The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Forbes: Silk Road and Libertarians

Forbes on Silk Road

Silk road is drug trading website that uses distributed cryptography (TOR) to evade detection. For Derid - TOR is only possible because of net neutrality principles.

TOR isnt distributed cryptography, its just a series of proxies. If you dont encrypt your actual payload people on the network can snoop with ease - and do. (It stands for The Onion Router ). Joining the network, and snooping on all the traffic people dont bother to encrypt is actually a favorite pasttime of quite a few people, and intelligence agencies.

And... wtf are you doing trying to bring "net neutrality" into the discussion? Has no relevance.

Anyhow, I have heard of silk road and look forward to reading the article.

Net neutrality is surprisingly sore topic for you and the only instance where you simply refused to engage on any level. Especially considering net neutrality falls squarely into libertarian school of thought.

The reason TOR (or any other peer2peer) networking can exist is because data passing through has to be treated in a neutral way. What would be the quickest way to kill p2p? QoS until it is unusable.

Using force to conform a service provider to an arbitrary and politically heated standard is not something very libertarian.

Any QoS or packet shaping can be defeated with a little effort, unless the QoS/blackout is entirely based on the routing table. In that case the only thing particularly hindered is sharing of large files, simple page transfers with a few GIFs arent a big deal and TOR has always had huge latency and low bandwidth anyhow.

Addendum: The answer to any net issues is for the govt to not so blatantly favor a few well-lobbied and DHS-friendly providers. Govt makes it harder for smaller telcos/ISPs to compete, which is the only reason "net neutrality" is even an issue.

The concept of using more govt force/control to "fix" an entirely govt-created problem is what I find so utterly abhorrent.

The whole mindset of "Who cares if this govt action/policy creates huge problems... we can just use that fact later to justify more govt actions/policies!" is itself the root of a great many of our societal issues.

2nd addendum: If you want to talk solutions that are slightly less libertarian I am all for them. Such as govt treating inet more like highways, and building/facilitating equal-access infrastructure across the country - and letting would be ISPs pay usage fee taxes for "offramp access"/backbone access." Provided of course, that it was completely illegal for the govt to tap in, control, or otherwise tamper with the data - which is typically the sticking point. US Govt as it currently stands just cannot be trusted, which is a shame because if it could be there is actually quite a bit of good that could hypothetically be accomplished.

There is a lot of (mis?)information that conflicts with my understanding of net neutrality.

Do you want to discuss it?

http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-101

At lot of people I have talked to in the past "when this was a big deal" were confused about whos side they were on. They all knew exactly what they were opposing but didnt understand exactly which side to support.

The article above does a decent job of putting it in a nutshell.

Yes, this is consistent with my understanding of net neutrality.

Derid, what do you think net neutrality is?

You as a internet user greatly benefit from our current model of net nuetrality.

The people opposed to net nuetrality are massive ISPs that want to double dip for profits. This would also cripple a lot of start up businesses and overall be negative for the average internet user.

I am all for companies making profit. Hell, I am for companies making A LOT of profit. In my opinion though this is an unethical way for large corporations to produce more profit.

Yes Sethan, no argument here. I am curious what Derid has to say (he has avoided this topic in the past, simply stating he is against NN).