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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."
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Let's test how serious they are by publishing a list of AT&T calling card numbers :)
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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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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...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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?
It's called an Information Dispersal Algorithm, or IDA.
See: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/jacm/1
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
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
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.
.sig: Now legally binding!
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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Slashdot Article Lots of info.
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This will probably be considered a flame but I think it needs to be said.
/. 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.
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
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
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.
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