Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by WD40ForRust2 922 days ago
I hope we get to a place where people like this simply generate an OpenPGP key/OpenSSL certificate for a pseudonym and just throw this stuff up on .onion and .i2p domains. A place where DMCA and copyright literally cannot be enforced because it's impossible to.
3 comments

This reminds me of the near-ish-future "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge, wherein instead of giving out phone numbers or email addresses or screen names (identifiers), people give out opaque GUIDs [0] that act as communication handles with capabilities baked in. So, you could give out one to friends that allows people to open a synchronous voice channel to you, but give out one on your business card that just allows people to send text messages to you.

The book doesn't talk about it too much, but presumably these handles could be limited-use (time-based or only granting a capability to send a certain number of messages) and could be revoked.

I know it would probably be off-putting to give each person I meet a different GUID for contacting me (kind of like telling them your email address is <their_name>@<my_vanity_domain>), but it might reduce the spam I receive.

[0] if you're searching the ebook, they're called "golden enums" in the text

Not sure how likely is that considering that Beeper is an actual/company startup which seems to have received funding from YC?

However, considering that I'd except they'd know better than to just outright take a binary from MacOS and use it in their app (assuming that's actually the case..).

It's not impossible, just currently not worth the tradeoffs of enforcing. There's nothing stopping governments from passing laws holding IP address owners responsible for the traffic they originate. At that point VPNs and Tor exit nodes will stop allowing illegal activity. VPNs are already moving this direction, no longer supporting port forwarding ie hosting content on bittorent.