> I suppose it hearkens back to what we westerners have always been > taught about the relationship between freedom and responsibility. I > relate anonymity to freedom, in the sense that I can say whatever > outlandish thing I want when I’m anonymous, with no direct > repercussions except for conscience or karma.
I don't really see the connection. Why should one feel good about using commercial data storage service that has no implied loyalty to their country, other than it may be regulated by it? Why should one trust these companies at all? Just because they are supposedly `outraged' by intelligence agencies intercepting `their' communications (or forcing them to hand over data using secret court orders)? All while they model and sell the data they collect in any conceivable way to improve their bottom line? With regard to Bitcoin, I really don't get it. Do you feel embarrassed and ashamed to use U.S. dollars and other paper currencies? Traditional paper currencies are used in far more criminal transactions than the less than ~$10 billion US Bitcoin market. Do you only feel like a good citizen if all of your transactions are well-documented for Equifax and subscribers of their services? As the storj paper points out, it is a simple matter to identify illegal distribution of information, if it is being done in public (e.g. Napster). One works backward from the (say) copyrighted material to the filesystem shards of it, and gets the hash for those shards. Then those hashes are put on greylists and voluntarily censored. It seems to me that greylisting capability opens up even more opportunities for security companies to collect the greylist information. However, for secret or private information, there is no way to ground what the shards are, short of brute-force decryption. I could imagine this could be an interesting and useful technology to corporations or governments that want to work in the cloud to do so. It gives resilience by giving alternatives paths to the same chunks. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
