[liberationtech] Concept for takedown-resistant publishing

[Joss Wright]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 01:25:50PM -0500, liberationtech at lewman.us wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 09:49:42PM +0100, lists at infosecurity.ch wrote 2.2K bytes in 61 lines about:
> : with a brainstorming with various persons it went out an idea of a
> : concept of a takedown-resistat publishing system for website.
> 
> Odd that no one brought up tor's hidden services, i2p eepsites,
> nor freenet.
> 

Well, I think that the context of the discussion was the proposal to use
a BitTorrent style system, not general censorship-resistant publishing.

Actually, I think that Freenet's model, while more traditional p2p than
BitTorrent style, is closest to what was proposed at the start of the
discussion. That limits it, to a large extent, to the static document model
that I mentioned in my earlier reply, which I view as one major factor
that stopped its wider adoption. (There are others, such as the initial
barrier to entry, but I think the static document concept was a
significant factor.) 

>From the other direction, I think that Tor's ability to interact with
the existing wider web, and to do so in a way that doesn't significantly
alter the experience, is a significant factor in its success.

Of course, a BitTorrent-style approach gets you some nice properties
that a Tor hidden service doesn't generally have that are very desirable
for censorship-resistance, such as distributed robustness and vastly
improved flooding resistance.

Joss