----- Original Message ----- From: Matt Joyce Sent: 10/22/12 02:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Porn make the world more free: Tor Porn Bundle?
Interesting discussion, the first point it occurs to me to make here after reading some of the points here is that whatever your personal feelings may be on the subject matter the fact is that it is a form of expression like any other and they have equal right to their expression as any other human being. Supporting free speech sometimes means accepting and even speaking up for the rights of people who's particular form of expression we don't personally like. Every human being has a right to their freedom of expression and equally human beings have the right to make their own choice what expression they wish to access and not to be persecuted for doing so. Bear in mind that if every an authority wants to step in and lock down free speech the first ones to go will be the more obscure and or unpopular in society. Much easier to bring in laws and oppression quietly that way, problem becomes that as each additional domino falls and the easier it becomes to take down the next one . I note in particular the argument that the industry is associated with crimes and abuses, first off while I would not dispute that it has been given that *reputation* I would be interested to see someone present hard data to show that these sorts of crimes are in fact more common than in other ostracised vulnerable groups, like the homeless or the poor in general for example. The argument reminds me a lot of the UK governments arguments in forcing through the "extreme porn" censorship law that essentially could be applied to just about any form of consensual BDSM, the government argued that the motivation and the reason why even realistic looking simulated images must be included was that models were apparently actually being harmed in the production of this material. However when repeatedly challenged they failed to actually cite any significant cases of this actually occurring and cited exactly zero to support the strongest of their claims. That quite aside there is a go od reason why those acts were they to occur are illegal, well substance abuse I'll get to in a moment. There is no justification for suppressing expression even if some attempt to use that expression as an excuse or cover for their criminal acts, this could be used as a justification for suppressing just about any form of expression you can imagine not least of all that I can't think of any religion or for that matter any sub denominations which have not suffered from this issue on multiple occasions does that justify suppression, not at all. This being from someone who personally is not a supporter of religion in general I will stand up any time for the right of others to such expression all the same. As for the substance abuse issue that touches on another area I personally feel very strongly about, In trying to be brief on the subject the substance abuse issue and the global policies and practices which have been tasked against mostly in the latter half of the last centur y and into this one are also oppression on a global scale. Even discounting the xenophobic and racist justifications which gave rise to the current system. The system in it's current form is oppressive while at the same time cannot be justified on any grounds with a little history and ongoing scientific evidence from the modern era it can be proven to not only have failed in it's objectives but quite the opposite and that by disambiguating the harms of the substances themselves from those of the organised attempts to suppress them that it can be shown the majority of the total harm results from the latter. Breif example the UK in the 50's when it was still possible to buy cocaine in a package with syringe and needle in boots the chemist on the high street had a total of 500 heroin and cocaine addicts in the country a number which had been stable for the first half of the 20th century with well over 90% of those being doctors, nurses, pharmacists etc who were in a position to know it's effects. There are little to no incidents of acquisitive crime arising from it, of any form of organized crime or violence around it or for that matter of any massive health issues other than the addiction itself even for the ~8% that were not medical experts (Ironically the substances are quite safe for prolonged periods when in uncut form and with safe and reliable dosages available). It was not until heroin and cocaine were both banned did an appreciable number of ordinary laypeople begin using it recreationally and that number exploded dramatically, at the same time the price also exploded leading to acquisitive crime and increasingly more dangerous and violent criminal gangs forming on the profits, the emergence of which caused a rapid increase in the rate of new addicts also, 50 years turned the stable 500 of the 50 years before into over 310,000 and resulted in harms per addict that exceed by far those of the entire 500 for the most part. In response we hav e forcibly removed thousands of people with a medical problem from their homes, their families, locked them up against their will and in general abused the human rights of these already marginalised and poor people and despite ever increasing aggressiveness in oppressing these people all we have done is created the pproblem that we supposably wanted to prevent and compound it with the oppression unleashed in response. As I say it's a subject I feel strongly about and could probably write books on and provide sources for more but I think it is probably rather offtopic for the list, am happy if anyone wants to respond off list. The short replies: Ok, that out of the way back to the original idea and a few responses on that, as anyone who read above can probably guess I would not have any objection in principle to the idea, supporting and enabling expression and access to such expression or information should be universal. Censorship in all it's forms is oppression and abuse, a nd nobody has the right to dictate to others what forms of expression are acceptable short of speech/expression which is by intent directly harmful in and of itself meaning involving actual malice ie deception, fraud, harassment etc. Answers to some specific points brought up: @fakefake: Your point about users being "too stupid" to know about tor not being able to send anonymous money. It is not so much stupidity but lack of information/education and deliberate suppression, having the access to tor, to information and a community of other people who have the knowledge and experience is likely to open some eyes to new opportunities that were hidden before. Similar comment on the subject of "let them fight" to support and encourage such activism in many of these countries is not something that one can do in the clear, any group with identities in the clear that seemed to have any promise would be likely to suffer reprisals. Tor can help those with the will to fight to communic ate, band together, gain the strength needed to fight back effectively. If used properly of course. @Fabio: Multiple intermediaries you mention are absolutely not an option if criminal persecution is likely, western union agents would face legal force to surrender customer details, the agents are independent businesses resident in the country too vulnerable to fight to protect the info even if they desired. Some of the larger providers that are based in safe countries operating online etc you mention however could *if* they were willing to fight and not take the cheap option. Unfortunately many will just hand over anything a subpoena asks for to give them an easy life. Then you have the issue of the finance provider, if a bank in that country they or their employees could face significant pressure to reveal details. @Seb: Sure video content is a bandwidth increase but many streams will only be like 1-3Mbit based on yesterdays consensus tracker the network has a total of 19.5 7 GBit/s now yes there is other traffic also but another thing with this particular use is that probably quite a fair amount is quite short sessions. There are a lot of people that use tor for anti-censorship to reach such as youtube now without much anonymity true but those are around 1Mbit streams. Another use getting around geographic restrictions of the likes of the BBC will be HD video also, a breif search on the web will turn up a few dozen howto's on setting up tor to pull that off. As for the HTML5 question, can't say I've heard of any, but most of the better paysites provide their movies in downloadable form as a regular video file, such as wmv (Mostly old content) or most common now is standard H.264/AAC especially for the the higher quality files, occasionally see nasty wmv's or gah real for some really low end stuff. All can be watched offline without needing such as flash, most WMV's many open source video players that could be trusted not to leak anything in ph one homes, not sure this could be said for windows media player. H.264 is probably even better supported, would be a lower resolution and bitrate to the high def 720/1080p tv shows somebody gets and has always found work perfectly on their linux computer WMV's on the other hand are known to occasionally have issues and perhaps one in a few hundred still just decide they really don't feel like playing at all. What might cause a larger load is if someone downloads a set of videos at once for later viewing etc that could burn up several GB though from what I've seen is rare to get a single tor connection to download much over 200-300kBytes/s and paysites almost invariably implement their own anti-leech restrictions some only allow one or perhaps up to a handful of active downloading connections from either a single IP address or login identity so leeching massive amounts of data in bulk by segmenting the downloading is probably going to be fairly capably throttled by that combi nation. I think much of the slow max on tor could be tcp buffers needing adjustment for the elevated RTT so the clients OS is in effect throttling itself because the window is too small, I've had one like that where all nodes including mine had more capacity but never took the time to try tuning tcp to compensate. @fakefake: There is no certainty in the claim they wouldn't contribute some relay capacity back if capable, sure would almost certainly be a dangerous idea for them to run an exit but those in countries where tor isn't blocked or at least not very effectively they could run a pretty safe middle, middle relays have the side benefit also that they additional encrypted tor connections for the relayed clients act as confounders making traffic analysis on the client connections that much harder, it adds the entire extra task of first monitoring and analysing to get enough data to infer information on which connections are likely client ones before they can even start do ing the regular network analysis on the connection patterns and timings that they could begin right away on a client only tor. @Greg, it should do I suspect, granted I havn't used the bundle I just run an exit, and definitely flash is a big no still I'd have thought what I don't know is what support does the TBB have for standard video formats such as H.264 or WMV? Many pay-sites have downloadable/streamable videos in those formats with a plugin they will stream right in the browser. There are a lot of options on the choice of media player w/ plugin also unlike flash where you have Adobe and Adobe. Many of the possibilities for the media player are also open source a big plus for bundling obviously because of the likely existence of a suitable player with a compatible licence that could simply be bundled and the ability to vet the code as necessary to make absolutely sure it is not accidentally leaking anything. For example any support for features like online metadata looku p/retrieval on files which some have would for this use probably be better set default disabled or perhaps even being extracted completely. The community db's for such are not exactly the sort of worrysome intentional privacy invading executable code from marketing data-harvesters you would be getting with flash support for sure but it would still be a leak to have them accessed by default and would be another party that could potentially be targeted to attempt to gain data-points so to me seems logical to default disable/strip any such features. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk Amen. Thanks for saying all that. Please write a/the book and give me an off-talk email and I will give you one to send me a copy. It is difficult to find ones way through topics such as this one ever since someone infused it/them with tons of emotional lies and misleading ideas. Sounds like you have a lot of well-thought out ideas that might be of benefit to both sides. Those who sense the real danger lurking, working, every day to corral us and those who have grown so far only to claim to themselves, "this is it, I make my stand here and will grow no more. I see it this way and this way is the only way!" One is a dead-end and the other becomes one of desperation until someone like yourself is able to bring in some calm, rational and inclusive courage. Okay. That's it from me, for now. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
