Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"?
I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.
Depends on where/how that data is distributed. A big focus with technologies like IPFS is to have data be local and to not upload it anywhere. OR, to encrypt data within a small, private swarm where not everyone can access it.
This is important, because getting rid of a content-addressable strategy doesn't actually protect your data. In practice, running application logic locally and having small private swarms is better for privacy than what we have on the web right now.
So say you're hosting your own data at a traditional URL and on IPFS. Well, if someone wants to save your data, they can do it with the same ease on both. They just download your stuff and save it. If you take your data down from IPFS and from the traditional URL before someone saves it, then your data is safe. So, again, same situation.
What IPFS says is, "if someone re-hosts your data, can we cryptographically prove that it's the same data? And can we refer to the data by that signature rather than whatever the host is this week?" So, if your data goes down but someone else found it and rehosted it, stuff like URLs would still work (although in practice, the URL you'd use would be a pointer to the most recent version of your site, so even that isn't necessarily typical).
This is a minor loss to data ownership because you can't literally invalidate a URL if other people are willing to host it. But that's the only thing you've lost. Under the web as it exists today, someone can still take all of your images and rehost them on Reddit or something. If you think it's easy to prevent that, go let the MPAA know what your strategy is so they can end piracy forever.
So the problem with IPFS/DAT isn't fundamentally any different, it just means that URLs break less often, there are fewer Man-in-the-Middle attacks on your website, and there are fewer download links that lie about their payloads.
Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;)
I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.
Anyone aware of any PFS / perfect forward secrecy that is baked into this or similar projects like briar, scuttlebut, ipfs, zeronet, kinds of things?
I guessing it would be less likely an issue if your friends / associates have a downloaded copy of your messages for the past year if each week a different key pair was made to decipher a section of the data store or something.
The human concepts of ownership implies a very important right that people tend to overlook: the right to DESTROY it, to undo it, to "take back what you said".
This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base).
And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten.
You have to burn books/libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things!
And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom I want to have.
Things like block-chain/graphs combined with content adressability bring significant limitations to FREEDOM. Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living.
And on:
> You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.
Yes you can, if you kill someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)
Legally speaking then, you don't own information about yourself like your address or past actions. The government won't let you erase that information. The only way to make your friends and family forget it is to kill them, which is obviously highly illegal.
Even with efforts like Right to Be Forgotten, Europe isn't positing that you actually own information about yourself in the same way that you're doing here. Right to Be Forgotten is a) balanced against public interest, and b) only applies to information access and indexing. Right to Be Forgotten doesn't mean that you can demand a newspaper burn all copies of an article it wrote about you.
The reality is that "ownership" means different things in different contexts. There's not a single definition. When we talk about "owning" data or Intellectual Property, we don't mean it in the same way that you "own" a wrench.
> Legally speaking then, you don't own information about yourself like your address or past actions
...and of this: clearly you want just some information to be impermanent or undo-able. I wouldn't want all information about myself to be delete-able. Just pick a class of infos, like "tweets" or "tv interviews" etc. And delete-able shouldn't mean modifiable. If I'd delete a year of my "certified resume" I'd still end up with a "blank year" that wouldn't look good.
There's room for forgettable channels of communication and publishing, from which information can be permanently deleted, and these should also have legal protections ensuring that if someone retains copies of that infos then they are inadmissible in any court, even if they were public at some point. A fully networked society needs such safe-spaces too...
If the information is inadmissible in court, then who cares if there's an immutable copy someplace? We make information inadmissible in court all the time without requiring it to be deleted.
We even make it illegal to ask about age, race, and religion in job listings, and we aren't deleting any of that information. I'm not 100% sure what the problem is.
> How can you own something that is inside my head?
If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination. (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide your decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the probability that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information.
Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...
There's two problems. First, there's a basic argument from the outside that you're fucking with historicity for no good reason other than that you think that you're more important than humanity.
Second, from the inside, this simply isn't how memes work. Memes are designed to propagate and survive on their own. If your ideas are at all good or interesting to society, and they manage to become memetic, then you have zero recourse, just as if you were Patient Zero for some new plague. You shared it, and unsharing is impossible, regardless of how moral you might believe unsharing to be.
Seriously, take some time and think about it: How many of your ideas and concepts are actually original to you? Almost none of them, right? And if you're honest with yourself, pretty much every concept seem inextricably linked to others. Really, what matters is the structure between ideas, and that can't be shared, since it's private to each person's mind.
Anyway, if this doesn't sway you, I'm okay with it; you're purely a fabrication of my imagination.
> and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination.
But this is even more problematic. What if you don't own the thing being used as proof? Do you get to destroy it just because it could be used to incriminate you?
For example, if I take a photograph of a public non-performative event, I legally own the copyright on that photograph. The photograph itself is treated like a creative expression. So should you be able to destroy my photograph? Because the law says I own that, not you.
With Right to Be Forgotten, you might be able to have that photograph delisted from Google images, assuming you had gone through a lengthy court process based on multiple determinations of how public the information was and how harmful it was to you. But you can't come over to my house and make me delete it.
If I go onto a forum later and say, "yeah, I can prove this thing happened; here's a photograph", I haven't done anything illegal. Do you think that should be illegal? I feel like at the point where we're talking about destroying physical evidence of something, maybe this is going a little bit too far?
> DESTROY ... and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it
There are other definitions of ownership more akin to stewardship. Some circumstances recognise others interests and therefore limit rights and elevate responsibilities.
> And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten.
Yes, that's the root for a lot of information censorship. Society as a whole is still very immature and tends to pretend that not every human is flawed and has a past with mistakes. I hope that we can collectively move past that at some point.
I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.