Thanks for sharing. I had heard of Handshake before but forgot about it. After the events of the past few days by so-called "big tech", I will be looking into this more seriously.
We're inching closer to realizing the "reductio ad absurdum" of censorship.
Someone actually got censored, and took "well, if you don't like how the DNS does things, you can just make your own!" as a literal challenge.
Wonder if this will eventually lead to further fragmentation. Hopefully encryption will keep it out of the lowest levels of infrastructure, I'd hate to see separate fiber lines put down to share controversial communications.
I'm almost certain that a sufficient requirement for making it stick would be the existence of in-demand, legal/gray area (and objectionable) web content that is excluded from "legacy DNS", as the article's author poetically describes it.
Why would he? I think he's even more convinced of it today. "Free speech" is a pretty right-wing issue nowadays and people assume it's a dog whistle for hate speech. If you want to be a progressive leftist like Randall Munroe, you can't advocate for free speech without hurting your reputation in the current environment.
If this [1] is the xkcd strip we're talking about, and don't see how Randall Munroe isn't advocating for free speech, nor how it is a left vs right issue. He's simply saying "free speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say", nothing more, nothing less. He furthermore argues that the right to free speech doesn't mean everyone else can't criticize you, have your shows/books/whatever canceled, shout you down, etc. He says "[free speech] doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences".
Now, you may or may not agree with his position (I certainly don't agree with some key aspects of it) but Randall is explaining what free speech is, not arguing for censorship.
You are confusing the 1st Amendment with 'free speech'. Free speech is a value that is broadly applicable to society, far larger in scope than prohibition from the government.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're completely right. The petty legalism around the issue does nothing to further the conversation. The 1st amendment is about the US government censoring people. It doesn't own the concept of free speech as a whole in the same way the constitution doesn't own the idea of God given rights, or democracy, or republic, or numerous other concepts mentioned.
The petty legalism is just a technique for people to stop thinking about their flagrant hypocrisy. As if the people screaming "they're a private business, they can do what they want" have ever entertained that as a serious argument for any other issue.
This is more like what I think, thanks for posting!
I was merely correcting the misconception that Randall Munroe from xkcd doesn't advocate for free speech. I didn't say I agreed 100% with the comic itself, though I do find parts of it thought-provoking.
> You are confusing the 1st Amendment with 'free speech'
I'm not Randall Munroe, how am I confusing anything by simply explaining he doesn't claim to be against free speech but rather is clarifying what he thinks free speech is?
I'm ok if you disagree with him, but please don't make claims about what I think, when I didn't say what I think.
I was replying to a comment arguing that xkcd doesn't support free speech because the author is leftist. I showed the author does support what he believes is free speech. That's all.
> Free speech is a value that is broadly applicable to society, far larger in scope than prohibition from the government
The idea of free speech is the ideas should succed or fail based on their ability to convince private actors tomhold and relay them.
Compelling actors to relay speech they disapprove of, unless those actors are the State or agents thereof, generally violates that principal.
Free speech is not an entitlement to third-party magnification of your speech, it is indeed the opposite: the idea that such magnification must be earned by convincing the party whose magnification is sought.
“People who disagree with me aren't relaying my speech or speech I like” isn't a violation of free speech.
I'm sorry, but "guilt by association" is not a compelling argument. If the CCP agrees with something, this alone doesn't make the something they agree with automatically bad. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
> They don’t just agree with it, they explicitly use that alt text to justify their oppression.
[citation needed]
"I'm sure the CCP thinks the same" is the laziest, weakest form of objection. You're not off the hook, you must still prove the idea being criticized is wrong regardless of what the CCP thinks about it.
(Like I pointed out in another comment, I think you've misread the alt-text, because it certainly doesn't support censorship).
Free speech isn't synonymous with the first amendment.
"Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences!" is one of the most infuriating lines I've ever had the displeasure to hear parroted.
What else could it possibly be, but the general idea of not being punished for saying things? The only thing that matters to the principle of freedom of speech is those consequences.
Who cares whether it's a government that decides that when you express a certain opinion, you lose your job- or twitter?
Funny, but not surprising, how even self-proclaimed leftists will side with capital when it's treading on the right people.
You might say "but you can't force people to platform/associate with those they find odious!", to which I reply 'of course you can'- there's laws against unlimited free association, with the argument that bulk group dynamics end up diminishing individual freedom on net.
You might say opinions are a different category from e.g. ethnicity, as they can be changed, while race can't.
In that case, in the future when we can change our bodies in a day, will it be alright if 'race', no longer existing as such, becomes as acceptably targetable as speech?
> Who cares whether it's a government that decides that when you express a certain opinion, you lose your job- or twitter?
I actually agree with you. I think the narrow definition that "only the government has the ability to censor speech" isn't useful, especially in an age where some businesses, platforms and corporations have so much power.
I was just correcting the perception that xkcd had a comic "against" free speech (and because "he is a leftist"). It's not against free speech. The author clarifies what he thinks free speech is.
Some people apparently thought because I linked to a comic to correct someone's claim about that comic, that said comic represents my opinion. Puzzling.
If one is against freedom from (in this case corporate) censorship, one is against free speech. 'Explaining' that free speech is not actually freedom from (one's particular preferred form of) censorship is de facto a attempt to excuse that particular form of censorship from the general principles of free speech that would otherwise condemn it, and is therefore in favor of censorship and against freedom from censorship, aka free speech.
While I disagree with XKCD's (and let me note, with many here on HN; I believe I first read this argument that only states can interfere with free speech defended by HN'ers) narrowing down of the concept of free speech to "only counts as censorship if the government does it" -- and it actually warms my heart that you and many others agree with me that corporate censorship is censorship, and even more important than state censorship -- I disagree that Randall Munroe is against free speech.
I think the issue is complex, but probably related to its sister concept of tolerance and with "the paradox of tolerance" [1]:
> "The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
It's perfectly reasonable to believe Randall Munroe supports free speech and at the same time believes someone spewing hateful vitriol can be kicked out of whatever private venue by the owners/administrators of said venue. In order for you to believe this, you simply must accept that Randall is using a different, possibly more legalistic version of "free speech" than you. Again, you cannot claim he is against free speech because he thinks corporate censorship is ok -- first, he doesn't exactly defend corporate censorship in his comic, and second, you're begging the question! You are claiming "corporate censorship" is against free speech, which is not a foregone conclusion and is exactly what is being debated.
Finally, the whole "this is because Randall Munroe is a leftie and, like all lefties, is against free speech" angle only serves to inflame the debate with name calling. Anyone going for this "like all lefties" is not interested in honest debate at all.
I feel weird having to point all this out because I, in fact, think corporate censorship is against free speech -- my concept, not what whatever amendment says -- and in this day and age, it's even worse than state censorship.
> It's perfectly reasonable to believe Randall Munroe supports [something that he calls "free speech"] and at the same time believes someone spewing hateful vitriol can be kicked out of whatever private venue by the owners/administrators of said venue. In order for you to believe this, you simply must accept that Randall is using a different, possibly more legalistic [definition] of "free speech" than you.
Sure, and it's perfectly reasonable to believe someone supports, say, not destroying [something that they call "forests"] and at the same time believes rainforests can be cut down to make more room for farmland. In order for you to believe this, you simply must accept that they are using a definition of "forests" that does not include rainforests.
Nonetheless, that person is against not destroying forests-the-actual-thing, regardless of what definition they use for "forests"-the-english-word.
> The whole "this is because Randall Munroe is a leftie and, like all lefties, is against free speech" only serves to turn the debate into an absurd flamewar. Anyone going for this "like all lefties" is not interested in honest debate at all.
Who are you responding to? Because if I had said something like that, it would have been "Randall Munroe is either a leftie or a rightie and, like all lefties and righties, is against free speech".
You're using ridicule in order to avoid addressing my point. I'm uninterested in engaging you in those terms, particularly since I was polite in my reply to you. Your snarky reply failed to address anything of importance.
You pretty much ignored my reply, did a silly search & replace (ignoring HN's guidelines of assuming good faith and replying to the best possible interpretation) and decided to feel clever about it. Thanks, but no thanks.
> Who are you responding to?
Not you in that particular sentence, but user bonoboTP and others in this thread.
It conflates the principle free speech with a narrow legal reading of the first amendment. Whether on purpose, or accident, I cannot say. The alt-text is also only illuminating in the sense that the CCP might heartily agree with it as well, as they see their crusade against free speech as nothing more than maintaining the public order and peace. In publishing the comic and leaving it up, Munroe has done more to damage the principle of free speech in the West than any opinion article I can think of, because it chains together several fallacies in a clever and funny way.
Hm, that fails to land as a criticism. Depends whether you're talking about (a) "free speech, the legally-protected institution" or (b) "free speech, your right to be awful and not suffer consequences". The xkcd is saying that people saying "but my free speech!" are defending (b) by describing it as (a), which it's not. That's basically true. Afaik the part xkcd definitely gets wrong is the part about "can't arrest you for what you say", which isn't really how it works (for instance https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred... discusses the case of how it enters into civil suits).
Of course _philosophically_, yeah, the people who included (a) in the constitution were interested in (b). Everyone's on board with free speech as a concept here. But at some point if someone is yelling Nazi stuff, I'm gonna punch them for it. It's not a legal question at all; my actions aren't governed by laws, just what I feel is right to do. That is the same point xkcd was making. I don't know enough to say whether AWS or whoever has the same right because they are operating in a legal system. But as a _person_, yeah, I can do whatever I want to you, including 'show you the door', if you're awful.
> Everyone's on board with free speech as a concept here
No they aren’t, including you. I don’t trust your judgement of who is a Nazi, and even if I did, I especially don’t trust everyone who hears you say that. However, despite your endorsement of political violence (terrorism) I don’t believe that it would be right for you to be deplatformed, especially if it’s breach of contract (like what AWS is doing). Nor would I want HN taken offline despite them not moderating terrorist comments such as yours.
Edit: you’re confusing my clinical label of terrorism with name calling. I am not calling names, except insofar as I’m making a point about how easily it is to make content seem unacceptable when we strip away context, which is why due process is so necessary. We are all terrorists to some group, however disfavored... if child molestation was somehow legalized, anyone who attempted it would face severe extra-legal consequences for example.
I'm not asking you to trust my judgment of who's a nazi. I get to decide who I think is a nazi and do what I want, _as a person_, and so do you. Of course I will try to convince you that I'm right, but if someone's being a nazi and can't be convinced that they're saying nazi stuff and they get banned from society, that's their problem, not society's. They should have listened.
The point is that while free speech might be protected as a legal concept, it's not protected as a personal concept. I espouse free speech, until someone really screws up and gets super evil, and then I don't want them to talk anymore (especially not to rally people to their evil causes). I'm not a government. And that's completely consistent with wanting a government/overall society which defends free speech.
(also, you're not doing your argument any favors by for some reason calling me a terrorist. it's not even clear why you're doing that)
uh... so? two examples of things people do to vile people.
to be clear: if someone shouts nazi stuff around me and I'm driven to anger enough to punch them (which, to be clear, has never happened, but hypothetically), I obviously accept the legal consequences of that. the whole point here is that legal rules abut what you should do are not ethical ones. Ethically, don't shout nazi stuff, and also ethically if you do shout nazi stuff you might get punched and you deserve it.
I feel like you're trying to trick me into admitting I'd punch them, or something, which isn't necessary and is kinda weird. I would definitely want to punch someone who was saying nazi stuff around me. Who wouldn't? Of course, yeah, 'showing them the door' is the more dignified response, so that probably comes first. As does talking about it and trying to figure out why they persist in being awful.
> The alt-text is also only illuminating in the sense that the CCP might heartily agree with it as well, as they see their crusade against free speech as nothing more than maintaining the public order and peace.
Which alt-text did you read? It cannot possibly be this one:
> "I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."
This is saying "that your idea cannot be censored is not good enough in order to convince people that it's good". This cannot be used to censor anything -- in fact, it claims the position is legal -- neither by the CCP or anyone else. It's a judgment on the quality of the idea.
It seems to me you're trying to invoke the CCP boogeyman regardless of whether it actually fits this argument.
> that your idea cannot be censored is not good enough in order to convince people that it's good
Yes but the implication is that if you’re censored and asking the government for redress, your speech is abhorrent. In the context of the comic it’s clearly meant to be interpreted that way.
Your literal description of it is a red herring, a typical clever Monroe construction to avoid criticism, as if anyone claims they’re correct because what they’re saying isn’t illegal. Nobody makes that argument.
> Yes but the implication is that if you’re censored and asking the government for redress, your speech is abhorrent
That's your reading. Mine is that if the best you can say about a position is "it's not illegal" then you're on shaky ground. I.e. it's legal, but unconvincing. It doesn't mean you should be censored, it just means your position probably lacks merit if you can't mention anything else that's good about it.
> Your literal description of it is a red herring, a typical clever Monroe construction to avoid criticism
At this point I have to ask: you are aware I'm not the author of xkcd, aren't you?
> in the context of the comic it’s clearly meant to be interpreted that way.
That's just not true. The claim is that if you're censored and your only defense of your position is that you should be allowed to say it, you position is flimsy. Nobody would agree with the claim that "_in general_ if you're censored your speech is abhorrent", that's laughable.
Now, yeah, agreed, it's debatable whether this actually happens. But it sure feels like it happens.
Its worth posting Amazon's legal response here [0]. Its certainly clearly and compellingly argued to me that it was Parler who breached the contract.
Note, there is some potentially upsetting language in this document where Amazon gives examples of the type of content on Parler they deemed to be in violation of the contract. Consider yourself warned, if that sort of thing bothers you.
I am coming to support the notion that ISPs and Internet Backbone providers should be treated as first class utilities like electrical companies and not be able to deny access except for things like non-payment. Otherwise we do run the risk of a physically balkanized internet.
it's related. ISPs and telecom in the US do not invest adequately in infrastructure, and the existing infrastructure is overloaded. net neutrality was all about how that infrastructure can be utilized; ISPs want to profit off the scarcity by allowing big companies to pay for priority so that their website would load faster at the expense of everyone else (big companies want this too, and they want it to be expensive, because that increases barrier for entry in a competitive space where they already have an upper hand), but the net neutrality laws used to prevent this sort of bidding for priority.
some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list.
> some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list.
In the U.S.? I thought this was only in India with Facebook's non-internet Internet.
i'm not aware of any ISPs that have taken that step in the US, but since the 2017 repeal it is now a legal business strategy. it has happened in portugal (although that's irrelevant to US law) -- customers get a base package and need to pay extra for the "social media package" (which unlocks twitter and facebook) or the "streaming package" (which unlocks netflix, youtube, etc.) (this is on top of the subscription fees you pay for netflix, etc.).
if you say so. i think they're waiting to see whether the new administration will overturn. in any case, the main point is about ISPs creating profitable incentive for themselves to keep infrastructure under-developed by making the internet a pay-to-play arena.
follow up: t-mobile has a plan in the US that doesn't charge you for spotify/pandora internet traffic, but does charge you for all other data. that's an "internet lite" plan right there.
Point taken. I've seen them do that for Youtube as well -- basically, they don't include Youtube vids in your data plan if you are ok with them degrading the video experience (and you can disable that sort of "feature"). However, this doesn't seem very compelling -- some of the things cable modem providers have done (DPI, injecting SYN or RST's into traffic) can end up far worse, but customers only put up with nonsense like that for so long (unless it's a de facto monopoly in that area).
>customers get a base package and need to pay extra for the "social media package" (which unlocks twitter and facebook) or the "streaming package" (which unlocks netflix, youtube, etc.)
According to snopes this doesn't seem to be fully accurate. There was a mobile plan with which you could buy extra data for different services (which I admit is not ideal), but no extra package to "unlock" services.
ok, i did a bit more research on the portugal case. i was going off a tweet with a website screenshot, but found this verge article[1] after reading your comment; and you're right. these sites aren't "blocked" by default, the package addons just give extra data to your plan and that data is specifically for those websites. still not "neutral" (looks like buying facebook data is cheaper than general-use data) but not nearly as dystopian as it seemed.
It's not a stupid question. In short, this is not the issue that was at the core of net neutrality. Sci-hub's repeated evictions from their rented, DNS-resolved internet names were done by the centralized parties that have technical control over the names, not ISPs or mobile data providers.
not even non-payment. poor people are disproportionately affected by non-payment cancellations. might be ok if it were means-tested, like only allowing non-payment shut-offs if the customer is above the mean income (even for small businesses).
that’s a reductio ad absurdum via tautology, but the effects are wide-ranging and can include freezing/overheating to death (for instance) from not having adequate heating/cooling. that’s inhumane and abhorrent, especially in the richest nations of the world.
I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams.
Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.
Elsevier and Wiley have a lot of lawyers who are likely arguing that leaving it up is condoning copyright infringement. There’s a long history of threats for anything related to targets of these lawsuits, and other companies taking something offline quickly to avoid being caught in the crossfire.
Hopefully with Dems in control we will see these companies punished for their bad behavior. Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.
The science should be funded and free. The applications of the science are where the money is to be made.
These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era. It's time for them to fail and die off naturally. But it will probably take legislation to do so. And I for one can't wait to see them gone.
> These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era.
Elsevier is a very diverse company with a lot of product offerings that are not antiquated. People here tend to just think of them as a journal publication company, but they are much more than that. The company sells (through subsidiaries) a lot of IT products to governments and law enforcement around the world.
They, as a small example, offer a service that allow LEO to perform comprehensive background & arrest record checks on individuals in custody.
"That part of the business" is still a huge portfolio of product offerings in-and-around the scientific publishing space. If you cut one head of the hydra, another will just grow back in its place.
The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.
They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.
I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.
Excellent breakdown. Thank you. Yes as I've said only legislation will end this tyranny.
To guard this data to the point they were willing to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for 35 years is beyond reprehensible. It's simply abhorrent the way they have acted as gatekeepers to this kind of knowledge.
They are responsible for slowing things down. Not speeding them up. These gatekeepers are holding us back. Lives could be saved. Millions of them. This data is a benefit to humanity as a whole and it should be treated as such.
>>Hopefully with Dems in control we will see these companies punished for their bad behavior. Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.
"Yeah, meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
You write like someone who's never heard of "regulatory capture."
Democrats are politicians with listed policies, not faeries that grant wishes because you happen to be more aligned with them. Elimination of copyright isn't on their to-do list.
"Data wants to be free and should be" has been the rallying cry of software pirates since I've been in high school. It might have struck a nerve in a group of people who make money off of the sale of software.
I'm not discounting how valuable open research is to society as a whole. I'm not even arguing that, as a moral right, the research should be freely available! I'm just not seeing a technical path there that doesn't retroactively unassign publishing rights to all past papers. And I don't see how a change in political administration makes it any easier to convince rich people to give up money.
I'm not even convinced the government should take action here - CS work is done on arxiv, so it's not even as if Elsevier provides a useful service in distribution. Why are authors continuing to publish in Nature when they could put a PDF up anywhere? that's what we need to address.
> These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era.
I personally believe this is wishful thinking (similarly when I read about how companies have "outdated business models"). Publishers sell prestigue and attention, and this can't easily be replicated, nor is it unnecessary.
The increase in research papers makes them even more valueable in my eyes.
This is despite me wanting to see many changes to publishing and science distribution.
edit: removed part that I deemed unecessarily hostile.
Like how the opioid crisis was handled.. democrats and Republicans are exactly the same thing. American politics is WWE with old people in formal clothes..
> Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.
Sci-hub was created under Obama, I don't remember neither him nor the party making anything to help them, quite the opposite actually: Elbakyan has been judged in absentia and sentenced twice under his presidency. Were she to put the foot on Western soil, she would pay it dearly thanks to this.
The Democrats are on Big Media's side even more so than the Republicans. Hoping that they're going to switch sides and "punish" big copyright and Media owners for their IP trolling and abuse is just wishful thinking.
I know that we're not supposed to be snarky here at HN, but I'm failing to see how #NotAllDems is a sensible argument. Especially given President-Elect Biden's track record on this particular issue, and Vice-President-Elect Harris' history as a "hardline", "tough on crime" prosecutor.
Liability and risk management. As soon as a lawyer becomes aware of a situation where an individual is using the service they are required to act to mitigate risk. There is no obligation for anyone to have access to a private service and they'll be weighing factors which include what 3rd parties might do.
In this case it seems that they would have considered the actions of the companies running the paywalls. How likely would they be to take legal action (not all of which is public) against Twitter? Fairly likely, if they feel that Twitter is helping to publicize the service they want to take down.
This is both in the legal and financial interest of Twitter. There is no real blow back from kicking off this person and their service versus dealing with US corporations. Copyright law changes and the impact of court decisions likely play a factor too. I find it hard to believe that some court somewhere, hasn't held Twitter (or similar service) liable for indirect copyright damages (that is likely being appealed.)
> “The DNS is like a phonebook for the internet. The addresses in the phonebook are the server IP addresses. DNS was created to give IP addresses human-readable names so with our platform, you’re finding the IP address through Handshake, not through a certificate authority,” Namebase CEO Tieshun Roquerre told CoinDesk.
(Emphasis mine.) Did this Namebase CEO just state on record that he doesn’t know how DNS works?
I think what he meant was that the domain resolution can be validated using the blockchain as opposed to needing a centralized/single actor certificate authority.
Followed by this: 'Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said.' -- thus implying that DNS is NOT decentralized? The article is pretty bad. For his sake, I hope they are taking his quotes out of context. Because I had a quick look at https://www.namebase.io/ -- and it does look interesting. It appears that they have decentralized the REGISTRY by putting it on the "Handshake" blockchain.
Can I configure my resolver to use this "Handshake" blockchain?
But now that I think about it, the registry IS already decentralized. IE: .com is managed by an organization separate from .org. And the whole reason for "renting" from .com is because .com owns the space. If you "buy" a TLD on the Handshake blockchain, do you lose the ability to rescind delegations under that TLD once people have "bought" them?
But you can buy a new TLD in the DNS, right? Granted, for more money and pending approval. How is the TLD you get from Handshake different? You still control it, right? And you have the power to revoke sub delegations within it, right? That's what's confusing me... the article seemed to indicate that by switching to Handshake, you won't get your name revoked ever again. But the detail that seems to have been left out is "... if you buy a Handshake TLD, as opposed to 'renting' space from a Handshake TLD holder".
ICANN is expected to re-open TLD registrations in 2-3 years but you can't actually buy a new TLD in the traditional system at the moment. Once the registrations open up, there's a $180k application fee (that's not a registration fee, you pay that whether you win the TLD or not) on top of the registration fee which can cost millions. Furthermore, ownership of the TLD is delegate by ICANN, which is a central authority as opposed to ownership of names on Handshake which are controlled by private keys that you control.
This is a case where I find Vitalik's distinction between different kinds of decentralization useful. [1] Roquerre is talking about political or logical decentralization whereas you are talking about architectural decentralization.
DNS is not decentralized in the sense that matters for censorship, which is the most important sense in this discussion. I don't know anyone who believes DNS is suitably decentralized to resist censorship.
> That works great until the only names that are left are all too long to remember.
Do you really believe this is a serious problem? I don't think it is by any stretch of the imagination.
---
> It seems like the answer is "everyone buys their own TLD", right?
Yeah, why not? The conceptual distinction between a domain and a TLD isn't necessary. From the Namebase docs:
> For instance, if you own "nakamoto" on Handshake, you can use "nakamoto" as a domain itself. In that case, you would point "nakamoto" to your website and visit it at http://nakamoto/ in your browser. You can also use "nakamoto" as a TLD and issue your own subdomains. In that case you can create "satoshi.nakamoto" and visit it at http://satoshi.nakamoto in your browser. A Handshake name can be used as both a domain name directly and as a TLD at the same time.
---
> And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.
Maybe? Buying from someone else's TLD isn't the point of Handshake, for the reasons I mentioned above. But if you wanted to buy a subdomain for some reason, and still wanted it to be uncensorable, you should buy one from someone who revokes their censorship capabilities programmatically.
And that point is the big picture: reasoning about transparent code for very important things gives you a level of control you can't obtain through trusting people.
There are two sides of censorship-resistance that are important when it comes to DNS. Censorship-resistance/seizure-resistance for owners and censorship-resistance for consumers.
For owners, it's important that their domain names can't be taken down or seized from them. Sci-Hub has dealt with this issue numerous times and has had to register a pool of domain names to try too counteract this issue before getting their Handshake name. Domain registrars can seize domain names and there isn't much recourse for the owners — it doesn't even need to be for a good reason[1]. On Handshake, ownership is controlled by your wallet's private key (similar to owning Bitcoin). As long as you control your private key no one can take your name from you.
For consumers, it's important that you can 1) access the domain name and 2) trust that the DNS records you're seeing are authentic. Handshake is a distributed network so as long as you can connect to a single node you can access it. This mechanic is what gives other distributed networks like Bitcoin and BitTorrent their strength. Furthermore, you can verify the authenticity of the records since each DNS update is reflected on the blockchain similar to how you can verify transactions on Bitcoin.
> I don't know anyone who believes DNS is suitably decentralized to resist censorship.
Technically DNS-the-protocol is suitably decentralized to resist censorship[0]; it's the particular canonical infrastructure of the main DNS system that's the weak link there. (Edit: by which I mean I think emacdona was talking about the protocol in general, and if you meant to object to that admittedly-debateable choice of focus, you should probably explicitly point out the distinction between the protocol (that anyone can use) and the canonical system (that is run by (tautologically) malicious corporations).)
0: Although it could use some cryptographic additions for better security, and it has problems with global uniqueness in the face of malicious actors pushing records to the effect of "sci-hub.org IN A some.fbi.ip.addr". But if you can find a trustworthy (possibly-suffix-indexed collection of) root server to start from, the protocol itself works fine.
We are going to have to come up with a new metaphor soon. I haven't seen a phonebook in ages. Honestly I would be more likely to tell my kid "Phonebooks were like DNS for telephone numbers."
I’m not sure what the GP means by it being the metaphor to replace phone book (“contacts app” would be my off-the-cuff suggestion), but I’m not that old and I’ve heard it referred to as a directory. I haven’t heard it recently, but that has more to do with the disuse of phone books, I think. Maybe it’s a regional thing?
That is probably fair. Anywhere I've lived in the US, someone would know (well, maybe not if they were young enough) what you meant by "telephone directory" but almost everyone would say "phonebook" at least in casual conversation. It's also true that when you would dial 411 for a number, that was called directory assistance. (And a listing of phone numbers for the staff in an organization would probably be called a staff directory or a telephone directory or something along those lines.)
Unless you're an expert on worldwide English use, it's best not to make such sweeping generalizations.
A straightforward search for the term brings up large sites in the UK, India, Malta and Hong Kong. "Directory Enquiries" was (is?) the name for the service in the UK where you pay a fee for someone to look in the telephone directory for you.
In the US, in larger cities, you'd have separate "white pages" (aka the phonebook) which lists just names and addresses and "yellow pages" which had business listings and ads. In smaller locations, they were often combined into one with both white pages and yellow pages in the same book.
It is not "pedantic", rather literate, to note the word directory instead of grasping for DNS.
"A telephone book was a directory for telephone numbers" is clear and accurate. Unless knowing what the word "directory" means is asserted to be the domain of pedants.
"By providing a worldwide, distributed directory service, the Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985."
I'm the same way, here's an interpersonal relationship tip I've had to learn: If someone calls you an asshole, you can't say "No, I've thought about it and you're wrong, you don't really think I'm an asshole." Well, you can say that, but it just makes you come off as even more of an asshole.
It's for the best. A phonebook is a single list compiled by one organization. DNS is more like asking a librarian for information on a subject, and the librarian handing back a reference book. The librarian may or may not know anything about the subject, but they know where to go to find the information.
Just like DNS:
- Which librarian you ask can result in being pointed to a different reference book.
- If the librarian is already familiar with the subject, they may be able to give you the answer directly to save time instead of pointing you to the reference book.
The phonebook metaphor was a good one to give to completely non-technical people, but technical people used it as well, and so often didn't intuitively understand that DNS involves clients exchanging data with arbitrary servers on the internet, using their own DNS server as a proxy. As a result, they often leave s significant communication channel open to the internet even from supposedly secure environments.
> A phonebook is a single list compiled by one organization.
There are mutiple phonebooks worldwide, each compiled by different organizations. There is just not one phonebook, similar to how there is not just one DNS-server.
I think the more charitable explanation is that mainstream reporting often contains many misquotes, factual errors and omissions that you will only notice when you are knowledgeable about the subject at hand.
To be forgetful or ignore this when turning the page regarding another subject on which you are less knowledgeable is known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [1].
Namebase CEO here. The article misquoted me (and some of the data I shared) in a number of places. See this tweet where the writer incorrectly stated that Namebase created Handshake when we only build on top of it (similar to how Coinbase builds on Bitcoin) https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1348801310498443264?s=20.
I'm happy to talk through how Handshake works if you have any questions about it. I also wrote an article on how Handshake can improve the root of trust for DNS which was previously discussed on HN [1]
It is worth noting that this is exactly what Aaron Swartz was bullied to his tragic death 8 years and a day ago. May he rest in peace. And kudos to Alexandra.
P.S. Corrected the date, seems like I still live in 2020. Thank you, lazyant.
The first Tweet attempts to coopt the memory of him to legitimize an unsubstantive jab in an ideological battle that is adjacent to academic literature. That's sickening.
His actions in the JSTOR situation were ultimately deemed lawful.
But, without passing judgement one way or the other, Aaron's beliefs about free speech and information freedom which informed his activism cannot be reasonably described as moderate.
Are you aware that you’re claiming not to pass judgement, and then do so in the very same sentence?
I think it seems immoderate to you because, like many others on this website (including me), we were all on the inside of the knowledge-monopoly walled-garden that Aaron talked about, where most research isn’t accessible to you unless you join the capitalist academia-industrial-complex (that last part is my own description, not Aaron’s), such as attending a university with a huge endowment (Harvard and other Ivy League schools), or living in a tech-cluster that the government has invested in for many years (Stanford&Silicon Valley) - why else does the most ‘exciting’ research happen at private institutions like these?:
“The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.” [1]
What makes it so one person is allowed to privatize knowledge and charge another a rent to access it? Why have governments allowed this enclosure of the scientific commons (amongst others), which is really an inheritance that belongs to all?
Privatization of knowledge is artificial scarcity that does not have to be there. It keeps the majority of society locked out, especially the working class, as well as people who live in the Global South.
This beautiful story from a few days ago is just one of many that shows the incredible power of Sci-hub:
I think that most intellectual laborers who themselves have conditional access to trade secrets and patents due to their employment with the capitalist/propertied classes (who are the so called 'owners' of this privatized knowledge), underestimate how difficult it is for others to follow in their footsteps, to try to copy what they did (myself included). In other words, we fail to see and acknowledge how much contrived scarcity is created by the US-‘led’ global Intellectual Property system and agreements, which allows capitalist firms to claim ownership of knowledge through trade secrets, patents and copyrights - which are then used to control where scientific research is done and where it is not. It ultimately holds back innovation, and the sharing of all kinds of emancipatory and empowering technologies locked up by capitalists under capitalism.
The most violent and advanced form of this capitalist enclosure of knowledge is the criminal enforcement of ‘trade secrets‘. The use of this mechanism, and the state institution that allows it, is the biggest capitalist perversion of science and technological development humanity has ever seen. [2]
Instead of contributing to firms and institutions that privatize knowledge, I hope we will continue joining in efforts to liberate science and technology from capitalism, creating an unconditionally available shared commons library that is accessible to all around the globe.
As we are currently part of the small group of people who are privileged recipients of this inheritance, I believe we have no excuse to not contribute to this battle for universal access, on all fronts, especially considering the fact that digital technologies have brought with them the possibility for a zero marginal cost of reproduction of knowledge. Sci-hub and similar efforts are a fantastic start to this.
For another strategy that helps reclaim technology from capitalism (and which really blew my hair back), check out the work of Bob Haugen, Lynn Foster and Pospi (Mikorizal) on Valueflo.ws / hREA. [3]
To be clear, I was actively involved in a lot of this and would not describe myself or my beliefs as 'moderate' either.
I'm more of an [information freedom] absolutist / code is law / bits are not a big / etc.
So if I were to "pass judgement" I would say Aaron was a freedom fighter who tragically fell on his sword when the going got (quite) tough. I don't have a single negative thing to say about him or his beliefs.
I meant more moderate than burning a Target store or starting a revolution as in the tweet.
And if we stick to objectivism, then they definitely are more moderate than even the status quo - semi-obsolete middlemen holding a rent-seeking/regulatory capture over some of the most important information available to mankind.
I would agree with this. I knew Aaron, at least in terms of our mutual involvement in the intellectual freedom movement, and worked with him on various things (though not well, I was a pretty shitty python coder back then).
His positions, like mine, were definitely in the "extreme", in the sense that 99% of people either 1) don't agree that we should abolish copyright and patents OR don't have an opinion on it.
But there can be a negative connotation to the word "extreme" that I don't think applies here. Our stance is extreme in the sense that the Internet was extreme in the 1970's, or the Web extreme in the 1990's, or civil rights extreme in the 1950's, or women's right to vote extreme in the 1920's.
Another way to put it: he was far ahead of our time on issues of justice.
Yes, this bothers me so much about whenever people bring him up. He seemed like a brilliant, kind, and unique person, not just a totem of “our side vs your side”
Yeah, it's pretty weird how he uses him to further left-libertarianism. How do you know Aaron Swartz stood for anarchism? He seems like anti-intellectual property to me, but you know right-libertarians oppose intellectual property too. I find it despicable to use someone to further an ideology without giving them the chance to actually state their own political beliefs.
It's ironic that the author is using the tragic and abusive results of authoritarianism as a means of advocating FOR the very authoritarianism that Aaron Schwartz opposed.
Suppose you get together with someone to found a company as cofounders, but then your cofounder nearly immediately leaves the company to pursue other projects.
Why is it wrong to annul the designation?
Swartz contributed technology (web.py) that Reddit used briefly, and deserves as much credit as other technology contributors of the same scale.
That doesn't seem to be a fair description - it seems like he originally ran a software house that were paid to build a lot of the original reddit, was acquihired and given the title founder, and then stuck with the company through acquisition before being re-assigned to another of the acquirers properties.
Founder, not sure, but your narrative of someone barely involved doesn't stack up either.
Also, early on, it seems he brought the technical knowhow, acting as an outside CTO, and also had high PR / name recognition value, so I think they owed him some recognition for sure.
Aaron was arrested January 6, 2011. That tweet is from July 2011. Anyone who was active on both HN and Reddit at that time quickly saw the community divided around the issue.
Then Reddit was still trying to figure out how to generate revenue years after a conde nast acquisition and you could tell that the "leadership" team very quickly wanted to distance themselves from any controversy.
Anyone active on Reddit or HN in the early days would have been surprised to here that Aaron was not considered a cofounder. It wasn't until after his legal trouble that the Reddit team tried to distance themselves from him and an his cause as fast as possible.
> For Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combination who worked with Swartz, Huffman and Ohanian, Aaron Swartz is right to call himself a Reddit founder.
> Speaking on Reddit a few years ago, Graham said: “The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups…and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.” [1]
This may be unfair as Aaron isn't there to give his side of the story, but the way I understand is that the YC put these 1+2 people (who were all talented) together to help build reddit, but Huffman and Ohanian were far more interested in building reddit as it was originally their project and they had been working on it for 6 months, and it seems like Aaron wasn't as interested in it.
So yes, while Graham did forcingly merge these two together, I don't think it necessarily makes Aaron a co-founder and contributor.
EDIT: Just to add, Aaron's project was "infogami" which seems to be a CMS system, and I'm not sure how much of that actually contributed to reddit. It seems like his project was mostly scratched and the project that Huffman & Ohanian were working on ended up being the real success.
Early versions of reddit's wiki were more or less reskinned infogami.
As to the co-founder question, Aaron was definitely a co-founder of the merged reddit/infogami company, but he didn't contribute much after that, leading to his departure. I think that, rather than any controversy over his arrest is why Steve and Alexis didn't really consider him a co-founder.
Reddit seems pretty unprincipled in general. Their decisions wouldn't be so bad if they appeared to stem from a coherent principle but overall they seem to only be reacting and doing whatever is politically expedient in the moment.
edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority.
Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.
I view a principle as being a belief held that one will hold the line on, even if to do so would be potentially costly. A principle isn't necessarily popular or just.
Optimizing for traffic, revenue, or whatever else is certainly a strategy but I don't think it's a principle in the sense of someone or some people having principles.
And I would add that the effective output of such a strategy, if it were the behavior of an individual, would probably be described as sociopathic.
I agree with your general stance, but I do wonder if this strategy hasn't morphed into an ideology in itself or at least what we'd recognize as principles (which can indeed cost people by their definition, but not necesarily so) At least that is what I see with much of the content shared here. The world view that percolates across all those articles is one that praises hustle culture, a mechanistic optimization of life, rationality fetishism, "hacking" social relationships, founder/mogul worship and many other ideas that support entrepreneurial success as the fundamental arbiter of value and moral worth. I even saw a few people sincerely believing thar systemic poverty could be alleviated with some bootsrapped startup concept. Essentially a mix of sociopathy and technocracy that can also paradoxically function as a guiding light for non-sociopathic people.
> I view a principle as being a belief held that one will hold the line on, even if to do so would be potentially costly. A principle isn't necessarily popular or just.
To be scupulously fair, "never hold the line, especially if it would be costly to do so", is still a principle by that definition, albeit a vacuous one. Just like "zero" is a number of apples you can be holding.
According to the Wikipedia page, he did not join Reddit until 6 months after Reddit launched. He was fired a year later. There is also a tweet from 2011 saying he was not a co-founder: https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904
Yeah I've dug a little and it seems Aaron got himself some idolizing 'free net knight' bubble distorting things a bit.
He made a webapp, and partnered with reddit founders to maybe merge things but AFAIK conflicting (technical and non technical) visions made the next step impossible.
And they've explained this multiple times. Aaron was given the title of co-founder, but he joined well after the site had launched, and then proceeded to go AWOL and not work for months until he was fired. Given that he was only very briefly involved in the site, it doesn't make sense to call him a co-founder, even if that was his de jure title.
E: At the same time, I feel like I should state - Aaron Swartz was a martyr, and I don't mean to disparage him or his legacy.
Industry has nothing to do with it. Every country has industry. The reason the US has so many in prison is because its people are the more hair-on-fire moralistic crusaders in the civilized world and they want people in prison.
Industry is not what the prison industrial complex is.
The prison industrial complex is a deliberate lengthening of sentences and increasing of mandatory jail time for non-violent offenses designed to increase the for-profit prison population to increase profit.
"Prison industrial complex" is verbal sleight of hand to blame a system rather than people, but in reality these market forces are merely the revealed preference of what people want. If people wanted these inmates free - and by wanted I mean wanted in the revealed preference sense, not the virtue signal on the internet sense - capitalism would have them free tomorrow.
> If people wanted these inmates free - and by wanted I mean wanted in the revealed preference sense, not the virtue signal on the internet sense - capitalism would have them free tomorrow.
That’s not how the world or capitalism works at all. Plenty of people want things and don’t get them.
If you are referring to “a majority of people” then it’s still not how it works - for example the structure of the existing system affects it (see no president Clinton). There is much more to decisions and change.
In this case, a minority of profit seeking people with power use levers of control on decision makers and propaganda to create public policy.
This is just hand-waving and misdirection. Even China and Russia, who couldn't give a rat's ass about human rights, do not have anywhere near the mass incarceration problem that the US does. No other country has this problem.
All you have to do is go to any Reddit thread and watch Americans cheer about prison rape and masturbate over how if you selectively remove information you can make the crime sound worse than it actually was and use that low-resolution non-central point to justify imprisoning the person for 1827361872 years. I'm sorry dude, it's not corporations, it's not systematic incentives, it's Americans. The American people are the problem.
the pressure the US DOJ attorneys put upon him became unbearable. their high pressure tactics which involve piling on charges and threatening the target with so many years in prison as to be lifetime for some can had adverse affects on people. Sadly this is par for the course as the prosecuting attorney and their office do not get called to account for their methods or out comes.
this is very difficult to correct as many times the target is politically acceptable to many and therefor they just give the DOJ free reign to apply it to anyone they choose.
It's important to understand the historical context. Aaron was arrested in 2011, when a lot of other internet politics was happening. Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, LulzSec (remember Fuck FBI Friday?), Wikileaks, SOPA. "The block was hot" so to speak.
The attitude in DC was, "those people on the internet think they can do whatever they want, we'll show them." Well, they showed us and we lost a truly inspiring person.
> When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit,[32][33] which it did in November 2005, resulting in the formation of a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products.[32][34] As a result of this merger, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit.
A company with the mendacity to misrepresent an employee as a co-founder in order to attract said employee wasn't happy with that employee's performance. So they boldly refuse to continue misrepresenting him as a co-founder on their about page.
If so, I would like to nominate Reddit for the Silicon Valley Courage Award. (However, I think Facebook is the clear front-runner for clamping down on "Stop the Steal" disinformation now that both houses of Congress and the presidency are under Democratic control.)
Neither of those have binary releases. I just wanted to install some handshake addon to nextdns and visit sci hub. Is this possible at all or is there non-zero configuration required?
Didn't work for me either. I'm not that impressed compared with my usual technique of going to the site's Wikipedia page to see how to access it. Works for thing's like Sci Hub, Popcorn Time and the Daily Stormer.
Not really a fan but it's a bit of a poster child for 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' discussions. I figure while that's still up there's adequate free speech on the internet.
Just tried to download and install handshake. Requires docker. Just tried to download and install docker on windows 7, failed install, requires more stuff.
Opinion: This will never become a realization until these people realize the average Joe is not going to jump through all these hoops just to get an alternative browser up and running. It should be simple and seamless. Less than 1% will bother with all this.
Does the average Joe really reads articles from sci-hub ?
The target public of sci-hub should be able to understand how to install a couple programs imo.
Windows 7 has reached EOL a year ago (minus two days), so yeah, maybe it's not very well supported...
Well, no, but they actually can, so it's not the question.
I doubt that most people able to read and publish complex scientitic papers would "struggle" to follow what is overall a one page sequence of instructions to enter in a computer. You don't need to understand containers to run docker.
I don't really get the analogy with the mechanic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> You don't need to understand containers to run docker.
Maybe we live in different worlds but the average (non-cs)professor would very much struggle with this stuff. I've seen some barely being able to use basic programs, they are skilled in very different domains and no one will bat an eyelid if they slowly click on the mouse to copy/paste every day of the week. Rocking the command line is certainly not in their job description for the most part.
Even comp-sci academics do work that is horrendously bad and not even close to what would pass in the workplace for an entry level graduate.
> the analogy with the mechanic
Essentially an adult saying to a group of children "this is so simple for me, what are you a dumbass?"
Define "average Joe"? I haven't been in academia since I finished university years ago, but I'll sometimes want to do some digging around on some topic and get a lot of mileage out of sci-hub then.
I don't see any Windows installation instructions there.
Is it really that hard to distribute an application? A statically linked executable, or a portable directory with an executable in it. Thousands of projects do it every day. Why do so many developers insist on making a simple thing like actually running their software so complicated?
Essentially, isn't this just another domain registrar (Namebase.io) providing a few TLDs, following a much more complicated process, the advantage being a much more solid DNS entry substitute? If you run a high-traffic site, won't you still be at the mercy of hosting providers, CDN providers, etc.?
Related question: Is there a true uncensorable (sic) protocol for hosting a website?
freenet comes to mind but it's manyyears ago that I've looked into it. the experience than was rather lacking. other means might be an .onion site but I'm sure that a high traffic site is another beast
IMO not enough "useful" content is not reachable via "normal" DNS for anyone to care about the alternative DNS systems.
Sure, sites like TPB and Sci-Hub need to switch to a different domain from time to time bringing some annoyance to their users, but that's about it. Only if all domain registrars at once started actively removing "shady" domains would an alternative DNS ever come to spotlight.
Not much useful content needs it. The intersection of "universally criminal, such that it requires a censorship-resistant DNS alternative" and "valuable enough that normal people want to see it" is very very small.
What about individuals living under a dictatorship or within a regime that censors political speech? I could see there being billions of people in the world that would benefit from an internet that resists censorship.
Whether they would benefit from it is a different question to whether they want it and are bothered jumping through the hoops necessary to use it.
I have been in a few places with governments that qualify as "regimes." I have used the internet in some places that have a reputation for internet censorship.
What I have observed is that most of those billions of people you say would benefit from a censorship-resistant internet have little desire to say anything worth censoring. Free speech is a particularly American preoccupation, and this value is not universally shared. The overwhelming majority of people living under such "regimes" are not engaged in active resistance to them. They just want to get on with their lives, make money, go out with their friends, etc.
And they don't speak English anyway so it's irrelevant to them if some American websites are blocked. Those are not the websites they want to look at. The people who do want to look at them use VPNs, which are tolerated as a loophole because total blocking with no possibility of circumvention is too much trouble and would have negative economic consequences.
And if they ever do want to say something that would attract the ire of the censors, what would be the point of saying it to a tiny audience locked behind a wall of obscure tech? They say it on systems that have mass adoption in those countries, and they accept the consequences, which are usually small, because by the time they put it on their social media accounts thousands of others are saying the same thing, and there is strength in numbers.
Sure, some people do want this tech and use the current iterations of it. Most don't. It simply does not solve a problem they feel they have.
In any case, the conversation was about censorship of the DNS system. Most censorship via DNS that I have experienced was either enacted by private companies who decided they didn't like being the registrar for sites they objected to on the basis of values, not legality, or it was enacted by Western states at the behest of private companies who wanted to defend their intellectual property.
And censorship is not all that useful. It happens a bit, but why bother when amplification of the desired message is much more effective and generates better press by definition?
Instead of having it persist as a service on a laughably slow network, why can’t we use this outrage to galvanize the public to lobby for change of a broken system?
Handshake has a number of mechanics built into it that I think give it a stronger chance of succeeding than previous attempts. It's similar to how there were numerous failed digital currency attempts before Bitcoin figured out all the mechanics necessary for success. Some of these mechanics are:
- There is no centralized party that owns Handshake. This allows for any party to step in and contribute to the protocol. We've already seen this play out in building Namebase (I'm the CEO) as numerous unrelated parties have come together to further Handshake adoption
- It's not just about opening up the TLD namespace. Handshake's main technical goal is to improve the security and censorship-resistance of DNS by shifting the root of trust from CAs to a distributed ledger. My article on the technical improvements Handshake can provide was previously discussed on HN [1]
- TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer
- The Handshake coin (HNS) provides an incentive for miners to provide security to the network and for holders to support ongoing adoption of the protocol, similar to how Bitcoin holders have put in massive efforts to evangelize it (I recognize that on HN people may find the Bitcoin evangelists annoying but I believe Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today without them)
> - TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer
for real money, USD or EUR or such? where does this money go? or do you have to first mine some cryptocoin, or buy it with real money, and it then goes to the entity 'namebase'?
this quite honestly looks really sketchy to me. I'd much rather take my chances with registering a domain name among the myriad of ICANN root nameserver gTLDs and ccTLDs than buy some weird, obscure cryptocoin, which can then be used to buy 'domain names' that only 0.000001% of the client devices presently operating on the planet can successfully resolve into IPs.
all of this just looks like somebody has grafted 'blockchain' and 'crypto coins' onto the same alternative root DNS ideas that failed twenty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Great question. All Handshake names are registered with HNS through the auction process. Say you bid 1000 HNS on a name and I bid 900 HNS. You'd win that name and pay 900 HNS (the second highest bid price. Importantly, that fee doesn't go to Namebase or any other entity — the coins are burned on-chain so they go to no one.
uhhh, so I'm looking on the website right now, and it wants a scan of my passport or photo ID for the privilege of buying a virtual cryptocoin, that can be used for purchasing domain names almost nobody can currently resolve, which vanishes into thin air after the purchase? am I getting that right?
"Purchasing HNS with USD is currently limited to those with a US passport or ID."
Namebase is a service built on top of Handshake similar to how Coinbase builds on top of Bitcoin. It's an incorporated company that has to follow normal AML/KYC laws like other onramps. You don't have to go through Namebase to get HNS. Also, you can buy HNS with BTC without KYCing on Namebase. You can't sell or transfer the HNS without KYCing but you can still register names and transfer the names to other wallets without providing any passport info.
>There is no centralized party that owns Handshake.
Historically, blockchains haven't been terribly firm on the "irreversibility" point. Ethereum reversed the DAO transactions. The BTC rollbacks in 2010 and 2013. Etc etc.
In practice, whoever owns the client update server and whoever has 51% of the hashing power can make arbitrary changes to the chain. For most cryptocurrencies, a meeting of these stakeholders could fit into a phone booth.
You're right that Handshake can suffer from a 51% attack like other proof-of-work chains. Importantly, the security of DNS records on Handshake is strong even with the possibility of a 51% attack.
51% attacks on blockchains used as a store of value are bad because an attacker can spend their coins (ie BTC) on an exchange, withdraw their profits, then perform a 51% attack on the previous block to take back their spent coins.
On Handshake, that same attack exists for HNS, but DNS updates on chain take 36 blocks (about 6 hours worth of transactions) to propagate, which is significantly more expensive and unlikely than pulling off a normal 51% attack on a single block (it gets exponentially more unlikely). Furthermore this wouldn't even be an attack per se. An attacker may be able to undo a DNS update, but they wouldn't be able to falsify DNS records because only the owner of the name who controls the private key would be able to submit valid UPDATE transactioins.
That doesn't do much. One can easily switch to another ip within the same host provider. The real problem is censoring the name, which they claim to have resolved.
I’m supportive of free distribution of scientific knowledge, BUT HN has a significant bias against believing in the power of legal systems.
No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.
In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available.
Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value.
EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSES
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints:
* *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it.
* *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism).
* *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them.
* *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well.
I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all.
I think it's fair to say that there's an equal belief implicitly in the power of legal systems - but only when it's convenient for a point OP is making.
Thinking how a quick decision now will possibly turn in ten years down the road is how we can retain our rights but still move our democracy forward. A perfect example is championing the destruction and banning of all right leaning social media / twitter users... but when SciHub gets banned all the sudden its a travesty of free expression. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is not a two way street. Even as a staunch liberal try my best to not let my anger at the other side get the best of me and play into the hands of the corporatists and statist who actually want to recreate what many refer to as fascism (melding of the state and corporate powers).
A very limited way. Ways for savvy individuals to secretively exchange information and communicate are one thing. Running a site that has a large data footprint and is intended to be accessible to a large unsophisticated audience is something else.
Boy, if only we hadn't insisted on browsers becoming so ludicrously complicated so we could kludge applications onto them we might be able to solve at least one of those problems.
But I guess that plane has sailed. All hail the one true platform: Chrome.
So long as there are open source browsers, involuntary censorship via the browser will be difficult. One can always fork and start again. The most real danger comes when utility functions like access to an ISP or internet backbone interconnection are threatened.
DeCSS, which was an algorithm that could decrypt DVD content, might be more apropros. Sites were being sued for hosting the DeCSS source code, and there was resistance to that like printing the code on t-shirts.
That was due to the export controls. Basically, you could (as a US-based software provider) have a US edition that offered stronger encryption, but for anything leaving the US were limited to weaker encryption (principally measured in key size, not necessarily encryption method). If a user could verify they were in the US, then, you could offer maybe a 128-bit encryption package, but outside only 56-bit.
Yea except its the same with servers, and if you host your own ISPs... we really need the cloud in space or somewhere else outside of the influence of countries.
Even this you can overcome - there is always crypto and while you're ultimately dependent on communication infrastructure, there are ways to make it infeasible to be blocked.
The risks of using cloud servers are now well documented, but, out of curiosity, do they extend to colocated servers? Do data centres turn a blind eye to their colocation customers?
> that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
Time will tell. Right we are on day 2(?) of Parler being banned from major platforms, and their main problems seems to be being banned from app stores and not necessarily infrastructure problems. thedonald.win seems to be doing just fine and Voat also seemed to sustain a significant userbase before shutting down (financing a platform is a whole other thing entirely).
> No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.
I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where this is not true (US encryption mainly). I'm wondering if you have any examples of where it is true. What has been censored effectively?
As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area.
> you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
There's two issues with this. Firstly, you're conflating "a large group of people", with "the law": these are not the same thing. Far from it.
Secondly, Parler is not exactly a shining example of technical competency. I wouldn't hold them up as "the example" of technology -vs- legal censorship purely because there are much stronger/actually competent representatives of the technological side out there that would fair far better than Parler.
It's also notable that many of the learned "techie" individuals who might rally to defend some other technology were it under siege from powerful state & corporate censorship, in this case actually rallied against Parler. So Parler were up against far more than just the forces of legal censorship.
Squashing something completely is extremely difficult, but you can make it inconvenient and risky enough that most people won't bother. See the Chinese internet for instance.
There's often this fallacy when discussing governmental action that if it's not 100% effective it's useless. It's of course not true.
> As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area.
Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Russia routinely jails people for merely liking (not to mention, reposting) improper things on social media.
Sibling comments are being ignorant. The most famous born secret in the USA is how to make breeder reactors and nuclear weaponry; even if somebody independently rediscovers it, the government will censor them.
But, that said, our profession has never attempted a revolution where we explicitly try to breach this born secret. It's not clear whether we'd succeed, and the victory cup is literally nuclear waste, so it's not exactly desirable either.
I agree that it’s likely impossible to completely sensor information. What is much more feasible is to add so much friction/risk to spreading it, that it defacto is unavailable to 99% of people.
I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc.
I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).
>As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked.
If you hold "worked" to the impossible standard of "completely eradicated its target" then no, just as basically no policy or initiative has ever "worked." Hell, polio still exists![0] By the much more reasonable standard of "suppressed the dissemination and popularization of its target" then there are a plethora of examples:
- Libel and slander laws successfully limit outright lies reported by the media.
- Various governments censor and punish criticism of themselves or specific officials.
- Copyright law successfully limits propagation of media.
- Certain content - typically sexual or graphically violent - cannot legally be broadcast.
- You are legally barred from lying about, for example, the ingredients of a product you produce or its efficacy.
- State secrets are heavily censored, and those who circumvent this censorship are heavily punished.
Not to mention individual cases of censorship, such as whether a man may publish his own autobiography.[1] That particular case was eventually decided in his favor, but there was no guarantee of that.
Not by censorship alone, of course, but here's J. S. Mill: "But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down."
On the other hand, if you want to talk about the power of the law, you can look at the war on drugs. Billions have been spent fighting drug cartels in Mexico, tens (hundreds?) of thousands have been killed... And they unfortunately still manage regularly ship cocaine and meth to the US. For some people, the potential financial gain makes it worth the risk to dodge the legal system.
Knowledge is maybe not as addictive as meth, and people may not be willing to make the same sacrifices to get it across, but the risk required to run an encrypted network without government approval, and the efforts the government is willing to take to squash it, are also less.
This competition between technology and law is ongoing, and they effect and influence each other's development. Makes sense some people are more invested in promoting the strength of one force versus the other. A bit of a simplification, but I see HN as largely a place for people who believe in what technology enables (creative, individualistic, free expression) versus the law
I think it depends on the goal of censorship. If you're trying to prevent a site (or service or group) reaching a certainly level of mass use then censorship definitely can work. There are a large number of piracy sites blocked in the UK by court order. The blocks are trivial to get round but they are probably effective for a good proportion of UK users.
But if the goal of censorship is to completely prevent a leaked fact from being communicated - that's much harder (and I'll say it's practically impossible after a certain point).
Legal systems failed often on internet topics and does so again. DMCA comes to mind. It arguably doesn't serve any constructive purpose. Some artist have been made believe they need giant content rights holders.
I don't think any government could disallow end-to-end encryption at this point. I think they are careful because it could seriously undermine their authority if they fail, which they very likely would, which would lead to severe embarrassment.
> doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism
We used to have that, it was called "net neutrality" and it was killed by Parler's political party.
I accidentally clicked on the link in a browser without an ad blocker, worst mistake of my life. I forgot what a monstrosity the internet has become...
Not sure about sci hub, but these open archive like arxiv and bioarxiv are still biased. I know one world renown scientist who cannot submit his article to bioarxiv even though Nature has no problem with his paper (but won't publish it either). The paper points out a certain bacteria did not in fact evolve the ability to consume the synthetic compound nylon, since the relevant genetic material existed before nylon had been invented, which can be easily demonstrated with a BLAST search.
The link didn't work for me, which gives me pause about the availability of this technology. For most, simply going to Wikipedia's Sci-Hub page to get the current domain is easy and good enough, as the domain rarely changes.
Did you use the HNS.to gateway or connect directly via NextDNS? Per the announcement tweet [1] the gateway has limited uptime guarantees — it's much better to connect directly and only takes a few minutes to set up.
A note that if you use Telegram, there is @scihubbot which you can talk to and will send you papers if it can. In my opinion it's faster/easier than using a web interface also.
Where is the effort to get these articles published freely without having a private entity act as a middleman?
This problem of publicly funded research only available behind a paywall is a bipartisan issue. The main issue is that there appears to be no movement or effort to push this forward so the public is largely uninformed.
Instead of using this complicated custom thing, you could do something simpler.
Serve an initial website on a regular domain. The website only displays a standard hosts file. Copy and paste it into your local system's hosts file. Now browse to the site listed in the hosts file.
You can change the domains used in the hosts file at any time, and get real certs for those domains so you can use TLS. If the public browses to the IPs in the hosts file, they'll get nothing. But someone with the hosts file can see the actual site's content.
This avoids domain takedowns, and allows changing IPs and domain names.
There are some comments here that note that sci-hub or Aaron's action on JSTOR data is/was illegal.
Just leaving this thought out here -- if laws are considered unjust, it is ok, even noble, to break them. That is how one got rid of apartheid, how colonies became independent and LGBT marriages came to be legally recognized.
If not for lawbreakers we would still be living in a world that approves of Turing's treatment post war.
It's fine to point that out, but the way you did it lands with me as snarky. There's a spectrum of how readers interpret such things (some would find it snarky, as I did, while others wouldn't)—but what's for certain is that the reader spectrum skews far more in that direction than commenters think it does. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Since you only have to hit a small section of that spectrum to start a flamewar, we need comments to err on the side of not coming across that way [1].
There's another guideline that helps with this:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Although "How fortunate that" isn't exactly calling names, your comment could have been shortened in just this way. "This was never claimed" would make the same point without hitting any of the snark spectrum.
On the other hand, I find that your suggestion sounds curt and impolite. I did not say idiotic, I did not suggest that the poster was in any way incapable. In fact I find it a bit rude to assume that I was acting in bad faith at all.
I agree that "if laws are considered unjust, it is ok, even noble, to break them." But it is kind of dangerous position at the same time. I am sure, people who stormed the capital are sincerely believe that situation was "Unjust" for them.
This article (really it's more of a press release from the interested parties) seems to confuse the role of DNS from the role of certificate authority, making it hard for me to understand what they're talking about.
These days sometimes the same entities provide both SSL certificates and DNS, but they are different services.
> Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said. Instead of using the web-standard certificate authority to authenticate user connections to a server, Handshake stores references to the IP address of the websites registered in its system. Namebase is a platform that offers users access to the Handshake network
That makes no sense at all. But it sounds like handshake is simply an alternate DNS protocol? Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow? Is it actually more decentralized than DNS (which is already of course decentralized in one axis, but not the relevant one for keeping a lookup available if the entity hosting DNS decides to remove it).
Very confusing.
It seems like tor .onion address would be an actually mature solution to this problem, instead of this thing that seems like press release babble?
The article has a few technical mistakes in it (I've found most publications do that when it comes to a technical subject I'm familiar with...), but in short Handshake is an alternative decentralized DNS root hosted on a blockchain. It aims to replace Certificate Authorities as the root of trust by pinning TLSA keys directly on the blockchain instead of relying on trusted parties for verfication.
So it aims to replace both DNS (a way of looking up IP address for a hostname) as well as certificate authorities (a way of knowing if the SSL cert being used by your connection is 'good')?
Its an alternative DNS, with a method to use that alternative DNS as a way of authorizing ssl certs too?
That's right! Though the infrastructure for HTTPS without CAs on Handshake is still nascent (the community welcomes contributors if you're interested!). This article covers how to set up HTTPS on Handshake using DANE https://medium.com/@ca98am79/how-to-view-dane-tlsa-websites-...
I think what they meant is that with decentralized DNS, it is possible to replace certificate authorities by using DNSSEC + DANE RFC6698[0], but I agree the way it's mentioned is confusing.
ok. obviously you can replace cert authorities with those systems on present DNS too, it doesn't require a "(more) decentralized DNS", right?
Replacing cert authorities with something DNS-based (or alternative decentralized DNS based) doesn't actually seem relevant to the problem they are highlighting, of sci-hub's DNS records being removed by private or government actors making it harder to find sci-hub... no?
To answer your first question, with the present DNS, If you use DANE, the trust is centralized since you have to trust the root DNS keys and the registrar (imo still better than trusting a large number of CAs. letsencrypt already relies on DNS to issue certificates).
That's the thing Handshake is trying to address: with the root zone being on the (decentralized) blockchain, each TLD owner has full control over issuing the certificates for that domain using DNSSEC+DANE. The idea was that this would allow us to get rid of both the centralized root zone and CAs.
> But it sounds like handshake is simply an alternate DNS protocol?
Handshake [1] is the next generation of DNS, as opposed to the ICANN controlled legacy system. It is more decentralized since a single actor does not control the system. You cannot be de-platformed without the consensus of the community and a fork, as opposed to a decision made by a single or small group of actors.
> Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow?
Since you can verify a certificate against a DANE TLSA record which is retrievable from a DNS zone with DS records stored on chain, the CA is no longer required for trust -- only cryptography. Checkout the paper which goes into far more detail [2]. The entire system actually incentivizes the Internet to become more secure -- which is pretty exciting!
> Is it actually more decentralized than DNS
It's more decentralized than DNS in that the root becomes the blockchain instead of ICANN. This project simply finishes the beautiful DNS ecosystem, which was already decentralized, other than the root.
This appears to be just another commercialisation of domain names, trying to create another "Gold Rush" for the most sought after "vanity" names. Winner-take-all. A few profit at the expense of the many.
It perpetuates that problem of ICANN DNS becoming a "business" instead of solving it. (ICANN DNS domain names were originally free.) The potential for censorship is only one problem of ICANN DNS.
Also, this project introduces a new problem of wasting energy on mining tokens.
> This appears to be just another commercialisation of domain names, trying to create another "Gold Rush" for the most sought after names. Winner-take-all. A few profit at the expense of the many.
This is a major problem that the project has made a sincere attempt to address. Through scarcity certain sybil protections are afforded, which has been inherently architected into the consensus protocol [1]. Additionally, an airdrop to many internet pioneers and open source developers was built in as well, giving everyone similar resources to participate in the auction system which, in turn, affords everyone more equality in participation. Finally, the top 100k names as per alexa were pre-reserved for the holders in the alexa list, and these sites are incentivized to properly setup DNSSEC, as that's the only way they can claim their name on handshake.
This is a win for internet security and internet users. It's absolutely a big win for freedom of speech.
I feel obliged to point out again that this project appears to be a cryptocurrency scheme in which the owners are, in essence, selling the DNS naming hierarchy, which is genius since they do not in fact own it. Also, once again, I'd like to put out an appeal for anyone who wants to go in with me on a venture to do the same thing with ARP.
With all due respect, this comment reflects a poor understanding of decentralized projects and, particularly, public blockchains.
> the owners are ... selling the DNS naming hierarchy
The blockchain is providing names in a global namespace owned by the commons.
I cannot understand why you have been harassing and stalking this project with troll-like behavior and rude, snarky comments. Let's try to be constructive and provide value to society and the future. The next generation reads these threads, and they look up to you. There's no reason for you to change that. And with that respect, not to sound all Uncle Ben on you, does come responsibility.
Either way, love you tptacek and appreciate your contributions to HN. I can honestly say myself, that I've learned a lot by simply being audience to your conversation.
I can sort of understand the idea of people starting a new parallel naming system as a piece of Internet infrastructure, sort of the same way DNS happened.
Where you lose me, like, all the way across the horizon is where the people who start that infrastructure do it with a traded coin that they've premined, allocated huge chunks of to themselves, and then "airdropped" to a set of developers they collected in 2018.
Why would anybody sign up for this? I genuinely have a hard time understanding why anybody would take this seriously. It's a plan to replace the DNS roots with... some company? That just decided they should be the ones to own it?
Actually, almost everything happened that way in the history of mankind, right? xD
> the people who start that infrastructure do it with a traded coin
All the names could be registered by one monopolistic player on the public blockchain. That's why a cost function is required.
> that they've premined, allocated huge chunks of to themselves
A huge chunk was not allocated to anyone other than FOSS developers. Please review the paper [1] for specific allocations.
> "airdropped" to a set of developers they collected in 2018.
To be clear, this set consists of any developer on github who had 15 or more followers in 2019, the PGP web of trust strong set, and anyone on HN who had a keybase account in their profile.
> Why would anybody sign up for this? I genuinely have a hard time understanding why anybody would take this seriously.
I don't think there is anything to sign up for? Secondly, you absolutely don't need to use the new internet if you don't want to - just like nobody forces you to use anything else in this world. You have a choice. That said, we'll miss you. :(
> It's a plan to replace the DNS roots with... some company? That just decided they should be the ones to own it?
So actually, the DNS root is owned by some company [2] that is under the jurisdiction of California law. It used to be, and still basically is, owned by the US Department of Commerce. Internet users are replacing it with a public blockchain owned by the commons.
Historically, revolutions happen all the time. Now it's the time for democratization of naming. Is there any good reason why we shouldn't own our own names? I think that the name might even be more valuable than money. What is anything without a name?
> To be clear, this set consists of any developer on github who had 15 or more followers in 2019, the PGP web of trust strong set, and anyone on HN who had a keybase account in their profile.
Could you clarify a bit for me? I checked both of those boxes. Does that mean I have some of this premined crypto somewhere? How would I get to it? The paper you linked to is very long, but I am intrigued so will likely check it out.
I love the idea here. Decentralized web is sorely needed. If we can make it usable, that would be amazing.
Absolutely! There is a page that describes the airdrop and includes a script to claim it [1]. If you have checked those boxes, it very well does mean you may have some premined somewhere. You could also try Bob [2] as well.
I agree with you! Recent times have shown how much we need the decentralized web than ever before.
> you absolutely don't need to use the new internet if you don't want to
Yeah, no, that's not how this works. People don't want your "new internet". People want the Network, and in our era it so happens that's the Internet (previously it was the Public Switched Telephone Network, and before that the Universal Postal Union). But it isn't your "new internet" of a few enthusiasts who are sure it'll work this time even though it hasn't worked the previous times it was tried.
> Is there any good reason why we shouldn't own our own names?
A name is what something is called. In London there is a famous river crossing which was officially named after an equally famous politician. William Pitt (the Elder). But people didn't call it "William Pitt Bridge" or even "Pitt Bridge". People called it "Blackfriars" because that's the district of London it is in. Nobody you ask in London will know where "Pitt Bridge" is. There is no "Pitt Bridge" you want "Blackfriars".
Perhaps you've never visited London. Lots of HN folks are from Silicon Valley. San Francisco has a bridge that joins the city to Oakland, I happen to believe it should be named after the Emperor, "Norton Bridge" seems like a good name. But is that what it's named? No, because even if a few agree with me, on the whole people call it the "Bay bridge" and a name is what something is called.
This seems to be a hard concept for some people to manage, but it's mandatory, so there isn't anything I can do about that.
> Historically, revolutions happen all the time.
Historically most attempted revolutions fail. In hindsight it is often clear they could never have succeeded. I think Americans have a fairly recent memory of what failed revolution looks like.
> So actually, the DNS root is owned by some company that is under the jurisdiction of California law.
In practice (and perhaps this will annoy tptacek but too bad) this isn't usefully true. ICANN's control of the DNS root is by consent, the same way that say, the English Parliament is sovereign by consent, so just because California law says they can do something does not in fact mean it will have the effect envisioned in California law.
> People want the Network, and in our era it so happens that's the Internet (previously it was the Public Switched Telephone Network, and before that the Universal Postal Union).
You're absolutely right in that it changes.
> Historically most attempted revolutions fail.
Yet, my statement still stands: Historically, revolutions happen all the time. Risk of failure is not a reason not to proceed. As they say, "give me liberty or give me death!"
> ICANN's control of the DNS root is by consent
I agree with you completely. Let's see for how much longer the people will consent to their rule vs a democratic rule by the commons!
There are quite a few things I don't agree with tptacek about. But this is just the latest of a long series of hijack attempts for this namespace (the Internet's DNS hierarchy) and it's about time people learned that can't work.
Successful namespace hijacks rely on overwhelming numbers. You need to have so many people using your hijacked namespace that you've got way more people who do not even know that it's a hijack but are using it anyway than the existing administrators had total engagement so that it's pointless to argue with you.
Handshake can't get there from here, most of the world now uses the DNS hierarchy. This was a fool's errand. Carving themselves out a niche might have been possible, if they had been content with a niche but it's clear that their financial motives dictated they try for the impossible instead.
Handshake doesn't replace the DNS hierarchy - it simply upgrades the root.
Like all things in the world, the namespace will be democratized. The people do deserve to own their own namespace, and even if you wish or hope for democracy to fail, I'm confident either this project or another will one day succeed. Everyone in the community is selflessly working towards this goal for you and everyone else in this world's benefit. It's a quiet space without accolade or reward.
If they are fools, then I hope to be the biggest fool.
Finally, nothing in life is forever just like nothing is impossible my friend. As a hacker and developer, we always find a way.
To be fair, the "hijacked" namespace reserved all the current TLDs for the current owners. Handshake is trying very hard to be backwards compatible and not to break the internet.
Surely I will be swiftly corrected by DNSSEC experts and I will dare to use less-than-correct terminology but doesn't DNSSEC make DNS more not less centralised. With DNSSEC, as I have seen it used in practice, a "root" must in effect "approve" of each domainname. In other words, cooperation from a root is required in order "certify" a domainname as "authentic". So if hypothetical internet user wants to serve her own RRs from her own nameserver for her own self-hosted own web resources on the internet, then she has to make sure a "root" approves of her source registry and registrar. Without the root's (indirect) blessing, her domainname is not "authentic" and should not be held in any shared cache.
Here is a different idea. The intent is not "world-takeover" or "winning" any imaginary popularity contest but just a different kind of DNS service, because, well who needs a reason. Because we feel like it, how's that. The idea is: Start a registry that only allows djb-designed per-packet encrypted DNS to be used. That is, all persons running authoritative nameservers must follow some rules. They must publish public keys in subdomains of the nameserver's domain. For an example of how this looks, do an NS query to ianix.com. All authoritative nameservers in this imaginary registry would be required to offer per-packet encypted DNS. It would not be that difficult to start something like this at least on a small scale. People running authoritative nameservers simply need to run a CurveDNS forwarder in front of their preferred authoritative nameserver implementation. The CurveDNS forwarder is a small piece of free, open-source software. This type of encryption is different from DNSSEC, so this is not a "replacement" or even an "alternative" to that movement. It is something totally different. The purpose is not to address risk associated with shared DNS caches (e.g., poisoning and other tricks) as DNSSEC is intended to address, it is not to distinguish an "approved" domainname versus an "unapproved" one by creating some "chain of trust" to a "root". The purpose is just to encyrpt DNS packets. The focus is authoritative DNS, the folks that actually own the web resource, not recursive DNS, third party DNS cache providers, etc. There are couple of reference implementations of the DNSCurve-enabled cache and one of a dig-like client users would run on their home/own networks to send encypted queries and decrypt responses. This whole system for encrypting DNS has been around for over a decade and IMHO is easily as "battle-tested" as anything DNSSEC. Does that mean everyone should use it. No. But it means anyone could use it. For no other reason that because they feel like it.
The main problem something like Handshake is purportedly aimed at solving, namely centralisation of who controls "the" DNS, is IMO caused by the commercialisation and making a "market" for names. There is no way anyone is going to solve the centralisation problem by offering a commercial alternative that replays the "Gold Rush" of the first DNS (not to mention all the corruption that followed, culminating in "new gTLDs" for $185,000+). If we want to level the DNS playing field, then IMO we would have to take the money out of it. That might mean "vanity" names are not as important. Who knows, public keys might play a more important role. I am thinking of those Facebook workers who "brute-forced/mined" some .onion name they thought was more recognisable. Silly. "Decentralised" would seem to imply more equality across the namespace, not "I snagged the best names before everyone else" (using x kilowatts in the process) or "That name sucks."
I wonder why wikipedia mentions that it has an .onion address but does not show this address? People do keep the constantly changing URLs for it up-to-date and are even highlighted in the side bar, so a legal reason not to publish the link to it is unlikely the reason.
CEO of Namebase here. We posted the original tweet announcing the news[1]. If any of y'all have questions about how sci-hub.hns works or how Handshake works in general I'll be online today to chat!
I beg to differ. The original Handshake developers collected 10.2MM USD from sponsors and distributed it among free software and open source projects [0]. Actual USD were given out, not just magical internet money, eg FSF received 1 million [1].
Handshake has taken a lot of lessons from previous attempts at alternative blockchain DNS roots like NameCoin. Here are some ways its different:
- Handshake names are not *.bit domains like NameCoin they're actually top-level domains. This is because Handshake's purpose is not to decentralize domain names per se but too decentralize the root zone and create a more secure root of trust than Certificate Authorities [1]
- Handshake name auctions were spread out over the course of the first year after launch to prevent early adopters from hoarding all the good names. For instance, .crypto was available in the first few weeks after launch but .information isn't available until next week. This is important because early adopters hoarding names prevents latecomers from supporting the protocol.
- Handshake names are sold via vickrey auction instead of a flat fee. Different names are more valuable than others. Flat fee pricing allows a hoarder to arbitrage that fact by being first whereas auction pricing ensures that names are better distributed. .X sold for 311k HNS[2] (about $40k) whereas other names sell for a few cents.
- Handshake has a light client[3] that can trustlessly verify DNS records on-chain. This is critical because very few people run full-nodes, so without a light client the majority of users would rely on third parties which provides worse security than users resolving names in a decentralized manner
They're not top-level domains until most people's clients resolve them as such. They're off to the side in a niche name space that most people don't know about, and to which you have provided a brittle gateway that doesn't even present them as top-level.
... and they have a million other little niche name spaces to compete with to reach the point of serving as "top-level domains". I can create my own alternate name space, too, and nobody will care about mine, either.
What happens if your definition of a top-level domain disagrees with ICAN's? I mean, what happens if you sell .xyzzy to Bob, and then ICAN, without caring about your project, sells .xyzzy to Alice? How should the conflict be resolved?
What I see happening as a complete outsider is that "the community" (eg browsers, libraries) puts them under a tld against their wishes, to resolve this exact issue.
Whats the easiest way to resolve handshake names locally without a 3rd party gateway? Is there a FF extension I can use, something that doesn't require a lot of configuration?
Did you use the HNS.to gateway or connect directly via NextDNS? Per the announcement tweet [1] the gateway has limited uptime guarantees — it's much better to connect directly and only takes a few minutes to set up.
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
It’s not pirated. The vast majority of this research has been paid for by the public. Eykaban is a hero, and has liberated it. Aaron Swartz died for this cause.
413 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadSomeone actually got censored, and took "well, if you don't like how the DNS does things, you can just make your own!" as a literal challenge.
Wonder if this will eventually lead to further fragmentation. Hopefully encryption will keep it out of the lowest levels of infrastructure, I'd hate to see separate fiber lines put down to share controversial communications.
Now, you may or may not agree with his position (I certainly don't agree with some key aspects of it) but Randall is explaining what free speech is, not arguing for censorship.
The alt text is pretty thought provoking, too.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1357/
I was merely correcting the misconception that Randall Munroe from xkcd doesn't advocate for free speech. I didn't say I agreed 100% with the comic itself, though I do find parts of it thought-provoking.
I'm not Randall Munroe, how am I confusing anything by simply explaining he doesn't claim to be against free speech but rather is clarifying what he thinks free speech is?
I'm ok if you disagree with him, but please don't make claims about what I think, when I didn't say what I think.
I was replying to a comment arguing that xkcd doesn't support free speech because the author is leftist. I showed the author does support what he believes is free speech. That's all.
The idea of free speech is the ideas should succed or fail based on their ability to convince private actors tomhold and relay them.
Compelling actors to relay speech they disapprove of, unless those actors are the State or agents thereof, generally violates that principal.
Free speech is not an entitlement to third-party magnification of your speech, it is indeed the opposite: the idea that such magnification must be earned by convincing the party whose magnification is sought.
“People who disagree with me aren't relaying my speech or speech I like” isn't a violation of free speech.
Also, I never made a “guilt by association” argument, you inferred it. You just committed the fallacy fallacy. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
[citation needed]
"I'm sure the CCP thinks the same" is the laziest, weakest form of objection. You're not off the hook, you must still prove the idea being criticized is wrong regardless of what the CCP thinks about it.
(Like I pointed out in another comment, I think you've misread the alt-text, because it certainly doesn't support censorship).
"Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences!" is one of the most infuriating lines I've ever had the displeasure to hear parroted. What else could it possibly be, but the general idea of not being punished for saying things? The only thing that matters to the principle of freedom of speech is those consequences.
Who cares whether it's a government that decides that when you express a certain opinion, you lose your job- or twitter?
Funny, but not surprising, how even self-proclaimed leftists will side with capital when it's treading on the right people.
You might say "but you can't force people to platform/associate with those they find odious!", to which I reply 'of course you can'- there's laws against unlimited free association, with the argument that bulk group dynamics end up diminishing individual freedom on net.
You might say opinions are a different category from e.g. ethnicity, as they can be changed, while race can't.
In that case, in the future when we can change our bodies in a day, will it be alright if 'race', no longer existing as such, becomes as acceptably targetable as speech?
I actually agree with you. I think the narrow definition that "only the government has the ability to censor speech" isn't useful, especially in an age where some businesses, platforms and corporations have so much power.
I was just correcting the perception that xkcd had a comic "against" free speech (and because "he is a leftist"). It's not against free speech. The author clarifies what he thinks free speech is.
Some people apparently thought because I linked to a comic to correct someone's claim about that comic, that said comic represents my opinion. Puzzling.
I think the issue is complex, but probably related to its sister concept of tolerance and with "the paradox of tolerance" [1]:
> "The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
It's perfectly reasonable to believe Randall Munroe supports free speech and at the same time believes someone spewing hateful vitriol can be kicked out of whatever private venue by the owners/administrators of said venue. In order for you to believe this, you simply must accept that Randall is using a different, possibly more legalistic version of "free speech" than you. Again, you cannot claim he is against free speech because he thinks corporate censorship is ok -- first, he doesn't exactly defend corporate censorship in his comic, and second, you're begging the question! You are claiming "corporate censorship" is against free speech, which is not a foregone conclusion and is exactly what is being debated.
Finally, the whole "this is because Randall Munroe is a leftie and, like all lefties, is against free speech" angle only serves to inflame the debate with name calling. Anyone going for this "like all lefties" is not interested in honest debate at all.
I feel weird having to point all this out because I, in fact, think corporate censorship is against free speech -- my concept, not what whatever amendment says -- and in this day and age, it's even worse than state censorship.
Sure, and it's perfectly reasonable to believe someone supports, say, not destroying [something that they call "forests"] and at the same time believes rainforests can be cut down to make more room for farmland. In order for you to believe this, you simply must accept that they are using a definition of "forests" that does not include rainforests.
Nonetheless, that person is against not destroying forests-the-actual-thing, regardless of what definition they use for "forests"-the-english-word.
> The whole "this is because Randall Munroe is a leftie and, like all lefties, is against free speech" only serves to turn the debate into an absurd flamewar. Anyone going for this "like all lefties" is not interested in honest debate at all.
Who are you responding to? Because if I had said something like that, it would have been "Randall Munroe is either a leftie or a rightie and, like all lefties and righties, is against free speech".
You pretty much ignored my reply, did a silly search & replace (ignoring HN's guidelines of assuming good faith and replying to the best possible interpretation) and decided to feel clever about it. Thanks, but no thanks.
> Who are you responding to?
Not you in that particular sentence, but user bonoboTP and others in this thread.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1357/
It conflates the principle free speech with a narrow legal reading of the first amendment. Whether on purpose, or accident, I cannot say. The alt-text is also only illuminating in the sense that the CCP might heartily agree with it as well, as they see their crusade against free speech as nothing more than maintaining the public order and peace. In publishing the comic and leaving it up, Munroe has done more to damage the principle of free speech in the West than any opinion article I can think of, because it chains together several fallacies in a clever and funny way.
A comic response to xkcd - https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
A legal rebuttal to anybody thinking AWS’s actions were legal (they were not, and hopefully a judge will agree soon) - https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/pdfserver/SGS7Z4Y/137165184/Par...
Of course _philosophically_, yeah, the people who included (a) in the constitution were interested in (b). Everyone's on board with free speech as a concept here. But at some point if someone is yelling Nazi stuff, I'm gonna punch them for it. It's not a legal question at all; my actions aren't governed by laws, just what I feel is right to do. That is the same point xkcd was making. I don't know enough to say whether AWS or whoever has the same right because they are operating in a legal system. But as a _person_, yeah, I can do whatever I want to you, including 'show you the door', if you're awful.
No they aren’t, including you. I don’t trust your judgement of who is a Nazi, and even if I did, I especially don’t trust everyone who hears you say that. However, despite your endorsement of political violence (terrorism) I don’t believe that it would be right for you to be deplatformed, especially if it’s breach of contract (like what AWS is doing). Nor would I want HN taken offline despite them not moderating terrorist comments such as yours.
Edit: you’re confusing my clinical label of terrorism with name calling. I am not calling names, except insofar as I’m making a point about how easily it is to make content seem unacceptable when we strip away context, which is why due process is so necessary. We are all terrorists to some group, however disfavored... if child molestation was somehow legalized, anyone who attempted it would face severe extra-legal consequences for example.
The point is that while free speech might be protected as a legal concept, it's not protected as a personal concept. I espouse free speech, until someone really screws up and gets super evil, and then I don't want them to talk anymore (especially not to rally people to their evil causes). I'm not a government. And that's completely consistent with wanting a government/overall society which defends free speech.
(also, you're not doing your argument any favors by for some reason calling me a terrorist. it's not even clear why you're doing that)
to be clear: if someone shouts nazi stuff around me and I'm driven to anger enough to punch them (which, to be clear, has never happened, but hypothetically), I obviously accept the legal consequences of that. the whole point here is that legal rules abut what you should do are not ethical ones. Ethically, don't shout nazi stuff, and also ethically if you do shout nazi stuff you might get punched and you deserve it.
Don't play coy. Punching someone is not the same thing as "showing them the door".
> I'm gonna punch them for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753591
Which alt-text did you read? It cannot possibly be this one:
> "I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."
This is saying "that your idea cannot be censored is not good enough in order to convince people that it's good". This cannot be used to censor anything -- in fact, it claims the position is legal -- neither by the CCP or anyone else. It's a judgment on the quality of the idea.
It seems to me you're trying to invoke the CCP boogeyman regardless of whether it actually fits this argument.
Yes but the implication is that if you’re censored and asking the government for redress, your speech is abhorrent. In the context of the comic it’s clearly meant to be interpreted that way.
Your literal description of it is a red herring, a typical clever Monroe construction to avoid criticism, as if anyone claims they’re correct because what they’re saying isn’t illegal. Nobody makes that argument.
That's your reading. Mine is that if the best you can say about a position is "it's not illegal" then you're on shaky ground. I.e. it's legal, but unconvincing. It doesn't mean you should be censored, it just means your position probably lacks merit if you can't mention anything else that's good about it.
> Your literal description of it is a red herring, a typical clever Monroe construction to avoid criticism
At this point I have to ask: you are aware I'm not the author of xkcd, aren't you?
That's just not true. The claim is that if you're censored and your only defense of your position is that you should be allowed to say it, you position is flimsy. Nobody would agree with the claim that "_in general_ if you're censored your speech is abhorrent", that's laughable.
Now, yeah, agreed, it's debatable whether this actually happens. But it sure feels like it happens.
Note, there is some potentially upsetting language in this document where Amazon gives examples of the type of content on Parler they deemed to be in violation of the contract. Consider yourself warned, if that sort of thing bothers you.
[0] https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/pdfserver/SGS7Z4Y/137165184/Par...
some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list.
In the U.S.? I thought this was only in India with Facebook's non-internet Internet.
https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/free-music-streaming
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691506/portugal-meo-in...
E.g. in winter times booting out renters or cutting heating/electricity is forbidden. Applying the same for internet isn’t far fetched anymore IMO.
I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams.
Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.
The precipitating event was a lawsuit in India and the subsequent reactions.
This article gives more details: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/
The science should be funded and free. The applications of the science are where the money is to be made.
These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era. It's time for them to fail and die off naturally. But it will probably take legislation to do so. And I for one can't wait to see them gone.
Elsevier is a very diverse company with a lot of product offerings that are not antiquated. People here tend to just think of them as a journal publication company, but they are much more than that. The company sells (through subsidiaries) a lot of IT products to governments and law enforcement around the world.
They, as a small example, offer a service that allow LEO to perform comprehensive background & arrest record checks on individuals in custody.
The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.
They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.
I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.
To guard this data to the point they were willing to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for 35 years is beyond reprehensible. It's simply abhorrent the way they have acted as gatekeepers to this kind of knowledge.
They are responsible for slowing things down. Not speeding them up. These gatekeepers are holding us back. Lives could be saved. Millions of them. This data is a benefit to humanity as a whole and it should be treated as such.
"Yeah, meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
You write like someone who's never heard of "regulatory capture."
Guilty but history is on my side.
Most scientific research is funded with grants and by universities with billion dollar endowments. They are not struggling.
You should not make money on the deaths of others because you think it's more important to charge for the knowledge that can save them.
I'm in medical. Some of these papers are life saving. Please don't discount how valuable that science is to humanity as a whole.
This is not about companies making profit. This is about science and the freedom of information. Data wants to be free and it should be.
I'm not discounting how valuable open research is to society as a whole. I'm not even arguing that, as a moral right, the research should be freely available! I'm just not seeing a technical path there that doesn't retroactively unassign publishing rights to all past papers. And I don't see how a change in political administration makes it any easier to convince rich people to give up money.
I'm not even convinced the government should take action here - CS work is done on arxiv, so it's not even as if Elsevier provides a useful service in distribution. Why are authors continuing to publish in Nature when they could put a PDF up anywhere? that's what we need to address.
I personally believe this is wishful thinking (similarly when I read about how companies have "outdated business models"). Publishers sell prestigue and attention, and this can't easily be replicated, nor is it unnecessary. The increase in research papers makes them even more valueable in my eyes.
This is despite me wanting to see many changes to publishing and science distribution.
edit: removed part that I deemed unecessarily hostile.
This saves lives. I think we can all agree there are certain things that are a benefit to humanity and we should place these things over profits.
These companies are less valuable than they appear IMHO. These gatekeepers of knowledge. More like stonewallers.
There's optimism, and then there is naiveté.
Sci-hub was created under Obama, I don't remember neither him nor the party making anything to help them, quite the opposite actually: Elbakyan has been judged in absentia and sentenced twice under his presidency. Were she to put the foot on Western soil, she would pay it dearly thanks to this.
We all know what we got with the Republicans last 4 years. Let's see what changed on the other side of the aisle if anything.
I know that we're not supposed to be snarky here at HN, but I'm failing to see how #NotAllDems is a sensible argument. Especially given President-Elect Biden's track record on this particular issue, and Vice-President-Elect Harris' history as a "hardline", "tough on crime" prosecutor.
In this case it seems that they would have considered the actions of the companies running the paywalls. How likely would they be to take legal action (not all of which is public) against Twitter? Fairly likely, if they feel that Twitter is helping to publicize the service they want to take down.
This is both in the legal and financial interest of Twitter. There is no real blow back from kicking off this person and their service versus dealing with US corporations. Copyright law changes and the impact of court decisions likely play a factor too. I find it hard to believe that some court somewhere, hasn't held Twitter (or similar service) liable for indirect copyright damages (that is likely being appealed.)
(Emphasis mine.) Did this Namebase CEO just state on record that he doesn’t know how DNS works?
Can I configure my resolver to use this "Handshake" blockchain?
https://www.namebase.io/blog/how-to-access-handshake-domains...
>a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names.
Except for being privacy focused, this literally describes every domain name service in the Internet.
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...
That works great until the only names that are left are all too long to remember.
And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.
Or am I missing something here?
Do you really believe this is a serious problem? I don't think it is by any stretch of the imagination.
---
> It seems like the answer is "everyone buys their own TLD", right?
Yeah, why not? The conceptual distinction between a domain and a TLD isn't necessary. From the Namebase docs:
> For instance, if you own "nakamoto" on Handshake, you can use "nakamoto" as a domain itself. In that case, you would point "nakamoto" to your website and visit it at http://nakamoto/ in your browser. You can also use "nakamoto" as a TLD and issue your own subdomains. In that case you can create "satoshi.nakamoto" and visit it at http://satoshi.nakamoto in your browser. A Handshake name can be used as both a domain name directly and as a TLD at the same time.
---
> And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.
Maybe? Buying from someone else's TLD isn't the point of Handshake, for the reasons I mentioned above. But if you wanted to buy a subdomain for some reason, and still wanted it to be uncensorable, you should buy one from someone who revokes their censorship capabilities programmatically.
And that point is the big picture: reasoning about transparent code for very important things gives you a level of control you can't obtain through trusting people.
For owners, it's important that their domain names can't be taken down or seized from them. Sci-Hub has dealt with this issue numerous times and has had to register a pool of domain names to try too counteract this issue before getting their Handshake name. Domain registrars can seize domain names and there isn't much recourse for the owners — it doesn't even need to be for a good reason[1]. On Handshake, ownership is controlled by your wallet's private key (similar to owning Bitcoin). As long as you control your private key no one can take your name from you.
For consumers, it's important that you can 1) access the domain name and 2) trust that the DNS records you're seeing are authentic. Handshake is a distributed network so as long as you can connect to a single node you can access it. This mechanic is what gives other distributed networks like Bitcoin and BitTorrent their strength. Furthermore, you can verify the authenticity of the records since each DNS update is reflected on the blockchain similar to how you can verify transactions on Bitcoin.
[1] https://www.izoologic.com/2018/12/20/zoho-domain-taken-mista...
Technically DNS-the-protocol is suitably decentralized to resist censorship[0]; it's the particular canonical infrastructure of the main DNS system that's the weak link there. (Edit: by which I mean I think emacdona was talking about the protocol in general, and if you meant to object to that admittedly-debateable choice of focus, you should probably explicitly point out the distinction between the protocol (that anyone can use) and the canonical system (that is run by (tautologically) malicious corporations).)
0: Although it could use some cryptographic additions for better security, and it has problems with global uniqueness in the face of malicious actors pushing records to the effect of "sci-hub.org IN A some.fbi.ip.addr". But if you can find a trustworthy (possibly-suffix-indexed collection of) root server to start from, the protocol itself works fine.
A and J are controlled by Verisign (a US public company)
B and D by different US universities
C by Cogent (another US public company)
E by NASA
F by Internet Systems Consortium (an American not-for-profit)
G by the US Department of Defense
H by the US Army
I by Netnod (a Swedish non-profit)
K by RIPE (the European RIR)
and finally M by WIDE (a project of several Japanese universities)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone#Management
https://xkcd.com/2267/
https://xkcd.com/2030/
We are going to have to come up with a new metaphor soon. I haven't seen a phonebook in ages. Honestly I would be more likely to tell my kid "Phonebooks were like DNS for telephone numbers."
thanks I'll be stealing this quote 100%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
That is probably fair. Anywhere I've lived in the US, someone would know (well, maybe not if they were young enough) what you meant by "telephone directory" but almost everyone would say "phonebook" at least in casual conversation. It's also true that when you would dial 411 for a number, that was called directory assistance. (And a listing of phone numbers for the staff in an organization would probably be called a staff directory or a telephone directory or something along those lines.)
A straightforward search for the term brings up large sites in the UK, India, Malta and Hong Kong. "Directory Enquiries" was (is?) the name for the service in the UK where you pay a fee for someone to look in the telephone directory for you.
[0] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uCASmsWxL...
"Phone[ ]book" is the 12th word on the page you linked, and described there as a synonym to "directory". There's no need to be that pedantic.
"A telephone book was a directory for telephone numbers" is clear and accurate. Unless knowing what the word "directory" means is asserted to be the domain of pedants.
"By providing a worldwide, distributed directory service, the Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
It's quite pedantic.
I'm the same way, here's an interpersonal relationship tip I've had to learn: If someone calls you an asshole, you can't say "No, I've thought about it and you're wrong, you don't really think I'm an asshole." Well, you can say that, but it just makes you come off as even more of an asshole.
Just like DNS: - Which librarian you ask can result in being pointed to a different reference book. - If the librarian is already familiar with the subject, they may be able to give you the answer directly to save time instead of pointing you to the reference book.
The phonebook metaphor was a good one to give to completely non-technical people, but technical people used it as well, and so often didn't intuitively understand that DNS involves clients exchanging data with arbitrary servers on the internet, using their own DNS server as a proxy. As a result, they often leave s significant communication channel open to the internet even from supposedly secure environments.
There are mutiple phonebooks worldwide, each compiled by different organizations. There is just not one phonebook, similar to how there is not just one DNS-server.
A floppy was like the save icon on old software. :)
I suspect these jokes are more reality than we think.
To be forgetful or ignore this when turning the page regarding another subject on which you are less knowledgeable is known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
I'm happy to talk through how Handshake works if you have any questions about it. I also wrote an article on how Handshake can improve the root of trust for DNS which was previously discussed on HN [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969
P.S. Corrected the date, seems like I still live in 2020. Thank you, lazyant.
But, without passing judgement one way or the other, Aaron's beliefs about free speech and information freedom which informed his activism cannot be reasonably described as moderate.
> cannot be reasonably described as moderate
Are you aware that you’re claiming not to pass judgement, and then do so in the very same sentence?
I think it seems immoderate to you because, like many others on this website (including me), we were all on the inside of the knowledge-monopoly walled-garden that Aaron talked about, where most research isn’t accessible to you unless you join the capitalist academia-industrial-complex (that last part is my own description, not Aaron’s), such as attending a university with a huge endowment (Harvard and other Ivy League schools), or living in a tech-cluster that the government has invested in for many years (Stanford&Silicon Valley) - why else does the most ‘exciting’ research happen at private institutions like these?:
“The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.” [1]
What makes it so one person is allowed to privatize knowledge and charge another a rent to access it? Why have governments allowed this enclosure of the scientific commons (amongst others), which is really an inheritance that belongs to all?
Privatization of knowledge is artificial scarcity that does not have to be there. It keeps the majority of society locked out, especially the working class, as well as people who live in the Global South.
This beautiful story from a few days ago is just one of many that shows the incredible power of Sci-hub:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685819
I think that most intellectual laborers who themselves have conditional access to trade secrets and patents due to their employment with the capitalist/propertied classes (who are the so called 'owners' of this privatized knowledge), underestimate how difficult it is for others to follow in their footsteps, to try to copy what they did (myself included). In other words, we fail to see and acknowledge how much contrived scarcity is created by the US-‘led’ global Intellectual Property system and agreements, which allows capitalist firms to claim ownership of knowledge through trade secrets, patents and copyrights - which are then used to control where scientific research is done and where it is not. It ultimately holds back innovation, and the sharing of all kinds of emancipatory and empowering technologies locked up by capitalists under capitalism.
The most violent and advanced form of this capitalist enclosure of knowledge is the criminal enforcement of ‘trade secrets‘. The use of this mechanism, and the state institution that allows it, is the biggest capitalist perversion of science and technological development humanity has ever seen. [2]
Instead of contributing to firms and institutions that privatize knowledge, I hope we will continue joining in efforts to liberate science and technology from capitalism, creating an unconditionally available shared commons library that is accessible to all around the globe.
As we are currently part of the small group of people who are privileged recipients of this inheritance, I believe we have no excuse to not contribute to this battle for universal access, on all fronts, especially considering the fact that digital technologies have brought with them the possibility for a zero marginal cost of reproduction of knowledge. Sci-hub and similar efforts are a fantastic start to this.
For another strategy that helps reclaim technology from capitalism (and which really blew my hair back), check out the work of Bob Haugen, Lynn Foster and Pospi (Mikorizal) on Valueflo.ws / hREA. [3]
[1] alienlid ↗ This is great, thanks for writing this and citing references. Love the Manifesto that Swartz wrote MacsHeadroom ↗ To be clear, I was actively involved in a lot of this and would not describe myself or my beliefs as 'moderate' either.
I'm more of an [information freedom] absolutist / code is law / bits are not a big / etc.
So if I were to "pass judgement" I would say Aaron was a freedom fighter who tragically fell on his sword when the going got (quite) tough. I don't have a single negative thing to say about him or his beliefs.
I would agree with this. I knew Aaron, at least in terms of our mutual involvement in the intellectual freedom movement, and worked with him on various things (though not well, I was a pretty shitty python coder back then).
His positions, like mine, were definitely in the "extreme", in the sense that 99% of people either 1) don't agree that we should abolish copyright and patents OR don't have an opinion on it.
But there can be a negative connotation to the word "extreme" that I don't think applies here. Our stance is extreme in the sense that the Internet was extreme in the 1970's, or the Web extreme in the 1990's, or civil rights extreme in the 1950's, or women's right to vote extreme in the 1920's.
Another way to put it: he was far ahead of our time on issues of justice.
Can you provide a citation of that? Swartz was overcharged, but clearly unlawful (a breach of contract at the bare minimum).
About Aaron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Why is it wrong to annul the designation?
Swartz contributed technology (web.py) that Reddit used briefly, and deserves as much credit as other technology contributors of the same scale.
Founder, not sure, but your narrative of someone barely involved doesn't stack up either.
Also, early on, it seems he brought the technical knowhow, acting as an outside CTO, and also had high PR / name recognition value, so I think they owed him some recognition for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Sutcliffe
Then Reddit was still trying to figure out how to generate revenue years after a conde nast acquisition and you could tell that the "leadership" team very quickly wanted to distance themselves from any controversy.
Anyone active on Reddit or HN in the early days would have been surprised to here that Aaron was not considered a cofounder. It wasn't until after his legal trouble that the Reddit team tried to distance themselves from him and an his cause as fast as possible.
> Speaking on Reddit a few years ago, Graham said: “The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups…and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.” [1]
sounds pretty clear to me..
1: https://www.thefocus.news/tech/aaron-swartz-reddit/
So yes, while Graham did forcingly merge these two together, I don't think it necessarily makes Aaron a co-founder and contributor.
EDIT: Just to add, Aaron's project was "infogami" which seems to be a CMS system, and I'm not sure how much of that actually contributed to reddit. It seems like his project was mostly scratched and the project that Huffman & Ohanian were working on ended up being the real success.
As to the co-founder question, Aaron was definitely a co-founder of the merged reddit/infogami company, but he didn't contribute much after that, leading to his departure. I think that, rather than any controversy over his arrest is why Steve and Alexis didn't really consider him a co-founder.
Not unlike most orgs I suppose.
edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority.
Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.
Optimizing for traffic, revenue, or whatever else is certainly a strategy but I don't think it's a principle in the sense of someone or some people having principles.
And I would add that the effective output of such a strategy, if it were the behavior of an individual, would probably be described as sociopathic.
To be scupulously fair, "never hold the line, especially if it would be costly to do so", is still a principle by that definition, albeit a vacuous one. Just like "zero" is a number of apples you can be holding.
He made a webapp, and partnered with reddit founders to maybe merge things but AFAIK conflicting (technical and non technical) visions made the next step impossible.
E: At the same time, I feel like I should state - Aaron Swartz was a martyr, and I don't mean to disparage him or his legacy.
Who killed him? According to wikipedia it was suicide. Did he have a mental issue?
The prison industrial complex is a deliberate lengthening of sentences and increasing of mandatory jail time for non-violent offenses designed to increase the for-profit prison population to increase profit.
That’s not how the world or capitalism works at all. Plenty of people want things and don’t get them.
If you are referring to “a majority of people” then it’s still not how it works - for example the structure of the existing system affects it (see no president Clinton). There is much more to decisions and change.
In this case, a minority of profit seeking people with power use levers of control on decision makers and propaganda to create public policy.
All you have to do is go to any Reddit thread and watch Americans cheer about prison rape and masturbate over how if you selectively remove information you can make the crime sound worse than it actually was and use that low-resolution non-central point to justify imprisoning the person for 1827361872 years. I'm sorry dude, it's not corporations, it's not systematic incentives, it's Americans. The American people are the problem.
this is very difficult to correct as many times the target is politically acceptable to many and therefor they just give the DOJ free reign to apply it to anyone they choose.
The attitude in DC was, "those people on the internet think they can do whatever they want, we'll show them." Well, they showed us and we lost a truly inspiring person.
> Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
> When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit,[32][33] which it did in November 2005, resulting in the formation of a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products.[32][34] As a result of this merger, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
A company with the mendacity to misrepresent an employee as a co-founder in order to attract said employee wasn't happy with that employee's performance. So they boldly refuse to continue misrepresenting him as a co-founder on their about page.
If so, I would like to nominate Reddit for the Silicon Valley Courage Award. (However, I think Facebook is the clear front-runner for clamping down on "Stop the Steal" disinformation now that both houses of Congress and the presidency are under Democratic control.)
> sci-hub.hns/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver..
[1] https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hsd
[2] https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hnsd
ipconfig /flushdns
futurama_fry_not_sure_if.jpg
This is actually an awesome tip for sci-hub though that I'll be using.
Vaguely implying that you're considering a drastic remark about someone else is barely better than an accusation. It's like "no offense, but".
Or if you don't have something specific in mind then just leave it out of the comment.
No offense, but this was a strange micro-rant.
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
Opinion: This will never become a realization until these people realize the average Joe is not going to jump through all these hoops just to get an alternative browser up and running. It should be simple and seamless. Less than 1% will bother with all this.
EDIT: Seems that progress has lead to this no longer being true.
Other options also provided in the docs: https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/how-to-access-h...
Windows 7 has reached EOL a year ago (minus two days), so yeah, maybe it's not very well supported...
What a ridiculous statement, do you truly want to live in a world where they can't? Most authors on sci-hub themselves would struggle with containers.
If a mechanic mocked a room full of people for not being able to change their own oil what would you think of them?
Please reconsider such an ideological stance.
I doubt that most people able to read and publish complex scientitic papers would "struggle" to follow what is overall a one page sequence of instructions to enter in a computer. You don't need to understand containers to run docker.
I don't really get the analogy with the mechanic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe we live in different worlds but the average (non-cs)professor would very much struggle with this stuff. I've seen some barely being able to use basic programs, they are skilled in very different domains and no one will bat an eyelid if they slowly click on the mouse to copy/paste every day of the week. Rocking the command line is certainly not in their job description for the most part.
Even comp-sci academics do work that is horrendously bad and not even close to what would pass in the workplace for an entry level graduate.
> the analogy with the mechanic
Essentially an adult saying to a group of children "this is so simple for me, what are you a dumbass?"
https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd
Is it really that hard to distribute an application? A statically linked executable, or a portable directory with an executable in it. Thousands of projects do it every day. Why do so many developers insist on making a simple thing like actually running their software so complicated?
I had a look at their website: https://hsd-dev.org/guides/win-install.html
It doesn't say that you require docker. Docker is one of the options.
You could either build it from source using NodeJS or use node JS's package manager NPM to install it.
Docker is a containerisation platform that requires virtualisation support:
https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/
The system requirements are as follows:
* Windows 10 64-bit * Hyper-V and Containers Windows features enabled
So of course this method is not going to run on Windows 7 and it clearly has stated so.
Plus it's not a web browser. It's a blockchain DNS.
Related question: Is there a true uncensorable (sic) protocol for hosting a website?
Has never caught on. On the other hand I 100% endorse sci-hub having a presence as a tor service.
[0]: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
Sure, sites like TPB and Sci-Hub need to switch to a different domain from time to time bringing some annoyance to their users, but that's about it. Only if all domain registrars at once started actively removing "shady" domains would an alternative DNS ever come to spotlight.
I have been in a few places with governments that qualify as "regimes." I have used the internet in some places that have a reputation for internet censorship.
What I have observed is that most of those billions of people you say would benefit from a censorship-resistant internet have little desire to say anything worth censoring. Free speech is a particularly American preoccupation, and this value is not universally shared. The overwhelming majority of people living under such "regimes" are not engaged in active resistance to them. They just want to get on with their lives, make money, go out with their friends, etc.
And they don't speak English anyway so it's irrelevant to them if some American websites are blocked. Those are not the websites they want to look at. The people who do want to look at them use VPNs, which are tolerated as a loophole because total blocking with no possibility of circumvention is too much trouble and would have negative economic consequences.
And if they ever do want to say something that would attract the ire of the censors, what would be the point of saying it to a tiny audience locked behind a wall of obscure tech? They say it on systems that have mass adoption in those countries, and they accept the consequences, which are usually small, because by the time they put it on their social media accounts thousands of others are saying the same thing, and there is strength in numbers.
Sure, some people do want this tech and use the current iterations of it. Most don't. It simply does not solve a problem they feel they have.
In any case, the conversation was about censorship of the DNS system. Most censorship via DNS that I have experienced was either enacted by private companies who decided they didn't like being the registrar for sites they objected to on the basis of values, not legality, or it was enacted by Western states at the behest of private companies who wanted to defend their intellectual property.
And censorship is not all that useful. It happens a bit, but why bother when amplification of the desired message is much more effective and generates better press by definition?
- There is no centralized party that owns Handshake. This allows for any party to step in and contribute to the protocol. We've already seen this play out in building Namebase (I'm the CEO) as numerous unrelated parties have come together to further Handshake adoption
- It's not just about opening up the TLD namespace. Handshake's main technical goal is to improve the security and censorship-resistance of DNS by shifting the root of trust from CAs to a distributed ledger. My article on the technical improvements Handshake can provide was previously discussed on HN [1]
- TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer
- The Handshake coin (HNS) provides an incentive for miners to provide security to the network and for holders to support ongoing adoption of the protocol, similar to how Bitcoin holders have put in massive efforts to evangelize it (I recognize that on HN people may find the Bitcoin evangelists annoying but I believe Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today without them)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969
for real money, USD or EUR or such? where does this money go? or do you have to first mine some cryptocoin, or buy it with real money, and it then goes to the entity 'namebase'?
scroll down here to the 'how it works': https://www.namebase.io/
this quite honestly looks really sketchy to me. I'd much rather take my chances with registering a domain name among the myriad of ICANN root nameserver gTLDs and ccTLDs than buy some weird, obscure cryptocoin, which can then be used to buy 'domain names' that only 0.000001% of the client devices presently operating on the planet can successfully resolve into IPs.
https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/buy-hns
all of this just looks like somebody has grafted 'blockchain' and 'crypto coins' onto the same alternative root DNS ideas that failed twenty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
"Purchasing HNS with USD is currently limited to those with a US passport or ID."
Historically, blockchains haven't been terribly firm on the "irreversibility" point. Ethereum reversed the DAO transactions. The BTC rollbacks in 2010 and 2013. Etc etc.
In practice, whoever owns the client update server and whoever has 51% of the hashing power can make arbitrary changes to the chain. For most cryptocurrencies, a meeting of these stakeholders could fit into a phone booth.
51% attacks on blockchains used as a store of value are bad because an attacker can spend their coins (ie BTC) on an exchange, withdraw their profits, then perform a 51% attack on the previous block to take back their spent coins.
On Handshake, that same attack exists for HNS, but DNS updates on chain take 36 blocks (about 6 hours worth of transactions) to propagate, which is significantly more expensive and unlikely than pulling off a normal 51% attack on a single block (it gets exponentially more unlikely). Furthermore this wouldn't even be an attack per se. An attacker may be able to undo a DNS update, but they wouldn't be able to falsify DNS records because only the owner of the name who controls the private key would be able to submit valid UPDATE transactioins.
Plus there's a myriad of questionable TLDs. In my world these are 'alternative DNS'.
Also, something like DNSCrypt can work for clients regardless of DNS root servers.
I get what you mean though, and in that regard you're right.
Can't censor what you can't reach, checkmate.
$ host sci-hub.hns
sci-hub.hns has address 186.2.163.57
$ host sci-hub.hns
Host sci-hub.hns not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
And the web frontend is unable to render anything, echoing that message I quoted above.
Paging @jgc !
No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.
In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available.
Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value.
EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSES
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints:
* *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it.
* *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism).
* *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them.
* *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well.
I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all.
Secondly, this is hacker news. Our culture is to route around these kinds of things. ;)
Thinking how a quick decision now will possibly turn in ten years down the road is how we can retain our rights but still move our democracy forward. A perfect example is championing the destruction and banning of all right leaning social media / twitter users... but when SciHub gets banned all the sudden its a travesty of free expression. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is not a two way street. Even as a staunch liberal try my best to not let my anger at the other side get the best of me and play into the hands of the corporatists and statist who actually want to recreate what many refer to as fascism (melding of the state and corporate powers).
Parler build itself on Amazon which was the big mistake the next company won't follow.
It's a wakeup call to anyone using the cloud that one day it might decide you are not welcome.
But I guess that plane has sailed. All hail the one true platform: Chrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
There are servers you can host yourself, and there are networks (payments and communication) from which you can’t be independent, in practice.
Those that do command a premium ("Bulletproof hosting") ...and are sometimes shut down themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
Time will tell. Right we are on day 2(?) of Parler being banned from major platforms, and their main problems seems to be being banned from app stores and not necessarily infrastructure problems. thedonald.win seems to be doing just fine and Voat also seemed to sustain a significant userbase before shutting down (financing a platform is a whole other thing entirely).
I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where this is not true (US encryption mainly). I'm wondering if you have any examples of where it is true. What has been censored effectively?
As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area.
> you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
There's two issues with this. Firstly, you're conflating "a large group of people", with "the law": these are not the same thing. Far from it.
Secondly, Parler is not exactly a shining example of technical competency. I wouldn't hold them up as "the example" of technology -vs- legal censorship purely because there are much stronger/actually competent representatives of the technological side out there that would fair far better than Parler.
It's also notable that many of the learned "techie" individuals who might rally to defend some other technology were it under siege from powerful state & corporate censorship, in this case actually rallied against Parler. So Parler were up against far more than just the forces of legal censorship.
There's often this fallacy when discussing governmental action that if it's not 100% effective it's useless. It's of course not true.
The most recent US example I can think of is that the Trump administration has been reasonably successful in suppressing hospital C19 images:
https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit...
But every administration in living memory (and probably without that qualifier, too) has suppressed something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Russia routinely jails people for merely liking (not to mention, reposting) improper things on social media.
But, that said, our profession has never attempted a revolution where we explicitly try to breach this born secret. It's not clear whether we'd succeed, and the victory cup is literally nuclear waste, so it's not exactly desirable either.
I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc.
I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).
>As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked.
If you hold "worked" to the impossible standard of "completely eradicated its target" then no, just as basically no policy or initiative has ever "worked." Hell, polio still exists![0] By the much more reasonable standard of "suppressed the dissemination and popularization of its target" then there are a plethora of examples:
- Libel and slander laws successfully limit outright lies reported by the media.
- Various governments censor and punish criticism of themselves or specific officials.
- Copyright law successfully limits propagation of media.
- Certain content - typically sexual or graphically violent - cannot legally be broadcast.
- You are legally barred from lying about, for example, the ingredients of a product you produce or its efficacy.
- State secrets are heavily censored, and those who circumvent this censorship are heavily punished.
Not to mention individual cases of censorship, such as whether a man may publish his own autobiography.[1] That particular case was eventually decided in his favor, but there was no guarantee of that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/9290806...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianis...
Knowledge is maybe not as addictive as meth, and people may not be willing to make the same sacrifices to get it across, but the risk required to run an encrypted network without government approval, and the efforts the government is willing to take to squash it, are also less.
But if the goal of censorship is to completely prevent a leaked fact from being communicated - that's much harder (and I'll say it's practically impossible after a certain point).
I don't think any government could disallow end-to-end encryption at this point. I think they are careful because it could seriously undermine their authority if they fail, which they very likely would, which would lead to severe embarrassment.
They could still do significant damage of course.
We used to have that, it was called "net neutrality" and it was killed by Parler's political party.
Real problem is a lot of this research is funded by taxpayers and should be public domain.
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
This problem of publicly funded research only available behind a paywall is a bipartisan issue. The main issue is that there appears to be no movement or effort to push this forward so the public is largely uninformed.
Serve an initial website on a regular domain. The website only displays a standard hosts file. Copy and paste it into your local system's hosts file. Now browse to the site listed in the hosts file.
You can change the domains used in the hosts file at any time, and get real certs for those domains so you can use TLS. If the public browses to the IPs in the hosts file, they'll get nothing. But someone with the hosts file can see the actual site's content.
This avoids domain takedowns, and allows changing IPs and domain names.
Just leaving this thought out here -- if laws are considered unjust, it is ok, even noble, to break them. That is how one got rid of apartheid, how colonies became independent and LGBT marriages came to be legally recognized.
If not for lawbreakers we would still be living in a world that approves of Turing's treatment post war.
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's another guideline that helps with this:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Although "How fortunate that" isn't exactly calling names, your comment could have been shortened in just this way. "This was never claimed" would make the same point without hitting any of the snark spectrum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I think intellectual property laws are always unjust, but most people disagree with me and they probably think that what sci-hub is doing is wrong.
There are probably some murderers out there who think that murder is justifiable in some cases.
These days sometimes the same entities provide both SSL certificates and DNS, but they are different services.
> Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said. Instead of using the web-standard certificate authority to authenticate user connections to a server, Handshake stores references to the IP address of the websites registered in its system. Namebase is a platform that offers users access to the Handshake network
That makes no sense at all. But it sounds like handshake is simply an alternate DNS protocol? Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow? Is it actually more decentralized than DNS (which is already of course decentralized in one axis, but not the relevant one for keeping a lookup available if the entity hosting DNS decides to remove it).
Very confusing.
It seems like tor .onion address would be an actually mature solution to this problem, instead of this thing that seems like press release babble?
Its an alternative DNS, with a method to use that alternative DNS as a way of authorizing ssl certs too?
[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6698
Replacing cert authorities with something DNS-based (or alternative decentralized DNS based) doesn't actually seem relevant to the problem they are highlighting, of sci-hub's DNS records being removed by private or government actors making it harder to find sci-hub... no?
In what sense is DNSSEC decentralized? IMHO signing the root zone is about the most-centralizing thing that has ever happened to the Internet.
Handshake [1] is the next generation of DNS, as opposed to the ICANN controlled legacy system. It is more decentralized since a single actor does not control the system. You cannot be de-platformed without the consensus of the community and a fork, as opposed to a decision made by a single or small group of actors.
> Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow?
Since you can verify a certificate against a DANE TLSA record which is retrievable from a DNS zone with DS records stored on chain, the CA is no longer required for trust -- only cryptography. Checkout the paper which goes into far more detail [2]. The entire system actually incentivizes the Internet to become more secure -- which is pretty exciting!
> Is it actually more decentralized than DNS
It's more decentralized than DNS in that the root becomes the blockchain instead of ICANN. This project simply finishes the beautiful DNS ecosystem, which was already decentralized, other than the root.
Now we are all root, democratically.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3QbXMFjro0
[2] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt
It perpetuates that problem of ICANN DNS becoming a "business" instead of solving it. (ICANN DNS domain names were originally free.) The potential for censorship is only one problem of ICANN DNS.
Also, this project introduces a new problem of wasting energy on mining tokens.
This is a major problem that the project has made a sincere attempt to address. Through scarcity certain sybil protections are afforded, which has been inherently architected into the consensus protocol [1]. Additionally, an airdrop to many internet pioneers and open source developers was built in as well, giving everyone similar resources to participate in the auction system which, in turn, affords everyone more equality in participation. Finally, the top 100k names as per alexa were pre-reserved for the holders in the alexa list, and these sites are incentivized to properly setup DNSSEC, as that's the only way they can claim their name on handshake.
This is a win for internet security and internet users. It's absolutely a big win for freedom of speech.
[1] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt
> the owners are ... selling the DNS naming hierarchy
The blockchain is providing names in a global namespace owned by the commons.
I cannot understand why you have been harassing and stalking this project with troll-like behavior and rude, snarky comments. Let's try to be constructive and provide value to society and the future. The next generation reads these threads, and they look up to you. There's no reason for you to change that. And with that respect, not to sound all Uncle Ben on you, does come responsibility.
Either way, love you tptacek and appreciate your contributions to HN. I can honestly say myself, that I've learned a lot by simply being audience to your conversation.
Cheers.
Where you lose me, like, all the way across the horizon is where the people who start that infrastructure do it with a traded coin that they've premined, allocated huge chunks of to themselves, and then "airdropped" to a set of developers they collected in 2018.
Why would anybody sign up for this? I genuinely have a hard time understanding why anybody would take this seriously. It's a plan to replace the DNS roots with... some company? That just decided they should be the ones to own it?
Actually, almost everything happened that way in the history of mankind, right? xD
> the people who start that infrastructure do it with a traded coin
All the names could be registered by one monopolistic player on the public blockchain. That's why a cost function is required.
> that they've premined, allocated huge chunks of to themselves
A huge chunk was not allocated to anyone other than FOSS developers. Please review the paper [1] for specific allocations.
> "airdropped" to a set of developers they collected in 2018.
To be clear, this set consists of any developer on github who had 15 or more followers in 2019, the PGP web of trust strong set, and anyone on HN who had a keybase account in their profile.
> Why would anybody sign up for this? I genuinely have a hard time understanding why anybody would take this seriously.
I don't think there is anything to sign up for? Secondly, you absolutely don't need to use the new internet if you don't want to - just like nobody forces you to use anything else in this world. You have a choice. That said, we'll miss you. :(
> It's a plan to replace the DNS roots with... some company? That just decided they should be the ones to own it?
So actually, the DNS root is owned by some company [2] that is under the jurisdiction of California law. It used to be, and still basically is, owned by the US Department of Commerce. Internet users are replacing it with a public blockchain owned by the commons.
Historically, revolutions happen all the time. Now it's the time for democratization of naming. Is there any good reason why we shouldn't own our own names? I think that the name might even be more valuable than money. What is anything without a name?
[1] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt
[2] https://www.icann.org/
Could you clarify a bit for me? I checked both of those boxes. Does that mean I have some of this premined crypto somewhere? How would I get to it? The paper you linked to is very long, but I am intrigued so will likely check it out.
I love the idea here. Decentralized web is sorely needed. If we can make it usable, that would be amazing.
I agree with you! Recent times have shown how much we need the decentralized web than ever before.
[1] https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-airdrop
[2] https://github.com/kyokan/bob-wallet
Yeah, no, that's not how this works. People don't want your "new internet". People want the Network, and in our era it so happens that's the Internet (previously it was the Public Switched Telephone Network, and before that the Universal Postal Union). But it isn't your "new internet" of a few enthusiasts who are sure it'll work this time even though it hasn't worked the previous times it was tried.
> Is there any good reason why we shouldn't own our own names?
A name is what something is called. In London there is a famous river crossing which was officially named after an equally famous politician. William Pitt (the Elder). But people didn't call it "William Pitt Bridge" or even "Pitt Bridge". People called it "Blackfriars" because that's the district of London it is in. Nobody you ask in London will know where "Pitt Bridge" is. There is no "Pitt Bridge" you want "Blackfriars".
Perhaps you've never visited London. Lots of HN folks are from Silicon Valley. San Francisco has a bridge that joins the city to Oakland, I happen to believe it should be named after the Emperor, "Norton Bridge" seems like a good name. But is that what it's named? No, because even if a few agree with me, on the whole people call it the "Bay bridge" and a name is what something is called.
This seems to be a hard concept for some people to manage, but it's mandatory, so there isn't anything I can do about that.
> Historically, revolutions happen all the time.
Historically most attempted revolutions fail. In hindsight it is often clear they could never have succeeded. I think Americans have a fairly recent memory of what failed revolution looks like.
> So actually, the DNS root is owned by some company that is under the jurisdiction of California law.
In practice (and perhaps this will annoy tptacek but too bad) this isn't usefully true. ICANN's control of the DNS root is by consent, the same way that say, the English Parliament is sovereign by consent, so just because California law says they can do something does not in fact mean it will have the effect envisioned in California law.
You're absolutely right in that it changes.
> Historically most attempted revolutions fail.
Yet, my statement still stands: Historically, revolutions happen all the time. Risk of failure is not a reason not to proceed. As they say, "give me liberty or give me death!"
> ICANN's control of the DNS root is by consent
I agree with you completely. Let's see for how much longer the people will consent to their rule vs a democratic rule by the commons!
Successful namespace hijacks rely on overwhelming numbers. You need to have so many people using your hijacked namespace that you've got way more people who do not even know that it's a hijack but are using it anyway than the existing administrators had total engagement so that it's pointless to argue with you.
Handshake can't get there from here, most of the world now uses the DNS hierarchy. This was a fool's errand. Carving themselves out a niche might have been possible, if they had been content with a niche but it's clear that their financial motives dictated they try for the impossible instead.
Like all things in the world, the namespace will be democratized. The people do deserve to own their own namespace, and even if you wish or hope for democracy to fail, I'm confident either this project or another will one day succeed. Everyone in the community is selflessly working towards this goal for you and everyone else in this world's benefit. It's a quiet space without accolade or reward.
If they are fools, then I hope to be the biggest fool.
Finally, nothing in life is forever just like nothing is impossible my friend. As a hacker and developer, we always find a way.
Here is a different idea. The intent is not "world-takeover" or "winning" any imaginary popularity contest but just a different kind of DNS service, because, well who needs a reason. Because we feel like it, how's that. The idea is: Start a registry that only allows djb-designed per-packet encrypted DNS to be used. That is, all persons running authoritative nameservers must follow some rules. They must publish public keys in subdomains of the nameserver's domain. For an example of how this looks, do an NS query to ianix.com. All authoritative nameservers in this imaginary registry would be required to offer per-packet encypted DNS. It would not be that difficult to start something like this at least on a small scale. People running authoritative nameservers simply need to run a CurveDNS forwarder in front of their preferred authoritative nameserver implementation. The CurveDNS forwarder is a small piece of free, open-source software. This type of encryption is different from DNSSEC, so this is not a "replacement" or even an "alternative" to that movement. It is something totally different. The purpose is not to address risk associated with shared DNS caches (e.g., poisoning and other tricks) as DNSSEC is intended to address, it is not to distinguish an "approved" domainname versus an "unapproved" one by creating some "chain of trust" to a "root". The purpose is just to encyrpt DNS packets. The focus is authoritative DNS, the folks that actually own the web resource, not recursive DNS, third party DNS cache providers, etc. There are couple of reference implementations of the DNSCurve-enabled cache and one of a dig-like client users would run on their home/own networks to send encypted queries and decrypt responses. This whole system for encrypting DNS has been around for over a decade and IMHO is easily as "battle-tested" as anything DNSSEC. Does that mean everyone should use it. No. But it means anyone could use it. For no other reason that because they feel like it.
The main problem something like Handshake is purportedly aimed at solving, namely centralisation of who controls "the" DNS, is IMO caused by the commercialisation and making a "market" for names. There is no way anyone is going to solve the centralisation problem by offering a commercial alternative that replays the "Gold Rush" of the first DNS (not to mention all the corruption that followed, culminating in "new gTLDs" for $185,000+). If we want to level the DNS playing field, then IMO we would have to take the money out of it. That might mean "vanity" names are not as important. Who knows, public keys might play a more important role. I am thinking of those Facebook workers who "brute-forced/mined" some .onion name they thought was more recognisable. Silly. "Decentralised" would seem to imply more equality across the namespace, not "I snagged the best names before everyone else" (using x kilowatts in the process) or "That name sucks."
Just an opinion. Good luck with the blockchain.
Already available:
https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
[0]: https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
- Handshake names are not *.bit domains like NameCoin they're actually top-level domains. This is because Handshake's purpose is not to decentralize domain names per se but too decentralize the root zone and create a more secure root of trust than Certificate Authorities [1]
- Handshake name auctions were spread out over the course of the first year after launch to prevent early adopters from hoarding all the good names. For instance, .crypto was available in the first few weeks after launch but .information isn't available until next week. This is important because early adopters hoarding names prevents latecomers from supporting the protocol.
- Handshake names are sold via vickrey auction instead of a flat fee. Different names are more valuable than others. Flat fee pricing allows a hoarder to arbitrage that fact by being first whereas auction pricing ensures that names are better distributed. .X sold for 311k HNS[2] (about $40k) whereas other names sell for a few cents.
- Handshake has a light client[3] that can trustlessly verify DNS records on-chain. This is critical because very few people run full-nodes, so without a light client the majority of users would rely on third parties which provides worse security than users resolving names in a decentralized manner
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969 [2] https://namebase.io/domains/x [3] https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd
... and they have a million other little niche name spaces to compete with to reach the point of serving as "top-level domains". I can create my own alternate name space, too, and nobody will care about mine, either.
e.g. How are new blocks created? Proof of work, predefined functionaries, something else?
You say you have SPV proofs which allow a full node to prove a particular domain is owned by a particular party. How does that work?
Σ（ﾟдﾟlll）Something went wrong.
sci-hub/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver..
Rather poor publicity for "namebase" I'd say