traumschule
commented
1 year ago To be honest I had the same idea at first but meanwhile i don't see this going anywhere. You built a distributed communication device that was intended to be censorship free. In the process we learned there may be cases where DAO / providers are better served to comply with legal requests or be proactive. Yet the suggested authentication towards GW will only "protect" against "unauthorized" visitors. GW may still endanger the provider by serving content against local laws which might result in legal consequences for the provider (not necessarily the GW, see Piratebay, 2012). As effect there will be different trust levels and prices between providers and GW.
The way i see it is that curators are hired to screen content and signal possible risks connected to assets to SP/DP, who are still bound to serve all channels they agreed to towards their WG lead and can't just drop single assets (at least we don't want them to) or get punished.
There are multiple outcomes (and likely more than listed here) for when curators warn Storage / Distribution about content:
- The lead / curators could try to convince the channel owner to remove the content but possibly without success (to earn fromt DAO rewards).
- To be "safe" again they would convince the lead to remove the whole channel because it has "risky" assets.
- The asset(s) in question may only be restricted in some jurisdictions and can be hidden (by providers) based on request origin. In a theory hiding content is handled by GW but i don't see this working out IRL.
- If all providers automatically delete assets based on on-chain flags the Streisand effect kicks in: Those assets become more valuable to some market players. A provider could decide to monetize on this by serving behind a paywall, or via p2p / Tor etc. There is no technical way to prevent this (as in exercising absolute censorship top-down platform-wide).
- The provider keeps serving the file publicly and may get blacklisted by ISP.
Note this is not about not liking (political) content but to prevent takedown notices by judicial entities who will be curious whom to blame. Their interest might not be how our DAO is structured but purely whose IP address appeared in a log. Providers might want to protect themselves by limiting their own data stored about consumers.
Apart from the above the economic effect for the DAO may even be higher serving highly wanted content vs. upholding moral standards. We don't know how the council will prioritize those aspects in the future.
However the suggested feature is no question a possible enhancement that providers may adopt. The challenge is to establish a communication protocol that eases negotiations between GW and DP which end-user addresses are allowed to access which assets (so far neither argus or colossus have a concept of country based white- / blacklists per asset). The GW would have to (pay in advance and) and inform a provider that an asset was requested by a user with the goal that the provider dynamically whitelists that asset for a specific address. Which in some cases may not be the preferred way for users: someone paid for content and expects to download the file from different locations. In that case the GW would be interested to offer their customers a way to whitelist multiple locations per user. This process could still be too complicated for some users.
bedeho
Background
Right now, anyone can fetch any content from any distributor. This unconstrained form of service provisioning is not really workable, and leaves the economics of the system too vulnerable to parasitical uses. The long term goal is for scheme where gateways foot the bill for clients, however, some basic form of authentication makes sense even before we get that far. A separate problem is that it means that
unlistedvideos basically are accessible to the world, despite being hidden from the interface of compliant UIs.Proposal
Distributors authenticate requests to fetch data, and require that there is some sort of Gateway specific authorization. This will require changes to Orion, and possibly also the runtime - at least to represent gateways as actors, and their endpoints. The main design challenge here will be how to make this authentication be efficient, in terms of how often it must be done, despite the fact all distributors and orion instances do not have any shared state. Certainly doing some sort of interactive challenge response step for every client request would not work. We should also be sensitive to the problem of requiring any sort of signing by the client, as that will create horrible UX if they had to sign with a wallet account. Clients should instead be able to be gateway users without a wallet, $JOY or a membership.
Note that, to support blocking access to
unlistedmedia files, you have to be able to discern who the viewer is. The owner still wants to be able to view the video from the infra most likely, its just not supposed to be available to everyone else. Perhaps also content working group actors? Unsure.