My god Chris, you're seriously interpreting this action as a business strategy? If being docile in the face of evil is Keybase's business strategy, I strongly urge you to re-prioritize, because if the government goes rogue, it's going to kick down your door looking for access to encrypted communications from dissidents, whether you're polite about it or not. How many John Does have you waffled on because it was a "better business strategy" so far?
The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective.
Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time?
Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out?
Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.
GP suggested that IPFS might not want to openly circumvent a specific country's censorship system, and blog about it, and you're comparing not doing that to the use of fake accounts by reddit? The issue is not as complicated as you're making it.
Well, yeah. The consequentialist viewpoint is if IPFS fails to succeed because it jumped too early, then ZERO people benefit from it. That's arguably the greater sin.
There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.
The greater sin is not failing, as failing is expected on the road to success. The greater sin would be to not jump when the opportunity presents itself.
Maybe look at it from a different point of view, if to someone in Turkey trying to access wikipedia it makes a difference then it's already a success.
It's a question of where you want to dray the line, and maybe the consequentialist drawing the line when ipfs takes over the world and gets 3 billions daily users is far fetched.
Youtube is probably not a sound example here as posting a trove of copyrighted content was a deliberate strategy in the larger scheme of having youtube bought by a giant actor for a hefty sum of money by a group of people from the paypal mafia with experience in this shady business.
From the get go the exploitation of illegal content (and other shady tricks) was made for the sole purpose of personal profit and had no intent on making the world a better place.
In other words youtube has been evil from the start, with evil intent, using evil tricks as part of an evil agenda. There was no room for ethics there.
Unless proven otherwise, IPFS seem to not have such a nefarious purpose even to work towards a greater good, due to its nature will hardly ever be made up for sell and has to leverage different mechanisms due to being a protocol and not a website in need of registrations.
Wow, that's ascribing a lot of motivation to things which have multiple interpretations.
Napster was rarely categorised as 'evil' except by 'big content'. In the music industry there was compulsory licencing which enabled it's successor - Spotift. There was nothing similar in video.
This stuff can lead to race-to-the-bottom issues. Consequences are different on a micro or macro scale. The optimal answer is to figure out how to stop others from doing the dishonest approaches. But in a macro context where everyone else is cheating, it's a lot more fuzzy and complex whether it is right or wrong to cheat as well in order to compete…
It's not just about business strategy. Pretty much all censorship circumvention that I am aware of leverages "collateral blocking" to achieve their goal. A determined enough state can block anything they want if they are willing to accept the collateral damage it causes. Turkey could try to shut down the entire internet inside their country in order to prevent the spread of information, but it would have serious economic consequences. Therefore, Turkey probably wouldn't block the whole internet.
Those trying to circumvent censorship leverage the fact that most countries can be modeled as at least somewhat rational actors. For a rational actor, censorship is a delicate balancing act. But this also means those interested in circumvention are also in a balancing act.
I've downvoted you because I feel the tone of this comment has upended what could have been a constructive, well-thought conversation and turned it into somewhat of a shouting match.
Ignoring your tone, it seems to me that you're drawing a false comparison (however to be clear, this isn't the reason why I'm downvoting). Chris's comment recognizes the importance of critical mass of adoption in network effects. He's pointing out that at this stage in its development, censoring governments would have no need to strong-arm IPFS. Simply blocking their domain is much lower profile and as such, much lower risk.
In this scenario there's no point at which "being docile" or "being strong" comes into play. If you think otherwise, then I'd argue that you may be mistaking the primary goal of the effort in question to be an open protest, rather than providing residents of Turkey access to censored information. I think you'd agree that the primary goal is for IPFS to give the people of Turkey Wikipedia, and while it might be nice if they also gave the Turkish government a big bold middle finger in the process, that's not in service of their primary goal.
If you accept that premise, then I'm not sure how you can take this idle musing from Chris and construe it to be evidence of how he'd behave when being legally strong-armed by a government while at the helm of KeyBase. The situation upon which that conclusion would be predicated just simply isn't represented in his original comment.
Finally I'd argue that if this is of critical concern to you, then why are you trusting a third party with your key storage in the first place?
I absolutely do need to know that Keybase is going to take privacy and censorship resistance seriously, and posts like this are not helpful in that "strategy". I depend on them for key distribution and so do a lot of other important, likely-to-be-targeted people, many of whom probably live in Turkey. When the Turkish dictatorship starts demanding information on political opponents from Keybase, what is Keybase going to do? Send the info to avoid being blocked? Wait until they're "strong enough" before fighting the important fights?
We're in a dark political period right now, this stuff is deadly serious. There's 110,000 people that have been detained in Turkey, they're not waiting for a future resistance, they need one right now. Stop spreading FUD about censorship resistance.
He(?) said that drawing attention to yourself while vulnerable is risky. Nowhere did he say anything about being less secure. Arguably it's the same security with more utility - better to be secure and available only to a few (because of limited advertising) than to be equally secure, and available to none because you got blocked early.
Now that last point is definitely arguable, and I think that's what you want to do, but that argument has no connection to the security of the information. Even if you think vocal advertising as an anti-censorship platform is the greater good, it doesn't make the information any more secure.
So what am I missing that explains your vehemence?
I think the problem is that pushing the anti-censorship angle lets more people avoid censorship today, whereas government censoring of IPFS is a problem for the future. And compromising on the present for fear of a future problem that may or may not actually happen, is a typical consequentialist trap that deontology is essentially designed to fix.
> If GP values adoption as the path to censorship resistance - then maybe their product will include backdoors to "stay compliant".
It's quite a leap to assume that - the poster said nothing of the sort, and saying "I don't want to get shut down so I can help people against censorship" is very different than "I care more about staying open than helping people against censorship"
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I certainly wouldn't assume it
Self censorship is the only way the book burners can really triumph. So long as humanities' collective ingenuity continues to exceed the sum of our malevolence; I ain't too worried.
Ps key base is awesome :)
So nobody should have done anything and we collectively should have just let Turkey censor Wikipedia with zero alternatives, that's the better solution here?
"Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins.
But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.
What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now.
Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?
That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms.
We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either.
If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.
There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.
But it won't grow unless others can download IPFS software to continue hosting it and there is no reason to believe they could not simply block it internally as well to prevent spreading.
As said before, it needs to be used/useful to many normal people (like a previous example of GitHub) before there it requires too much political will to effectively block.
Installing software from a USB drive is within the reach of most normal teens and young adults in the developing world. So, sneakernet -> IPFS -> Wikipedia is a viable path so long as blocking the IPFS protocol, over all reasonable transports, is hard enough to do.
Responding to 0xCPM (sibling comment). IPFS was not designed to hide the sources but thanks to versatility of transports (you can ever run it on cjdns or mesh network) and possibility of using it offline it is not easy to censor.
The person I was responding to was talking about people getting the IPFS software via IPFS or in person delivery of media. This is not a promising method for distributing anything to normal people, even if it later lets you view Wikipedia.
What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country?
(I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)
I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.
I don't know how to make this work with IPFS' P2P approach: a request for www.google.com with a destination IP of some residential Turkey customer looks awfully suspicious. I suppose it's workable if App Engine has a colo inside Turkey.
There's a circuit switching relay protocol [1] in the works which will allow multi-hop connections. This is generally useful for situations where two nodes can't directly connect to each other, be it because of NAT, censorship, or simply because they don't have a transport protocol in common (e.g. js-ipfs in the browser).
That means nodes can soon use the Websockets transport to connect to a domain-fronted node (this part already works), which then acts as a relay.
Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).
No, he's just saying they probably announced this at a point where their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want, so they may be shooting themselves in the foot a little bit.
> their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want
That's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but without evidence, definitions of words like "weak" and a proper wash through the scientific method, I'm not convinced we can make conclusions like that at this point in time.
That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method).
It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?
You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion.
Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.
I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.
In this case, business and political strategy unify in their mutual interest in IPFS's survival. Screaming and being outraged doesn't produce change. Methodical, contemplated action does. Flying under the radar until you're strong enough for conflict is a sensible strategy.
You should really keep your outrage in check until you have a better grasp of the issues.
Blind ideology-driven attacks without any kind of strategy may make your hind brain feel all tingly, but they are routinely squashed like a bug by the censorship apparatus, which has plenty of resources to block IPFS at the protocol level.
Rational strategy is not "being docile in the face of evil". It's just not openly marching into battle against a vastly stronger adversary who was only dimly aware of your existence.
Given the exposure and that this is Turkey, the IPFS project may be making the right call here, but strategy, not blind ideology, is the way to make those calls if you want to win.
This idea isn't even a particularly new or unusual one. When faced with a superior enemy, fighting opportunistically is an old as dirt strategy. People have continued to use it for literally millennia because it's effective.
Force is tilting the balance of power to your side by gathering advantages. Warfare is the Way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near.
If your enemies have advantage, bait them; if they are confused, capture them; if they are numerous, prepare for them; if they are strong, avoid them; if they are angry, disturb them; if they are humble, make them haughty; if they are relaxed, toil them; if they are united, separate them. Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect.
This strategy leads to victory in warfare, so do not let the enemy see it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Relatively speaking, I'd say 'our enemies' are extremely strong. Probably best avoided (for the moment) if the overall objective is victory.
He said nothing about "business". And I'd hope Keybase's strategy is to be effective in the face of evil than just performatively non-docile in the face of evil.
Speaking as someone who watched this come together on IRC, it definitely was NOT a business decision! This is just a problem being solved by smart people with great tools! That's how it should be!
