Comment by wikitopian

4 years ago

In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call.

I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?

There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.

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wikitopian

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pixl97  4 years ago

You are free to make a decentralized crypto-driven platform filled with nazi's. What you're ignoring is there are very valid reasons these platforms don't exist. They become deplorable crapsack worlds that 'normies' will not visit. It is never going to have any mainstream popularity. "Oh, you're on that nazi child porn software". And it requires a massive amount of moderation to ensure such a form does not become a complete hellhole (see failures of NNTP).

When you pull your crypto driven system out of the light, you are going to have to fight what lives in the dark. If you screwed up the protocol of your system and it's taken over, well it's gone, you exist outside the law and there are no means to get it back. Do a bunch of trolls with stolen crypto generation means exist on your network and flood out all the legitimate users, well too bad.

Civil society exists between the authoritarians that want dominion over everything and those that embrace chaos and would leave the world in ruin. It is a delicate and imperfect balance, but where it exists allows humanity to flourish.

  • wikitopian  4 years ago

    The tor dark web already exists and everybody knows what goes on there. There are already decentralized crypto-driven naming services.

    Merely improving the tor network's name resolution has nothing to do with your grand philosophical argument against internet freedom.

    • pixl97  4 years ago

      I believe we're arguing past each other. What I'm saying is there is no business model (one is even needed for free projects like the linux kernel) that motivates people to spend this effort. The people with the technical know how and desire to obtain the materials on it already use it. Beyond that group there is little motivation to expand such network, civil society tends to operate in the open.

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