mirroring services, web accounts for ecash

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

Some meta-level thoughts on the eternity service document availability
problem:

Many of the problems with designing an eternity service are introduced
by trying to build real time accessibility of data (with similar
response times for documents to those offered by web servers).

The BlackNet model can quite ably provide eternity like services with
perhaps 24 hour turn around on documents.  Everything is operated by
digital dead drop (via say news:alt.anonymous.messages), or mixmaster
remailers.

This suggests that another approach would be to have two classes of
services.  Users of high risk documents can put up with 24 hour turn
around, and lower risk documents can be served by an alternate
service, intermediate risk documents can exist by using low risk
resources until detection.

The low risk document service could be just an automated mirroring
service, and could for example explicitly state that illegal materials
in server localities will be removed on the server operator becoming
aware of this fact, or perhaps on receipt of court notification.  This
presents the kind of "we aim to discourage illegal materials" persona
that commercial ISPs like to present to the police and spooks.

It might also be useful to partially automate the differences in types
of material which can be hosted in various jurisdictions.

Scandinavian countries might be used for pornography in the 14 - 21
year old range; other jurisdictions useful for copyright music
materials, where music royalties are collected by a blank media tax;
the US might be useful for publication of materials critical of
Islamic beliefs, and so on, in each case the materials being strictly
legal in the server locality.

The mirroring service could be offered by mirror site operators as a
public service for locally controversial materials, or services could
be charged for to improve long term availability.

If the mirroring service is automated, it is likely that materials
will slip through the gaps in the system (especially if it is designed
with this property in mind), much like warez used to be traded in
funny named directories on badly configured ftp servers, or world read
and writeable ftp incoming directories.

The operator says "darn warez pirates" and removes the offending warez
when he is notified.  But it might stay up for a few weeks, and URLs
spread quickly, and there are lots of open access sites.


Another less controversial "host" service which warez pirates might be
likely to get away with abusing would be simple web space available
for ecash.  Lance Cottrell already offers this such anonymous web
accounts.  If many ISPs start offering this kind of service, the
pirates will be more easily able to keep going by hopping from account
to account, as accounts are closed for breach of policy, in a similar
way that spammers treat accounts as disposable.


A TAZ server could even offer a persistent virtual URL to a migrating
warez file collection located either on mirroring sites, or on
anonymous ecash paid web accounts.  (TAZ servers just offer a layer of
indirection, see Ian Goldberg and Dave Wagner's paper:

	http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/cs268/

)

Adam