
blob-id.
There seem to me to be 3 basic approaches to locating information:
1. distribute the data according to blob-id prefix. Number the
servers 0..n-1, place blob-ids at server (blob-id mod n). Have some
redundancy so there are multiple servers with the same server-id.
Then locating data is simple, just pick a server at random from the
list of servers sharing server-id.
Apparently some smart caches and high performance proxies do something
like this based on document hash.
2. have a URL server which maps virtual document URLs to server-id and
blob-ids. Either user distributes data as they see fit, or servers
self organise and keep random data, or use LRU cache replacement
policy.
Ian Goldberg & David Wagner's TAZ does something like this -- the TAZ
is a virtual URL database. (Their rewebber is chained encrypted
URLs). (See link from www.cypherspace.org).
3. have a web of servers which will request information from each
other, where the web is organised however the operators see fit, or
using some agreed network structure. You make a request from any node
and it returns it if it has it
Freenet (see link from www.cypherspace.org) proposes to do something
like this. Not sure of status on freenet project either freenet list
has gone dead or I have become unsubscribed.
Obviously there are lots of design permutations that could be tried.
Adam
