On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]> 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
