AT&T Labs Backs Publius, A Freenet-Like System

joseph writes: "This article on C|Net announces Publius, a system similar to Freenet, meant to battle censorship on the Internet. What makes this approach interesting is its backing from AT&T Labs. Of particular interest in the article are the safeguards against the common opposition to such projects, like their use for piracy. Publius features no search utility and a maximum file size of 100k."

Comments

Censorship on Publius

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article: In order to reach a file, a Publius surfer must have access to the file's complicated URL. The Publius project will provide a list of files it considers interesting, but this will not include music, pornography or anything else deemed "uninteresting."

This strikes me as a serious shortcoming. Since it's not searchable, you can only get a file if you got the URL through other channels--in which case, you could just get the file itself through those same channels. Unless, of course, the project includes the URL in their directory--which itself exposes them to legal sanctions (eg court orders to remove certain URLs from directory), so they might as well just host the file directly. Publius does have some nice redundancy features, but that seems to be its only advantage.

Either a medium is censorable or it's not. You can't give yourself the ability to censor porn, without also giving yourself the ability to censor political speech.

Re:Censorship on Publius

[Mike Schiraldi]

You can't give yourself the ability to censor porn, without also giving yourself the ability to censor political speech.

Or without giving someone else the ability to get a court to order you to censor political speech.
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Re:Censorship on Publius

[Borealis]

If it's searchable then you can legally pursue folks that have it on their systems. Note that they don't say they won't host certain files, just that the publius project will only list "interesting" files. I assume that you can still add and retrieve files regardless of content.

My (admittedly limited) knowledge of freenet leads me to believe that it operates on a similar principal, if you don't know the file key then you can't retrieve it (or it'll be that way when they get to .3).

The file size limitation does seem somewhat arbitrary though. What's to prevent you from breaking a large file into several smaller files? It's a merely inconvenient method to try to suppress warez. You could even use the 100k file format to store a list of Publius URLs and then use a client program to download all the fragments listed.

Re:Censorship on Publius

[Borealis]

IMO the guessability of the key is irrelevant. For a document to be accessed, the key must be known. For contentious files (like MP3) there will be warez channels that post the URLs or keys. All anybody has to do is find out where the URL/key is being listed and you have access.

The central goal of both Freenet and Publius is to make documents available. Thus spending time obsfucating documents beyond the simple idea of not being able to explicitely know what's on your system is relatively pointless (as access info will have to be made public to be used).

Re:Censorship on Publius

[Ketzer]

Hopefully, some third party will make a search engine that indexes the URLs, or the existing search engines will index them. It's really only about giving people a place to host their free speech. Once you've posted, you should have your own URL, and you're free to plug that wherever you want. (Be it Slashdot or Yahoo or television commercials, whatever.)

(Ab)Using Publius as a fully distributed agent

[substrate]

The 100K limitation can be bypassed if you use an automated system on top of a Publius client. Consider some large package of data, say the source code to MozillaR16.

You create a gzipped tar file of MozillaR16, MozillaR16.tar.gz. You use a simple utility to seperate it out into 100K pieces:

piece00000 through piece99999 (10 gigs of data there, in 100K pieces!)

If you abandoned these on Publius they'd be useless, there's no information on reassembling them into a whole and unless you're very careful there can be ambiguity in what fragment of the archive goes with what other fragment of the archive.

You calculate the MD128 hash of each piece and rename it with the hash as part of the information:

MozillaR16-0x01234567012345670123456701234567 and so on.

You append all these filenames into a file

MozillaR16.build

Now if you want the files in MozillaR16 you get the MozillaR16.build file. Your client sends out queries for the various 100K packages that build up MozillaR16.tar.gz.

This could be truely distributed in that there isn't the necessity that any one site contains the whole list of fragments needed to build an archive. You could add in a translation layer so that any individual file is a cross section of the overall archive itself such that by itself it contains little or no information. Think of grabbing 100K bytes of the archive at random and inserting them into files with offset information. Any single file would not contain any distinguishable information. It might be a safety feature against being accused of carrying certain types of information.

Re:Where is the benefit?

[Tet]

When you can get Pink Floyd's Echoes (a good 20+ minute song) in some format (perhaps mp5) and compressed to under 100k, then I'll sit up and take notice :)

Why? Why would you want to use something like Publius for that? If you already own the track, then encode it yourself. If you haven't, then you're only interested in pirating it, right? If you had a legitimate use (e.g., evaluating a band before deciding to buy it) you wouldn't need the full 20 minute epic, and a 2 minute sampler should suffice, and may even fit in the 100K limit at low quality. If you like it, go and buy the CD...

Kilroy

[nowan]

That's a fascinating point, and you may be right. But in MLK's day, how would he have gotten the word out other than being in front waving a standard? For good or ill, this provides another way for people to communicate, and predicting the effect on society is a crap shot.

An interesting analogy, actualy, is the Kilroy story. I'm not familiar w/ the details but (I believe it was during one of the world wars?) the phrase "Kilroy was here" started showing up in bathroom stalls and such all over the world in an entirely anonymous way. Peaple simply saw it in one place, and put it up someplace else. Whatever the reason, it captured people's imagination -- and isn't that all you need to do to effect social change?

Too bad...

[GeorgeH]

Wow, I'd love to use this system to publish the Publius PDF. That way people could anonymously learn how to set up their own censorship resistant networks.

Oh wait, the PDF is 233k...
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Re:Where is the benefit?

[mdecerbo]

I think the name of the system, "Publius", with its ties to the American Revolution, suggests another reason for the 100k limit, besides treading lightly around the RIAA. By not getting bogged down in .mp3-sharing and copyright issues, more attention can be drawn to free speech in the strictest sense-- text, probably political.

But sad to say, plain .TXT is not much of a marketing tool these days. Tom Paine's handprinted manifestos lit the fire of revolution; today, only a multimedia manifesto would catch the public attention. We are a society of Web surfers and couch potatoes. The revolution had better be televized, or it's not gonna fly.

(It's offtopic, but those televised images of the Bosnian prisoner camps that TMiB mentions are a great example. It turns out they were faked (there's an article and even a video with the skinny on how it was done. But they sure built up a lot of sympathy for the Bosnian Muslim separatist movement, didn't they?!)

But pirate radio and TV transmitters are easy to jam and track down. That leaves computers. Freenet is not going to be a speed demon, and Publius will enforce this 100k limit. So the single most important way for people of limited means to disseminate controversial information is, I would argue, the Web. And, in fact, just about any political or controversial group you'd care to name has a Web site by now.

Once the Web becomes truly a mass medium worldwide, I predict that we will soon start seeing national governments go after the Web sites of movements they don't like. Thing is, some of those sites will be backed by other national governments. I wonder what the 'net will look like then. More firewalls like China's? Special agents attacking server rooms? ISP workers getting threatened like judges in South America?

Inaccurate portrayal of freenet

[FreeUser]

No, it is not useless. It is designed for people with a REAL reason for being anonymous, yet wanting to spread information. For example, whistlerblowers, or people in countries with a less than perfect track record of censorship.

Except that, without the ability to do searches, no one will be able to find the material in question. Giving out the precise key is tantamount to publishing, so anonymity is preserved at one level, but possibly compromised at another.

Furthermore, whistleblowers and the like often need audio-visual proof of what has happened, such as audio recordings (ideally compressed with ogg or mp3 format for space), images, and even video footage. How is one going to reasonably publish that kind of important evidence of wrongdoing with a 100K filesize limit? By breaking up the files into 100K chunks? Then why not get rid of that limit to begin with.

It is not designed for pirates who want their MP3's (go to freenet for that sort of stuff).

This is a very unfair characterization of freenet and downright slandorous.

Freenet is intended to do precisely the same thing as publius, with the exception that freenet make no judgement whatsoever about content. Publius may make use of some better algorithms, but has also clearly made policy choices which make it less than ideal for dissidents to skirt censorship (such as the lack of searchability and the filesize limit, and worse: a philosophy of passing judgement on material and what is "fit" to be protected from censorship and what is not, with who deciding such criteria an open question). FreeNet can always adopt better encryption and storage approaches now or in the future, without making the same kinds of misguided compromises.

FreeNet remains IMHO the most promising approach to thwarting censorship of all kinds, today and in the future.

Workaround.

[Christopher Thomas]

Of particular interest in the article are the safeguards against the common opposition to such projects, like their use for piracy. Publius features no search utility and a maximum file size of 100k.

An admirable effort, but this just means that someone will circulate a third-party utility that does indexing and can reassemble fragmented files from 100k packets.

Still, it should cut down on the number of people storing CD images.

Re:Lameness filter?

[Samrobb]

Seriously, if I write a critical article and I point out hard, technical facts to back up my claim there is *ZERO* basis for the suit and it should be thrown out.

Until they haul in UCITA, and show that you couldn't have installed their software without agreeing to their licensing agreement, which happen to prohibit benchmarking, profiling, comparisons, or any other mention of their product without their express permission.

And before you state how silly that is... MS, Oracle, and I'm sure other database vendors routinely put these kind of restrictions in their licenses, today, without having the 1000-pound gorilla of UCITA to back them up. I seem to recall MS, at least, trying to enforce it in one case.

Re:Where is the benefit?

[finkployd]

Agreed, but there is also a perfect method already in place to spread information (well, almost) called FreeNet. Not only does it have search capabilities, but it imposes no limit on what you can spread.

Finkployd

Re:Where is the benefit?

[finkployd]

Wrong, I have a couple hundred MP3s, and all of them downloaded from napster. I also own the equivilant CD for every song on my PC. Why didn't I just rip them myself? I'm lazy. :)

Finkployd

Where is the benefit?

[finkployd]

When you can get Pink Floyd's Echoes (a good 20+ minute song) in some format (perhaps mp5) and compressed to under 100k, then I'll sit up and take notice :)

Seriously, what does this offer over freenet aside from "let's make those whining children over at the RIAA happy" type restrictions? If it's the same as freenet, but with a strict set of rules, then freenet will eventually beat it no matter how much corporate money it has backing it.

Finkployd

Re:Where is the benefit?

[MostlyHarmless]

I suspect that they did so for precisely that reason: To keep out mp3s. The system was designed to be a safeguard for free speech; if someone wanted to speak out against $CAUSE then he could do so without fear of retribution by (corporation, government, cia, pick one). There already is a perfectly good system (several in fact) for trading mp3s, so these guys wanted to focus on issues that, dare I suggest it, matter more in life than music.

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Re:Where is the benefit?

[Borealis]

You're making an assumption that all MP3s are pirate. MP3 is highly effective for any audio data. While I will concede that it currently seems to be primarily used for piracy it's still just a form of media.

Besides, as I note in an earlier post, this is hardly going to stop anybody:

url 1: list of Publius URLs for file fragments 1-19
url 2 through 20 (listed in url 1): MP3 of "They Might Be Giants - Istanbul" in fragments.

Program a client to seek and re-assemble the MP3 based on url 1. It's merely inconvenient (to the point where freenet will probably darwinize this to obscurity) but hardly a showstopper for pirates.

Re:Where is the benefit?

[TMiB]

The 100k limit will keep out MP3s, but it may also stop the system being usable as a free speech tool. Sure, you can express a lot in a 100k text file, but what about photos and videos ?

Given the power and importance of images (remember the Ethiopian famine, Tiananmen square, the Bosnian prisoner camps ?) a mechanism for distributing materials that's limited to 100k just won't work.

Re:Where is the benefit?

[baka_boy]

Compare, for example, FTP and Napster. Both are conceptually similar, but one offered a coherent use and user interface, while the other was an incredibly general tool. Which one got popular notice really quickly, and generated all this attention?

Similarly, Freenet and Publius have similar basic goals and technologies at their core. However, Freenet is an incredibly general system, which could be used for everything from snippets of text to warez and pirated movies. I think Publius may do quite well, if for no other reason than its purpose is easily understandable by the average user, it will probably have a much simpler interface, (especially with strong corporate backing) and there will be less opportunity to shut the whole thing down on the pretense of preventing piracy.

What I really want to know is why AT&T would back a project like this. Where is the gain to them from making anonymous free speech easier? How exactly are they going to answer, say, their Board of Directors, or a shareholders' suit, if someone decides that is could be economically detrimental to them?

Are they serious?

[Mike Schiraldi]

Let's test how serious they are by publishing a list of AT&T calling card numbers :)
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Re:Interesting cryptography

[YoJ]

Without getting into the actual mathematics, let me say that the system of having n shares and you need k of them to reconstruct the message has been worked out. This isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff, this actually works. And it's cool.

Here's a simple example. Suppose we have three servers that store information (n=3). We want to store a number on the servers such that each server individually doesn't know the number, but any two servers taken together are enough to reconstruct the number (k=2). The system we can use is to encode the number as an angle. Draw a line at that angle to horizontal, and choose three random points on the line. Send a single point to each server. Each server knows one point, but it can't figure out the angle of the line. But if you put the information from two servers together, you get two points which lets you draw the original line (and hence figure out the angle and get the information). Of course with bigger n and k you need real cryptographic systems (and not just lines).

This is a GOOD thing

[Upsilon]

I can't believe how many posts I see complaining about the project just because it can't be used to trade warez and mp3s. I find it incredibly hypocritical. Systems like Freenet are often defended because of their legitimate uses include the ability to protect people from being prosecuted by unjust governments, etc. Now we have a system which can do the same thing, but that's about all it can do.

Now, I'm not here to debate the ethics of filesharing. I think there can be a good case made for the legitimacy of mp3s under certain circumstanes, but that's besides the point. Whether or not you believe mp3 sharing is right has nothing to do with whether or not it is illegal. And if it is considered illegal (which it almost certainly will be, seeing how the RIAA 0wnz Congress), then the RIAA can attack systems like Freenet and possibly even get them declared illegal. Now here we have an alternative which can accomplish the legitimate and considerably more important use of Freenet without being attacked by the RIAA.

No search?

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

AT&T also started funding my BlackHoleNet project. See, what you do is you send a file (less than 100K, so break that MP3's into 100 files!) and BlackHoleNet sends it to a special device (/dev/null). Later, when you want to get a file out it is retrieved from a different special device (/dev/random). The only remaining bug in my system is that the process of traversing the wormhole from /dev/null to /dev/random is somehow scrambling the files. I just need some funding to get over this last hurdle.
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Re:Interesting cryptography

[sporty]

On a side note, they can, if they wanted, create a key that can unlock if x% of they total key is present. Thus data won't be lost by on person losing the key.

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Let's not forget...

[mav[LAG]]

...that the most subversive file extension in the world is not MP3, or JPG or DivX. It's TXT - the plain old written word in electronic format. Ma Bell's service may be useless for exchanging large files but it could well be a very useful service for anyone who wants to be published and can't right now for whatever reason.

It's all in the words folks. The Chinese Government doesn't give a toss about its citizens downloading MP3s. It *does* care a lot about what they read...

Kind of like the newsgroups?

[Blackwulf]

The newsgroups will only allow so many lines, I believe...So they have many utilities which will break up 20 meg posts into 93 parts, and then piece them together later...

But with other services that do the same thing, who will use this?

Anyone tried it?

[spankenstein]

I just gave it a shot and it's kind of weird to use. I like the idea... but What good is the free speech if it's nearly inaccesible?

Apparently to read a document you have to know the full URL which is HUGE. And since there is no search You can't find things on the subject of say... "Search and Seizure." You would have to wade through the web and find a link to the Publius Document.

The encryption and the anonymity are great. And i understand not having a search function... but I think that it is at the expense of ease of use and actually getting the free speech "heard".

woo hoo.

[Zurk]

these systems are very important...i wonder if they have thought of the p[rotection against spammers angle ? especially now that the first spammer (flatplanet.net) has surfaced on gnutella networks.

limits

[Hobbex]

Limiting the file size to 100kB will drastically hurt this systems ability to support the freedom of speech. Unlike the days of the original Publius and the Federalist papers, not all speech today is, or can be, in the form of text.

Next time Will Smith gets a video of the NSA killing a Senator he will be able to upload it to Freenet. Will he be able to place it on Publius?

Does it say something about the sick influence of money in our world that they are willing to tolerate the usage of the system by child pornographers, but not by people who don't feel like giving money to the RIAA?

Re:limits

[mrogers]

You can split a large file into pieces and insert them separately. Then insert a list of the pieces as another file. Voila - large file support. The 100k limit is almost certainly there to avoid attacks which flood the system using bottomless data streams, or use large files to diplace a disproportionate number of smaller files. A similar limit will be used on Freenet, for similar reasons. It doesn't drastically hurt the system's ability to support freedom of speech; it protects it.

Re:Interesting cryptography

[Hobbex]

It's called an Information Dispersal Algorithm, or IDA.

See: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/jacm/19 89-36-2/p335-rabin/

Interesting cryptography

[stuyman]

If you go to the actual Publius site you'll see the information on how the system works. It kind of reminds me of steanography, in that technically all the servers appear to have is random data. The difference is the key retrieval method.

The publisher takes the key, K that is used to encrypt the file and splits it into n shares, such that any k of them can reproduce the original K, but k-1 give no hints as to the key. Each server receives the encrypted Publius content and one of the shares. At this point, the server has no idea what it is hosting -- it simply stores some random looking data. To browse content, a retriever must get the encrypted Publius content from some server and k of the shares. Mechanisms are in place to detect if the content has been tampered with. The publishing process produces a special URL that is used to recover the data and the shares.

I'm wondering just how that cryptography is implemented, whereby having less than n of n shares still permits us to read the document. The pdf on their site seems to involve MD5 hashes in the process, but I was wondering if someone more cryptographically inclined could elaborate. Of mathematical note, they generate d*ln(d) shares, where d is the number of servers. This has something to do with the coupon collector problem, and that if you check d*ln(d) servers you get to every "unique" server.

All in all it seems a really good system; hopefully the common carrier concept will be better applied. Since the pages can be retrieved with special (CGI based I think) URLs, they could probably be indexed by standart search engines such as Google. I hope this works out

Re:Interesting cryptography

[e271828]

The "angle" example above generalizes roughly like this:

A (monic*) polynomial p(x) of degree k is completely determined by knowing its value at k distinct points. So, you can "prove" that you have collected k different values by generating p(0) based on these values. If you had fewer than k values, the information is useless, because p(0) could be any real number at all!

Of course, you could distribute the value of the polynomial at n different (non-zero!) points to n different servers and any subset of size k would do the trick.

*monic polynomials are polynomials for which the coefficient of the highest order term is 1.

Lameness filter?

[technos]

Anonymity may breed distrust, but if you're not anonymous, they sue you into the ground. Piss off someone with money, or a powerful lobby, or a big corporation, and you might as well be dead. They'll make sure no one hears you. This is the age of the frivilous lawsuit, where anyone wishing to silence someone else may do so simply by making it horribly expensive to exist.

Say I write an article, saying in effect that DB2 bites in comparison to Oracle. IBM doesn't like this, and sues me for slander, libel, and false claims harming their business. None of those claims are true, and are in fact laughable, but I still have to hire a laywer and spend huge amounts of money just to get the judge to not rule by default against me for a huge sum. In the mean time, no other publisher is going to hire me or take my works for fee because of the lawsuit. And what if the judge dismisses? Well, that doesn't happen. IBM drops the suit, and refiles next week.

Pretty soon I'm 20K in the hole, the article was pulled so no one ever saw it, and IBM offers to drop the suit if I retract my statements and only write 'the truth', as their marketing dept sees fit to spin it..

You know what? I'd do it too.

Re:Lameness filter?

[jallen02]

I would say it depends on your article

You make corporations now a days sound like some embodiments of evil out to take away all of our privacy and market to us in our dreams.. hmmn oh wait

Seriously, if I write a critical article and I point out hard, technical facts to back up my claim there is *ZERO* basis for the suit and it should be thrown out.

And I think if there is a clearly defined technical logic behind your 'slander' or 'libel'... Then the suing company will know and be much more wary because losing a lawsuit even at the expense of 20K to you can spell total disaster for a corporation to lose a court battle, whats left? Your paper you wrote with all of its content free to be viewed. No they do not lose often but if and when corporations do lose.. its hurts them a lot more than the slight legal fee's it tookj to sue you so it is still a gamble, and I think the little guys still have a decent chance at standing up to corporations... right now

Jeremy


If you think education is expensive, try ignornace

Re:Useless

[deefer]

Nope, not useless. If I want to get on my soapbox, here's a way of doing it. Or, can you say "DeCSS source code"?
The trouble is, it cannot carry any warez, or MP3, and that puts it waaaay behind Freenet and similar efforts.
The totally distributed PTP type network model like Freenet will be the next Internet killer app. And watch entrenched institutions like RIAA, MPAA, FBI, MI5, MI6 etc turn blue as they try to regulate and control.
Once you get this sort of PTP nettech together, imagine wireless networks getting together, all communicating as mini routers, DNS etc, you basically have a network that is pretty hard to compromise... I think the Nomad Mobile Research Centre has something to say about this... Interesting reading...

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

Re:Embodiment of truly free speech?

[Borealis]

The issue I see with this being like the "Snow Crash" repository is that it's artificially limited. The "Snow Crash" repository had voice and video feed, as well as extensive AI.

A better bet would be a system that is not at all limited, like Freenet. While it may eventually host a fair % of pirates, that's not the point of the system, it is built to provide a network of anonymous and ubiquitous data availability without allowing for contentious files to be deleted. Publius, on the other hand, is psuedo limited to text (although posting multipart fragments of a warez file is still entirely possible).

Re:Can you blame them?

[Borealis]

Here we are at /. discussing a tool that has obviously been crafted to help encourage online collaboration without enabling the D00DZ who want to distribute WAREZ. What are the first reactions?

It sucks cuz I can't distribute illegal files

It just makes the suits who are concerned about abuse say "See: we told you so. All they want to do is abuse it."

That's entirely the point. If you want to distribute LEGAL files then you don't need a system like this. You're assuming that a file being illegal means that it is a "bad" file. This is not necessarily the case, as what is legal may be dictated by malevolent (or at least not benevolent) forces.

Previously on Slashdot (June 30)

[cnj]

Slashdot Article Lots of info.

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Ultimate Compression Format

[Greyfox]

We just need a few bytes to index the starting and ending digits in pi where the song is located. Since pi is infinite and random, it's gotta be in there somewhere.

Embodiment of truly free speech?

[cpytel]

This is refreshing for 2 major reasons, it is actually backed by someone with major clout, namely AT&T.

Second, this system is out to provide a safehouse for truly free speech, and not to provide a safehouse for rampant piracy.

With the right development, I wouldn't be suprised if this could be developed into a robust information repository (Like the library in SnowCrash?) However, it will be interesting to see if it becomes popular because it won't attract those who are really just in it for the warez and mp3z.

-cpytel

Re:.#~ files

[cybercuzco]

They can read english in China, Hong Kong for example. Granted your average chinese farmer isnt going to be able to read english, but he probably wouldnt be able to read chinese either, let alone have an internet connection.

New "source" for the rumor mill

[codemonkey_uk]

I can see it now...

• "Where did you here that?"
• "A bloke in the Publius told me."

Titter.

(Quick reminder for the slow of brain a Pub is like a Bar, but British)

Thad

Indexing CGI-based pages

[yerricde]

Since the pages can be retrieved with special (CGI based I think) URLs, they could probably be indexed by standart search engines

Many search engines (such as webcrawler) automatically throw out all URLs containing a ? because they don't want to waste the resources to index CGI.

---------------
Adopt a bird today!
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Don't make this into another Napster!

[Raunchola]

Yeah, this story was already posted...

Of all the comments to this story, the ones that get to me are the ones complaining about the lack of MP3s. People, we have enough Napster-like clones out there, we don't need any more! File-sharing programs are a Good Thing(tm), but because of programs like Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet, people see this programs as only being useful to MP3 traders and warez kiddies. The great thing about Publius is that it implements true free speech, i.e. the sharing of sensitive and critical information without fear of reprisal, without worrying about MP3 traders and warez kiddies. And because of that, maybe some people will get turned on to the idea of file-sharing programs, and will see them as something more than another road for piracy. It'll be interesting to see how this program will function down the road, and I hope it continues to develop.

Remember, just because you can't download a copy of AutoCAD or a Britney Spears CD from it doesn't make Publius useless. There's plenty of Napster-like programs out there, don't make Publius into another one.

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100 K fle size

[Yardley]

Ha-ha... well, then, it's perfect for porn!

(Trade secrets, product rumors, & illegal device compatibility descriptions - like DeCSS - will fit nicely, too.)

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What about moderation???

[Red Bishop]

I love reading slashdot. It combines links to interesting, newsworthy articles WITH commentary. But I don't read all 500 posts about .NET, or DeCSS, or whatever. I read the highest scores first, because my time is valuable.

If Publius is to be effective, ie. getting me to read it as part of my routine, it NEEDS indexing, searching and moderating. The most valuable resource in the 21st century is going to be the attention of humans, specifically wealthy and educated humans. Think about it, that is what advertisers pay Billions of dollars a year for.

How is Publius going to attract and keep attention?

From the Publius Whitepaper

[jtregear]

From their discussion of preventing "Denial of Service" attacks on Publius, which would also be effective against spammers:

"Publius, like all Web services, is susceptible to de-
nial of service attacks. An adversary could use Publius
to publish content until the disk space on all servers
is full. This could also affect other applications run-
ning on the same server. We take a simple measure of
limiting each publishing command to 100K. A better
approach would be to charge for space.

An interesting approach to this problem is a CPU
cycle based payment scheme known as Hash Cash
(http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashcash/).
The idea behind this system is to require the publisher
to do some work before publishing. Thus, it becomes
difficult to efficiently fill the server disk. Hopefully,
the attack can be detected before the disk is full. In
Hash Cash, a client wishing to store a file on a par-
ticular server first requests a challenge string c and
a number, b, from that server. The client must find
another string, s, such that at least b bits of H(c . s)
match b bits of H(s) where H is a secure hash function
such as MD5 and "." is the concatenation operator.
That is, the client must find partial collisions in the
hash function.

The higher the value of b, the more time the client
requires to find a matching string. The client then
sends s to the server along with the file to be stored.
The server only stores the file if H(s) passes the b bit
matching test on H(c . s). Another scheme we are
considering is to limit, based on client IP address, the
amount of data that a client can store on a particular
Publius server within a certain period of time. While
not perfect, this raises the bar a bit, and requires the
attacker to exert more effort. We have not imple-
mented either of these protection mechanisms yet."

Finally a decent use of this technology

[Thellan]

This will probably be considered a flame but I think it needs to be said.

Finally someone has produced a product that uses the technology Napster and Gnutella are based on to do something good. Despite what many proponents of Napster and Gnutella say, the main use of those programs is to get around having to pay for music and other electronic info like videos.

Some of the posts already on this board say "What is the use of this program?" Now we just have to split the mp3s into lots of little files. The people saying this apparently totally miss the purpose of this program. It is NOT to get music without paying for it. It is to help people communicate in an anonymous and secure way. Which many of the /. readers say it key to the internet. No doubt eventually someone will make a wrapper so that mp3s and such can be put on Publius but that is not really a good thing.

I think it is great that a major corporation has helped to produce a product like this. Especially one that goes against what many government agencies want, that being anonymous, encrypted communications across the internet.

Just my $.02

Rich

Re:Useless

[MarkusH]

No, it is not useless. It is designed for people with a REAL reason for being anonymous, yet wanting to spread information. For example, whistlerblowers, or people in countries with a less than perfect track record of censorship. It is not designed for pirates who want their MP3's (go to freenet for that sort of stuff).

There is also going to be a list of files which is found to be "interesting". I hope that there will be some way for users to decide what is interesting enough to be listed (possibly a moderation system?), but even if not, there will be a list of some sort. Yes, it will be eventually abused, but it's primary purpose isn't piracy, unlike certain other programs out there which will remain nameless.

Cunning...

[AndrewD]

I actually think the 100k file limit is a good move. Yes, it's trivial to work around, but only for those with more nous than the average user of this sort of system.

Of the millions of Napsterites, I would guess that a very large percentage indeed wouldn't have the knowledge or - more importantly - the patience to take a really big file apart for posting or to bother to track down the whole thing and put it back together. Napster's great strength for copyright violation was that it was very, very easy to use indeed.

Adding a significant amount of ballsaching effort (whether assembling a dispersed file by hand or writing the script to do it) to the process of getting an MP3 or big piece of software is going to discourage the casual pirate, just as the trouble of getting through locked doors and windows and an alarm system will discourage the opportunist burglar.

In effect, it's likely to head Napster-style legal trouble off at the pass.

Re:Cunning...

[evanbd]

But that's not the point. It's a matter of time (days? weeks?) before some person writes a little program that you download, give it some name of a distributed file, and it searches it out for you and puts it together, proerly verifying hashes and all. A little more work for the comp and a bit more work for the person writing it, but not for the end user. You will get the people who are somewhat tech-savvy (ie average napster user) and interested in trying something new, untested, and small user base (very few napster users), but there will be such people. So it will discourage some casual pirates, but not by the mechanism you suggest. It will be the lack of publicity and the small user base, instead.

---

Two Thoughts: Censorship and Filtering

[Ketzer]

Okay, my first thought is about censorship.
It works a bit like Slashdot commenting, except the Publius people do the modding, not the users. They get this giant collection of anonymous pages, and they pick out a few and label them "interesting." Somebody posted in the C-Net article that this doesn't remove censorship, it merely transfers it to the Publius staff, allowing them to censor something by labeling it "uninteresting." Is this really true? Can you only reach the "interesting" sites? Or are "uninteresting" sites reachable but not advertised? Because the latter doesn't seem to be censorship to me, but the former clearly is.

My other thought is Filtering. They claim that this technology prevents censorship. Does the prevention lie in the fact that you can't filter these sites, or in the fact that you can't delete them, or what? Because they can easily be filtered, you just have to have a filtering program that interprets what it reads, like your browser does, then filters the end result, rather than the inital scripting. As for deletion, if the US wants it deleted, they can order AT&T to delete it just as they could if it was hosted normally. So what is it that they are actually accomplishing? I'm missing something.

Re:Two Thoughts: Censorship and Filtering

[Ketzer]

This is from the C-Net article:

In order to reach a file, a Publius surfer must have access to the file's complicated URL. The Publius project will provide a list of files it considers interesting, but this will not include music, pornography or anything else deemed "uninteresting."

"We don't view this as censorship," Rubin said. "We view what we're doing as a directory for things we think are interesting. For now, people publishing content on the system will have to email URLs and descriptions of their files to be included, although a search feature might be added in a later version, Rubin added.

It sounds like you'll be technically allowed to access any of it, but you'll only be provided with useful information about the ones that they consider "interesting." Hopefully, some outside group will start a directory/search engine that indexes them.

As for the deletion, I don't think that really helps. It just puts them in Napster's position:

Judge: Remove the illegal content from your service.

AT&T But we can't, we specifically designed the service so that it couldn't be censored. In order to remove the illegal content, we'd have to shut the whole service down!

Judge: Hey, there's an idea. Shut the whole service down. Now.

Re:Two Thoughts: Censorship and Filtering

[Ketzer]

It's as if Napster looked at every song header and decided whether it was OK or not.

No, it's not. It's as if Napster picked out a few cool, non-copyrighted songs, and listed those songs when you start up, but without actually preventing any copyrighted songs from being traded.

AT&T isn't monitoring the pages and deciding if they're "OK or not." They're allowing all pages, just like Napster allows all file-transfers. The 100k cap keeps people from trading mp3s (or at least makes them work a little to do so) but there's more that's illegal than mp3s.

As for shutting them down, there's still a "head" somewhere. You pick a URL, and the DNS for that URL points somewhere, and that somewhere contains the information to go out to the myriad servers and fetch the page. All you have to do is shut down the "head." Or even one of the servers. If you chop out a chunk of it you probably corrupt the rest.

Re:Two Thoughts: Censorship and Filtering

[evanbd]

From the publius site, it seems that there is no flagging as "interesting" or whatever. If you have the URL-equiv, you can get to it. There will obviously be sites (perhaps including some supported by AT&T) that catalog such URLs and list the interesting ones. They may or may not be censoring, depending on your interpretation.

I think that things can't be deleted in any way because of the distributed thing. AT&T can't delete something without removing from all the servers, and they can't do that.

---

Re:Two Thoughts: Censorship and Filtering

[evanbd]

Several things...
They can't shut it down, because there are other people out there with servers over whom they have no control. And, they are arguably doing all they can to prevent piracy by not listing pirated stuff and limiting to 100K. Admittedly, this doesn't solve everything, but it helps. It's as if Napster looked at every song header and decided whether it was OK or not. Sure, you can use wrapster or whatever, but that's clear abuse of the system (to a greater degree at least).

And, I agree there should be a massive indexing service. I would even consider doing a simple perl script one if I had a place to put it and a bit more knowhow... Then that server could be indexed easily by web search engines.

---

So . . .?

[TOTKChief]

As an Internet publisher myself, I'm a bit miffed as to what's going on here. Sure, I publish stuff about sports, which is not exactly Earth-shattering in terms of societal impact (though I can argue for its societal worth, mind you), but what seems weird to me is that this is a way to hide behind the computer screen.

Looking at the root of the name of Publius -- familiar with the Federalist Papers myself, because I have to soon explain why we made all those changes in the UAH SGA last year anyway -- I see their point, but societal change is more often brought about by grassroots efforts led by out-in-front, standard-bearing individuals.

To demonstrate my point, could the American Civil Rights movement have progressed without someone like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marching? Sure, he could have sat in Atlanta (or Memphis, or Selma, or . . .) and written beautiful works on what was wrong with the oppression of "Negroes" in American society. I dare say his impact was strengthened by his visible action.

Heck, to take it to a whole other level, Jesus Christ himself could have just written a bunch of stuff, but I guarantee fewer people would be affected by Christianity -- whether you have a positive or negative view of it -- without some decisive action in there.

Anonymity breeds a small hair of distrust. If you're going to take over the world, you've got to have people's trust.

--
<><

Old news.

[Kickasso]

michael was here.
--

Publius and Freenet

[evanbd]

Ok, here's what it looks like to me. Publius is more secure in protecting the servers from the content they host; Publius has ability to maintain a "pseudonym" without outside software; Publius has the ability to hyperlink. Here's some elaboration:

Secure servers: It is publicly known who runs the servers, but it can be kept private what server has what. In order to download something, I need to know where to get the key shares. The server doesn't know that. Also, a server can't know what it's hosting without the ability to download it. However, things are less secure in that all this means that if I know how to get something I know who is hosting it, and a govt. etc. could use an attack based on such. So servers are both more and less secure.

The last two are really just based on the document format and software architecture.

This was all written without knowledge of the code, and is jst my interpretation of the web site.

---

Can you blame them?

[PacoVore]

This is the kind of reaction that fuels the fires of distrust.

Here we are at /. discussing a tool that has obviously been crafted to help encourage online collaboration without enabling the D00DZ who want to distribute WAREZ. What are the first reactions?

It sucks cuz I can't distribute illegal files

It just makes the suits who are concerned about abuse say "See: we told you so. All they want to do is abuse it."

We shouldn't mindlessly rally around the suits just because they think it's cool. But, we shouldn't snub it because it's not made for warez distributors. Let's judge it on some other basis.