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Freenet - Services Without Servers (www.youtube.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

the fediverse allows defederation, and i'm wondering if there's a way that users can block content despite a collective persistence of it.

if user A circulates cat pictures, user B circulates dog pictures, and user C circulates both, can user A block dog pictures from B and C, but still see user C's cat pictures? at that point it'd be up to the users/collectives to provide insight as to what addresses deal in unsavory content and helm each other block/filter, which comes back around like defederation.

that doesn't guarantee creeps won't circulate creep content. but i think the solution lies in community action anyway, both in helping prevent people from seeing things they wish they didn't, and in apprehending offenders.

mine is not a super educated take, but it seems like it should be possible -- i'm hoping smarter nerds than i could answer!

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The design with the original freenet could be described as a collective communal hard drive. No individual knew or had control of what content, or more likely portions of content, their node held. They simply offered up an amount of space to the net along with bandwidth.

    The data was all encrypted and defined by content hash keys with each request being passed from node to node asking for the key. If the node had it then it was passed to the node requesting it from them, which may or may not be the originator of the request.

    Same way with inserts of content. That passing back and forth up a chain makes things functionally anonymous, but easily bottlenecked if you have some slow node in the path.

    By not knowing or having control what's stored on their own node it gives the operator plausible deniability in theory. Not sure if that was ever properly tested in a court.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    that's what i figured. i guess what i wondered is if users are able to revoke their willingness to (potentially) store something unsavory post facto and/or if the content link was shared to block prescriptively.

    if i only wanted dog pictures on my computer and blocked any cat picture content i came across (for example), could that block all future attempts to store a portion of any content i chose to block, as long as the key/hash matched?

    hypothetically, that aproach could narrow it down to where if virtually all people chose to block a file, it might stop circulating and only exist on a single person's hard drive. i realize, though, that it wouldn't take much to alter a file slightly and alter its hash therein

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    if user A circulates cat pictures, user B circulates dog pictures, and user C circulates both, can user A block dog pictures from B and C, but still see user C’s cat pictures?

    To do that, you need either a system of trust where you trust someone else to tell you which images from C are dogs and which ones are cats (as well as a policy for what to do when a picture contains both), or an automated system that will scan all the messages and perform that determination for you.

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