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voynich | 2 years ago

I had a similar idea, at least in terms of resilience. It was, basically, to compress each piece of content just so that the compressed version would be theoretically uncensorable.

Jon Lech Johansen did this with DeCSS back in the day [1], and the compressed version of the program was a prime number, which gave it a sort of "untouchable" quality.

Obviously, doing this for much larger content (i.e. movies and general videos) would be a challenge, and this technique might not be the best choice. Still an interesting concept, though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_primes

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zo1|2 years ago

What you guys seem to be describing is "Freenet", but that project has been around forever and relatively obscure. These days, unfortunately, I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole due to safety concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

"Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information"

From what I remember, it basically takes content and distributes "anonymous" and encrypted chunks of it across various members on the network. Content stays active by being replicated, and replication happens proportionally based on popularity. So content that never gets used basically disappears.

fsflover|2 years ago

Does Freenet have torrents? I2P does.

chii|2 years ago

> which gave it a sort of "untouchable" quality.

while true, the actual reason it's untouchable is that the companies cannot realistically sue everyone - it's too costly, and they cannot recover the funds.