3. How to avoid illegal content!?

How to avoid illegal content!?


  • Hi Forum, I'm trying to understand how one can avoid all of a sudden to host material that would compromise legislation in most countries, i.e. terror plans, child pornography etc.

    By participation in freedom of speech blockchain controlled storage solutions where no cencorship exists, you expose you harddrive to accidentially to contain such materials even if it is encrypted and that the data you host are only bits and cannot perhaps as such be regarded "content" in a traditional form. If you want to hide compromising files or content as a user, SIA is ideal, with out being the devils advocate, right?

    I can't find and y discussion on it. But it is highly relevant and one of the downsides of participating, eventually a show stopper for many nodes?

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  • S

    This is a valid concern for any new technology. Nuclear reactions are used to bring electricity to hundreds of millions of people. They were also used to slaughter cities. This tech will result in the free and un-attributable sharing of vial and destructive data, but it will also enable the safety and security of billions of patients' personal health data. This will allow further personalization of medicine, and in turn save billions of lives.

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  • admins

    Third party services can't be held accountable for things their users do on them. If someone commits a crime using a service that you are providing to them legally, they are the ones that committed the crime, not you.

    That said, if a host does discover that they are storing illegal or objectionable content on their machine, we have a way for that host to delete it. Unfortunately, the host pays collateral over this data and so will be penalized for deleting the data.

    This is a problem for the whole sharing ecomony. Airbnb homeowners have to accept that people may commit crimes in their homes (drugs, etc.). But for the most part, people don't, and you usually have some way to deal with it if they do.

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  • T

    Isn't all stored content encrypted with keys host doesn't know about? If so, what is the problem?
    Even if someone stores some "bad" data on your machine, it is encrypted and you have no idea what it is. And you don't have a way to find out.
    And why would you care anyway?

    Let's say someone indeed stored some "bad" data through Sia and your machine is one of the hosts that were used.
    Let's say your host machine is being scanned for storing such a "bad" data for some reason.
    All files you store are just blocks of random numbers unless you have a key. And only renter has one.

    So to really get into trouble because of storing "bad" data through Sia that much must happen:

    1. Someone stored "bad" data into Sia. It's hard to estimate, but I'd say this is unlikely.
    2. You were chosen as host for that data. Considering current count of hosts it is likely (probability is about 30/85=0.35 currently). But this will decrease with larger number of hosts.
    3. Your machine were scanned. Now that is extremely unlikely unless you yourself store "bad" data and gave someone serious a reason to suspect you.
    4. And the most important. Those who scan the machine, can break the cipher (which is like impossible), or they know about some vulnerability of Sia (if there is one) and know how to exploit it (more likely than breaking cryptography, but still very improbable), or they know which renter's data there is and have their keys (also, very very improbable).

    To sum it up, this kind of scenario is like fantastic.
    So I wouldn't worry about what people are storing using Sia.

    Yeah, if you are very moral person you can think "Oh my, those bits and bytes I let people to store on my computer may be something very-very bad". But then maybe Sia is not for you. Or any p2p technology whatsoever.

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  • Let me clearify. I perfecly love p2p solutions. I think SIA is great, but there are these issues and a lot of other ones. (ie. the the reward until now is redicuouly low, due to the rate of the coins, and may not even pay for the extra electricity if you add in a few extra harddrives - but that is off topic here!?)

    Sia is the perfect solution if you have data to store - especially if you have data to store, that you want to disquise effectively. Merely you can get rid of the content also very fast by simply uninstalling the client and getting rid of the keys.

    I'm just trying to say what freedom of speech and no cencorship open network also implies; that you cannot know what you store. That means you by definition also store things you would not like to store on you own hard drive if you were asked to and being paid for, if you had visibility on the content.

    SIA unlike BitCoin, that is linked to no one, SIA is linked to Nebulous, which is a company authorities could leverage any legal actions against, like it has happened for apple, when us authrities wanted to have certain suspect phones unlocked, and similar to what has happned to piratebay, where certain ISP were forced to close any traffic to that site.

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  • T

    As far as I understand, keys for encrypting stored data are private. That is, only renter has access to them. It's like your private key to wallet in any cryptocurrency. Which means that developers also have no access to them.

    Of course it is possible that there is some sort of vulnerability in the implementation. But source code is open, and vulnerabilities are known to be quickly fixed after discover. And should there be any backdoor or something else that compromises developers, the project will die unborn because (at least I tend to believe) most blockchain technology users aren't stupid and have a bit of experience.
    There is only one way for Sia (as for any other startup) to be successful — to make nice product people want to use and can rely on.

    As for your last point, maybe you've heard about Signal messenger? They've got this document (I forgot how it is called) that forces company to give up all the information about users. So they did. It was the registration date.
    While Signal does not even use blockchain the point here is, that they didn't have any information about users. And the power and beauty of blockchain is exactly in the fact, that there is no trusted third-party who posses a lot of data about users.

    Authorities can pressure companies. They can ban domains. But they can not block p2p technology (especially blockchain-driven) because it's as difficult as to block internet.

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  • I agree to most of the points. p2p solutions only can be brought sucessfully to live, when the comuniti making up the p2p network is happy. No campaign can ever leverage that!
    a note on your view for IP-adresses. All nodes are visible in a simple map, so it would not take long to trace where they are, and who are behind them if some one wanted, so in that respect engaging in SIA is not private at all..

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  • T

    Well, I agree that open host IPs is not very good. However I don't know any blockchain-based system, where IP-addresses of nodes are hidden.

    Monero devs, for example, are working on protocol improvement that will hide IP-address for node which first broadcasts transaction, so third-party won't be able to track where the transaction came from. But even with this improvement IPs of blockchain network nodes are public.

    On the other hand, considering that every stored piece of data is encrypted, what's the point of hiding the IP-address of host? Yeah, the world knows that this IP-address hosts a storage space for Sia. So what?
    I don't believe it is possible that just running a node (and hosting storage) may be forbidden by law. That would be ridiculous. How can you ban running an open-source software?

    Also there are Tor and other solutions if you really care to be "invisible".

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