[javajosh]

I see a lot of people saying that you cannot analyze the data flowing through a system - and yet, I have to wonder, how then do people find the data they are looking for? It seems to be a rather fundamental theorem that if you know a URL to a file, no, there is no way to stop you passing whatever you want. But if you only have search, then surely the search itself implies that you have a way to classify the data!

Personally, I think this is enough to stop the spread (if not the storage) of horror. In other words, someone might safely store their cache on my computer without my knowledge (heaven help me) but I refuse to store anything that is searchable as a horror.

[lmm]

I don't think this system is searchable. You'll be storing a bunch of encrypted blobs, each of which can be retrieved and decrypted by anyone who knows a short key. One of them might be a CP picture (if you store enough of them, statistically one of them will be a CP picture). One of them might be an index full of other short keys, pointing to a whole host of CP pictures spread across the mesh.

If you're fine with that, that's good enough; you can run this system, and political activists and perverts alike will be able to stick their blocks there, accessible to anyone to whom they can pass the relevant short keys. But many people will be uncomfortable with even this much.

[davorak]

Yeah this system does not appear to be the quick glance I looked, but api's disired system does not need to model this one.

api's requirements:

> How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data?

As long as we are reasonable by taking "un-censorable" to mean very difficult to censor and "users can opt out of certain types of data" to mean highly limit traffic of data type <x>, it seems like a hard problem until proven impossible.

[javajosh]

>I don't think this system is searchable.

How then can it be used to share anything? I can see how it could be used as a secure, distributed backup (which itself is rather handy) but I'm not sure how it can be used to distribute data.

[lmm]

It's (AIUI) meant as a replacement for pastebin etc. - you host something on this mesh, and then you only have to spread a short hash key around. It also lets you do the wikileaks thing of publishing a bunch of encrypted data which you could later release the key to.