Slashdot Mirror
Publius
Ukiah writes: "Publius is a Web publishing system that is highly resistant to censorship and provides publishers with a high degree of anonymity. Publius was the pen name used by the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison." Check out the system's home page or a Washington Post story. I just volunteered to host a server, so be sure to load up the system with bootleg Metallica mp3's - your chance to send a Slashdot author to jail, not something you get to do every day...
This is the vulnerable point in every such scheme I've seen. The "recipe" which gives you the decrypted data has to be held in an identifiable location, and that location is therefore vulnerable to being shut down. Whilst the law seems pretty undecided on whether HTML linking is equivalent to publication, I'm pretty certain that this much more specialised kind of link is going to be counted as the publication. A better way of describing it might be as the "key" to the data. Either way, thats the weak link in the whole scheme.
On the subject of the various forms of abuse, any system which can withstand the unfriendly attentions of a dictatorship will be wide open to this kind of abuse, because our police have to abide by civil liberties while those in a dictatorship can ignore them. Hence if you can use it to publish banned data in a dictatorship then you can always use it to publish banned data in a democracy.
The real way around this problem is to site the servers in democracies and then design protocols to make it very difficult to block access from the dictatorships short of shutting down foreign access altogether. This is probably best done through proxy servers that tunnel secure data through HTTP.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
This won't work. It won't work because there's no deniability.
/.? The XOR-based system? That had deniability. Consider:
Remeber the last anti-censorship system on
Alice wants to share scientology secrets with the world. Alice looks around, finds Bob's chunk of random data, and XORs the scientology secrets with Bob's data. (In a real situation, she would also use Barry's, Bonnie's, and Billy's, but let's keep it simple). Then she gets her friend Christine to publish to usenet (or whatever) "Hey look: Alice xor Bob = Secrets!"
Helena Kobrin (scientology lawyer) drags Alice and Bob. Alice says "I put random data up, Bob XORed Scientology secrets with my data." Bob says "I put random data up, Alice XORed Scientology secrets with my data." Mathematically, there's no way to tell who did it. There's also an easy way for both Alice and Bob to show that their data is innocent - just have Charlene and Darlene xor bits of the bible with Alice's and Bob's data, respectively, and say "We were just (independently) trying to get the bible into Iran/China/Libya..."
Anyway, this "Eternity service" doesn't have anything like that. Here, Kobrin will say "Is there anything else that this data could have been?" and "Could these have been key shares to any other data?" Alice will have to say "No."
At best, Alice is an ISP - and under the DMCA, she'll have to take it down until it's proved non-infringing (never). In the XOR system, all she needs is Charlene to prove it's innocent.
That's my 2 cents, anyhow.
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
(emphasis mine)
It looks like this was designed to specifically avoid mp3s and pr0n. Probably, they wanted this to be more similar to the original, anonymous federalist papers in that it is more intended for writings that may be offensive to the government of the writers' respective countries. Of course, in the U.S. it will probably just fill up with instructions for bombs and drugs. But one of the prices you pay if you host anonymously is that you take the chaff together with the wheat.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
You're on to something. This would make a great poll:
:-)
Who would you most like to see in jail?
1) CmdrTaco
2) Hemos
3) michael
4) Jon Katz
5) Roblimo
6) Janet Reno
7) Bill Gates
8) everyone at Intel
9) Jack Straw
10) Metallica
11) Hemos' new wife, CmdrTaco's gf, and Natalie Portman, in a prison shower scene like in "Caged Heat"
12) Cowboy Neal and Whalen Smithers, in a prison shower scene like in "Cellblock Cumpanions"
Of course, poor Jon Katz would win, even though in our hearts we all know we want that prison shower scene with the girls. Except for the ten percent of us who studies say would want to see the Cowboy Neal/Smithers scene...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*