Re: [freenet-chat] Thoughts about Freenet

[Sam Joseph]

Adam Langley wrote: > On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 11:06:42PM +0900, Sam Joseph wrote: > > Perhaps we might be able to agree that child porn requires the abuse of > > minors, since we don't consider them able to give consent to take part > > in the creation of the pornography. I don't know if everyone agrees, > > but isn't child porn the product of child abuse? > People who go for child porn are sick IMHO. But just because I > disagree with it doesn't mean it should be controled. The only reason > for controling it is because of what you have to put the children > through to get it. > But I'm not prepared to give up so much (free speech, etc, etc) just > to control child porn. Fair enough. > > nodes, but it strikes me that in order to promote free speech, we could > > have a Freenet system that only held text files, and didn't support > > image or sound files. > That's unworkable. Text files are data. Images are data. No system can > ever stop people from writing a JPEG->Text converter which encodes > pictures in text. No filter can even keep up and stop such converters > without banning all text files. Okay. I didn't consider UUencoding. However it wouldn't seem to difficult to filter based on statistical analysis of text. Text in English (or indeed in other alphabet-based languages) has a certain statistical character which UUEncoding does not. If one wanted to provide a service that only supported text and not images, you could filter on this basis. Now perhaps this would merely start an arms race whereby more sophisticated UUencoders were developed that displayed the same statistical properties as normal text, but I get the impression that the encoded files would have to become larger and larger in order to store the image encoding. One could then place a limit on the size of text to upload ... I guess I am proposing more and more complex schemes which would be difficult to implement, but it's interesting that Freenet (to my knowledge) treats all files as equal. If a large file gets requested 3 times and a small file gets requested 3 times, which one gets deleted first from the different caches they end up in? One might be able to show that if large files were always deleted preferentially (when deleting became necessary for space constraints) and that images were forces to take up even more space than they do now then we would be making things harder for the child pornographers without making things harder for those people who wanted freedom of speech? Child porn seems pretty unpleasant to me, seems like we might want to make some effort to restrict its availability while we are busy defending human rights through Freedom of Speech. CHEERS> SAM _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/chat