[muckaiqv] Gradually deleting content in Freenet

An adversary wanting to delete some target content on Freenet constantly inserts an unending quantity of random junk data.  Eventually, junk data will hit the hash bucket of each accessible copy of the target content and overwrite them.  How effective is this attack?

I suspect it is effective: old content remains available, not displaced by new content, only if it is popular, i.e., only if people are accessing it.  This pits the efforts of people against a machine that works constantly, never tiring.  The machine will eventually win; the humans are doomed to lose.

In practice, an adversary does not need to constantly insert junk data.  Enough normal users are constantly inserting that any content will eventually disappear.

Can the censorship be accelerated by a powerful adversary unleashing a great many nodes constantly inserting junk data?  (Also probably helps to constantly fetch the junk data from different nodes.)

These problems could be mitigated if Freenet had a mechanism by which a user could permanently save and serve chosen data from his or her machine, perhaps data the user feels is important to keep accessible.  However, this seems difficult or impossible given Freenet's architecture.  Even if the user serves the data, preventing it from being overwritten, there's no way to guarantee that other nodes seeking the data will be routed to it.

Probably the best way is to augment Freenet with an additional storage system.  Previous thoughts on monetizing data storage.

In the absence of mechanisms for data permanence, Freenet is better thought of as a ephemeral broadcasting medium than a permanent publishing medium.  The interface presented to the initial user, hyperlinked web pages, is probably wrong.  Better would be a collection of recent messages, organized into forums and topics.  FMS is the most famous software offering this.  It could be further skinned with metadata, though it runs into the problem (though possibly feature) that metadata, for example a user's profile of actions, is also ephemeral.