Sunday, February 10, 2008

Freenet mirroring of video sharing

Video sharing sites like Youtube would do well to make the address tag, currently something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1234-abCDE, into an encoding of a hash of the video file. This hash should be convertible to a Freenet CHK. Youtube's already seems to be a base-64 encoding of some 64-bit quantity, so it is almost there: Freenet CHKs are 256-bit. Along with publishing the video on its own site, they can simultaneously insert the uploaded video into Freenet. Alternatively, if they make the video available as a downloadable file that has that hash, anyone else can insert the file into Freenet. This makes the video difficult to censor. If the site receives a legitimate takedown request, it can comply with the letter of the law and remove the video from its site. However, anyone else on the internet who had made a link to the now-defunct page with the video may simply rewrite the link address to a Freenet address and hope to find a copy there. I don't think you can censor a link. Freenet's niche is specifically when a document is popular but there are forces trying to censor it. However, Freenet has the problem that it is difficult to publicize content, that is to make it easy for someone looking for the content to figure out its address and be able to find it. By piggybacking in this way on the internet at large, this problem is solved.

This technique is available to anyone publishing content: simply choose the file name to include as a substring the CHK of your content. You may then insert it into Freenet yourself, or rely on someone else to do it. There is even plausible deniability that it was you who inserted it if that ever becomes an issue.

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