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RE: Child Pornography Found in Bitcoin's Blockchain? Let's Discuss Steem Witness Liability (again)!
I'm kinda interested to see what types of measures and safeguards we as witnesses will put in place to thwart would be child pornographers from hiding heinous images in the steemit blockchain. It's already hard enough to keep people from posting (and getting upvoted) music and videos of Mariah Carey's "Hero" , let alone having to stage an effort to stop criminals who are already fashioned in remaining undetected off the blockchain
This might be a viable solution to the problem. Why do we save text in the blockchain at all. Why dont we just save a hash, pointing/validating a textfile on an IPFS-Server. So if the content in question would be in violation, just delete the textfile.
Thats the same as a Hollywood Blockbust on D.Tube. The movie itself is saved onto a IPFS-Node. So to delete it, the Cops/Copyright-Holder would have to adress the IPFS-Node owner, but not the Blockchain itself. The Blockchain only holds the Link to the file.
Kinda creating an extra layer between the blockchain and the content.
I think this is the way forward as it provides scaleability advantages as well. It would be a huge architectural change for the Steem ecosystem though.
Yes, it probably would be a huge change. But it is better to do such changes in the beginning of a blockchain (we are in year two when my calculation is correct) than in a few years.
While this is possible it removes the selling point of 'cannot be censored' - which is really the issue here for me.
This 'cannot be censored' idea is quite nuanced, and perhaps ephemeral.
If our governance processes cannot 'protect people' from the availability of illegal content, I think governments will do it, so we may need to compromise here.
As I understand it, front-ends already censor content when issued with dmca takedown notices, and most image content is not subject to the protection of consensus, and is not even stored on IPFS, so is fairly easy to have removed anyway.
The whole point here, from my perspective, as a witness - is that since images can be encoded as text and put inside posts, the witness servers ARE going to be forced to potentially process 'illegal' material if someone posts it to Steem. If the uncensored aspect is only 'temporary' then we should make that clear because I am fairly sure that if that is removed then fairly large numbers of people will power down and leave and at the very least many are misleading the world by holding up Steem as something that it is not (going to be for long).
To get to the core of this we have to address the point of what is really 'protecting people'. Do I need or want someone else to decide what I should be protected from? Or can I decide myself? Sure, I, like most people, don't want or need to see child pornography and I will take whatever steps I can to stop it being produced in the first place.. However, that is part of the issue here - that the biggest problem is that the children are being exploited and hurt in the first place; while the distribution of that material is actually a symptom of that deeper, root cause. By censoring the material, we:
a) set up an imbalance that can be exploited, whereby 'someone' can decide what is and is not seen on the blockchain - on behalf of others (which is exactly the problem that has caused such suffering on earth due to the deliberate and malicious hiding of important information for political gain.)
b) prevent the wider public from seeing exactly the problems we are facing and thus prevent them from correctly being guided emotionally towards making changes in their own lives that truly protect children from being harmed in the first place. in britain there are countless examples of children being harmed and even murdered in government run institutions that have been taken over by sexual abusers... one of the common threads is that the children did not feel safe telling others about the abuse, partially because there is a culture of silence about it and that they feel 'wrong' for having been made a victim. at least by having the material visible to some extent, we will all know something of the extent of the evils involved and maybe the children will feel more accepted by society when they are abused in this way.
the vehicle of government has provably been used to abuse large numbers of children and so we must be very careful when using 'governance' to attempt to 'help' the problem, that we do not actually just end up sweeping things under a rug and claiming to be acting responsibly, while in reality we are actually helping make the problem worse. the governments may claim to be 'protecting' people, but in reality they have a very long track record of doing exactly the opposite, under a vale of 'good intentions'. what if the children themselves post the abuse as evidence to support the prosecution of their abusers, when the government systems have been twisted by abusers from inside so that they no longer do their job?
we cannot help to correct 'bad programming' when we prevent others from even knowing the extent to which it exists.
this is a very challenging subject and i don't mean to sound like i am advocating for 'law breaking' as such.. I am really just pointing to the original intention of @dan when creating Steem in the first place - whereby he wants to 'make governments irrelevant'. i suppose what i am saying is that in light of the bad press and potential government attacks that a totally free speech system might receive due to the current nightmarish situation regarding child abuse, we need to at least be promoting a wider discussion of the problem and finding new solutions, rather than just blindly bowing down to 'voices of authority' as if they know best, when in reality they are provable, often, part of the problem.
My point was more of a pragmatic assessment of the 'on the ground' reality. Except on my very optimistic days, I think too few people have eyes to see what we're facing.
I think our best hope is that through technology like blockchains and IPFS, governments are subjected to a kind of information arbitrage whereby they risk becoming irrelevent if they do not gradually shift towards radical transparency that @dan embraces. I think there is some danger in allowing arbitrary content on the blockchain at this stage though.
Agree with you.
Steepshot is using IPFS already and I came across a new product which is also planning to use IPFS. With the partnership between stellar and keybase, I think thats going to be another possibility made available very soon.