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European Parliament approves copyright reform

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Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#821

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Yes, the Internet caught many "corporate and political powers" by surprise. But now they're getting it locked down. > I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation. You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connecti…

> But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. Hi, I'm a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I'd like to clarify upon this :) (The project is still active, there was a release just this week!) While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as "it's dangerous". It is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well! What is dangero…

Thanks for the explanation of the LEA exploit.

I should have been clear that I was talking about opennet mode. If you want to use Freenet in darknet mode, among people who know each other well, and trust each other, it's at least safer than (say) using a private torrent tracker. I mean, torrent traffic is also encrypted, these days.

It's true that you're relatively safe from adversaries, if you only use darknet mode. But there's always the possibility that one or more of your peers will get busted through some other exploit. And that they cooperate, and become informants.

But in darknet mode, you can only communicate with your peers, and can only access stuff that you and they have uploaded. If you want to communicate with the global opennet, and share stuff with it, at least one of your peers must have opennet peers. And that exposes them, at least, to adversaries.

If they get busted, and cooperate, others in the darknet are now at risk, because an adversary could use their client to probe its peers. They couldn't add other peers to the darknet, however, without some social engineering.

So anyway, it's whatever nodes that peer with the global opennet which are the main risk. And to do that safely, one can use anonymously leased throwaway VPS as gateways to the global opennet. You reach them via Tor. So if they go down, adversaries don't learn anything actionable about the darknet itself.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole stupidity started when google refused to pay european newspapers for their articles showing up in google news. Google could have stopped all this be immediately kicking off all european newspapers from every google service they have and reinstating them only after they fill out and submit the form that they allow google to use their stuff without any pay. Instead google only threatened to do this and europ…

> Google could have stopped all this be immediately kicking off all european newspapers from every google service they have and reinstating them only after they fill out and submit the form that they allow google to use their stuff without any pay. They did exactly that when germany introduced the "Leistungsschutzrecht", which was pushed and lobbied for by all major german publishers. Needless to say they all agreed…

I can't then imagine why on earth they think google or facebook will start paying them now.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#823

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Right now, when one of my users uploads copyrighted material, I can take it down when I see it. Or when I get a complaint (DMCA takedown). We're taking about teenagers here, so it's not always clear to them that they cannot use ripped sprites from other games, or music, or whatever. Basically I can make the uploader responsible for what they upload. The secondary problem is that my biggest competitor also has a lot o…

> But if I'm outside of the > EU, I can just block that > region. This kind of behaviour is going to lead us to having two seperate internets. > Not the biggest one anyway True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable. > not a single native English speaking country in there Except there are native english speaking countries in there, and besides, europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write englis…

> This kind of behaviour is going to lead us to having two seperate internets.

No, EU kind of behavior does, just like China behavior.

> True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable.

I have lots of users in US, Australia, New Zealand, various Asian countries, and UK. Focusing on them allows me to skip translations.

> europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write english anyway.

As a European myself (Belgian), I know this very well. The Netherlands and Flanders are probably leading in this. But the bigger countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain prefer translated software. Just look at the dubbed movies they watch.

It's a lose situation anyway for me, there is no question about that.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#824

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The largest entities are multinationals operating on multiple continents, so it's pretty clear that regulations being passed at federal level isn't the primary source of their economies of scale. Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.

> The largest entities are multinationals operating on multiple continents, so it's pretty clear that regulations being passed at federal level isn't the primary source of their economies of scale. First, it still can be. If the US has one set of laws and the EU has another set, a conglomerate has two sets of laws to navigate. That is still much easier for them than having dozens in each place. Second, companies do t…

> But that has nothing to do with entity size, and in fact is the opposite. If one state has advantageous laws then local companies there have an advantage over companies of any size that operate elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in the real world, tax havens are tiny jurisdictions for very good and well-understood reasons and the companies operating out of them are not in any meaningful sense "local", and the downward pressure on workers' rights is much stronger when multinationals can credibly threaten to relocate to one of several other jurisidictions with relevant manufacturing industries if new labour laws are passed locally rather than by a large trading bloc. And navigating 100 sets of copyright regulations rather than two is a challenge for a startup but something Amazon has ample resources to do where there's sufficient money in it to be worth bothering.

Local regulatory innovation gives us a lot more Google Bermudas and goods exported from Special Economic Zones designed specifically to privilege their patron corporations than local search engines and consumer electronics industries.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#825
post #519
post #411

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Even if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet it wouldn't matter with respect to things like this. It would still be subject to the same laws. The same applies to radio mesh networking.

The postal service can send a box with say 10 * 6 TB hdd quite fast. Say 2 days for delivery. 480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.

>you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel

I imagine that in practice the postal service may start to decline your custom somewhere around the quintillion-box mark, or perhaps even before...

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#826
post #232
post #182

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This also affects small online communities, who pay for their servers by running a few ads. There are a lot of these platforms.

How small are we talking here? They could switch to a donation model to bypass it. A Linode 1GB is only $5 a month.

Linode is a for-profit business. Won't they need filters on sites hosted by them?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#827

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Isn't one of the main points of Tor that other than by knowing that an IP is an exit node, no one is able to tell you're using it? And .onion resolution is entirely client side, no?

The ISP can see your traffic going towards entry nodes if I'm not mistaken.

TLDR: You can use pluggable transports.

It's super difficult to build a low latency mix-net that covertly works inside an adversarial network.

In addition to the current models over which onion/garlic routing are based upon you would (at least) need to add to the core of your software traffic obfuscation, a series of covert channels, NAT bypass, ...

Tor and other mix networks simplify the problem assuming that there's a portion of the Internet that is free and introducing censorship circumvention mechanisms.

Of course, the assumption is increasingly untrue.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ISP can see your traffic going towards entry nodes if I'm not mistaken.

TLDR: You can use pluggable transports. It's super difficult to build a low latency mix-net that covertly works inside an adversarial network. In addition to the current models over which onion/garlic routing are based upon you would (at least) need to add to the core of your software traffic obfuscation, a series of covert channels, NAT bypass, ... Tor and other mix networks simplify the problem assuming that there'…

Perhaps we could crowdfund Tor node satellites?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#829
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's weird to me is: Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse. Why are they so concerned with copyright protections?

It might have something to do with their concern for privacy protections. Strengthening privacy protection makes the most popular model for sites to pay for content creation and operating costs--selling information about their visitors to advertisers--much less effective. Maybe as part of that they want to make it more viable for sites to switch to a direct selling of content model?

This is what I think it is. News websites want to turn to paywalls now that GDPR is going to decimate targeted advertising once the lawsuits start coming down but to do that, they need to

1: prevent any free news websites from linking to their pay-walled website and paraphrasing/quoting the whole thing (most people won't pay for the original news source when they can read practically the same thing from a free website). Article 11 prevents this without compensation to the original source.

2: prevent any single user who has access to the pay-walled website from posting the entire article onto websites like hacker news and reddit which I see happen all the time (that and outline/archive links). Article 13 prevents this with automated filters that if fail, the news website can just sue the website and get compensated that way.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a ~20 year old P2P network that relies on traffic obfuscation for plausible deniability. But peers see each other's IP addresses. Traffic is not just obfuscated, it is encrypted. Sure, you see the IP of a peer which transfers stuff across your client - but you do not know what the stuff is as it is encrypted. So the IP address is worthless unless you figure out a way to guess what the stuff is, and who request…

Sure, but some criminal investigators have figured out how to know "what the stuff is". They serve it themselves, and have hashes for the encrypted chunks. As far as "who requested" the stuff, as you say in your other reply, they have some statistical arguments. I agree with the Freenet Project that they're very likely bullshit. However, if you're facing criminal charges, you'd better have resources for expert testim…

AFAIK in the cases of the convicted people, the Freenet stuff was only used to obtain warrants, at which points the cops captured computers and found accessible CP. I don't remember seeing anyone convicted based on the Freenet evidence alone.
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