Re: [Social-discuss] Censorship

[Dan Brickley]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Andrew Gray <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm a strong believer in free speech, and the free exchange of data.
> Censorship is an issue that came to mind when I was thinking about the
> future of GNU Social.
+1

> Who has the power to censor data? In short, the person who distributes
> it.
>
> Several methods of data conveyance have been proposed on this list. I
> (rather naively and indirectly) proposed an extremely decentralized
> system of data distribution: ultimately, your profile and data comes
> directly from you. Encrypt before sending, and it bounces amongst
> friends of friends until arriving at its final location, where it can be
> decrypted and viewed. This is rather impractical, with a sharp increase
> in bandwidth among other things, but would provide essentially a
> Freenet-like system or censorship resistance.
>
> Another proposed method is to have various repositories of data, by
> means of an XMPP or similar server containing the data of its immediate
> users. This is much more practical, but raises a question in my mind.
>
> What if a given university wants to provide a GNU Social server for its
> students? Suddenly, the university has the power to censor any and all
> data that ends up on it, because it is distributing the data.

I'd suggest having a principle that identifiers should be portable and
associated with domain names that users can control/own. I believe
XMPP supports this level of indirection via DNS; if you put certain
structures in your DNS, you can express a delegation to commercial
services eg. GTalk without that transient commitment to google (or
your university) being encoded in your friends' buddylist entries.

cheers,

Dan