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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

Strategically, this (advertising IPFS as an anti-censorship tool and publishing censored documents on it and blogging about them) doesn't seem like a great idea right now.

Most people aren't running IPFS nodes, and IPFS isn't seen yet as a valuable resource by censors. So they'll probably just block the whole domain, and now people won't know about or download IPFS.

We saw this progression with GitHub in China. They were blocked regularly, perhaps in part for allowing GreatFire to host there, but eventually GitHub's existence became more valuable to China than blocking it was. That was the point at which I think that, if you're GitHub, you can start advertising openly about your role in evading censorship, if you want to.

But doing it here at this time in IPFS's growth just seems like risking that growth in censored countries for no good reason.

View on HN

Agreed. Also, if IPFS is not the preferred way to go about this kind of endeavor, there are the guys at https://lunyr.com/ who are building a Wikipedia in blockchain architecture. About time someone actually attempted this. Additionally, the guys at Everipedia also have the entirety of English Wikipedia imported and forked very nicely so there is at least another large scale effort with a robust dump of Wikipedia already in production.

Lots of different attempts at keeping the vision of "sum total of human knowledge" on the web. :)

>Sum total of human knowledge

I like wikipedia, but I always felt like it was missing crucial pieces of information to make it the "sum total of human knowledge." For example, I can look at the articles for ISO_31-11, Spheres, and Sphere Eversions, but I don't think that information alone is enough for me to go from "society of post-apocalyptic 'we lost how to do math'" to "we can prove sphere eversion is possible once again." I chose this example because I'm shit at math and never learned much of it anyway so I can maybe be considered a mad-max post-apocalyptic uneducated peon? Anyway point is I think there's the crucial "teaching" step missing.

Perhaps with a collection of a great deal more articles together, the result "prove eversion is possible" can be taught, but missing for example the ISO_31-11 article alone would make it monumentally difficult, I feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_eversion

I believe, at some point, Wikipedia was talking about partnering with Archive.org to turn all their citation links into Wayback Machine snapshots—including the ones for journal PDFs.

Presuming such a thing ever gets done, an archival copy of Wikipedia + the Wayback Machine pages Wikipedia references would then make a pretty good "sum total of all human knowledge."

There's a lot that's not written down. Didn't NASA try to coax Apollo engineers out of retirement for their new big space stuff? The engineers had knowledge that wasn't written down, wasn't accessible, or was simply lost.

Sure, with sufficient time you could recreate the knowledge with brand new engineers but you'd be rediscovering lost information.

I think sum total is probably overstating it, but Wikipedia provides more than enough of a scaffolding to massively accelerate rediscovery of math. It's less about teaching and more about giving inquiring minds a roadmap with some answers filled in. How far do you think Euclid would have gotten if he could've read Wikipedia for the entirety of his life?

> How far do you think Euclid would have gotten if he could've read Wikipedia for the entirety of his life?

Much less far than he actually went, given that Euclid is known solely for compiling existing work. There's not so much reason to do that when it's already been done and you're happily reading the compilation.

In Euclid's day, "compilation" meant taking disparate and sometimes halfheartedly proved theorems with wildly different terminology and framing and laying them out in one consistent chain of deductions. So I have trouble writing him off as a trumped up textbook author.

It's like saying the formalization of continuity by Weierstrass and Bolzano was compilation because prior mathematicians had already been working with the concepts.

s/ total/mary/

I don't understand this comment :(

That's the geekspeak for '"sum total" should be rephrased into "summary"'.

Ah I see, thank you. Is it some sort of programming syntax or like, scientific publishing notation?

It's regular expression syntax for, roughly, "substitute 'mary' for ' total'", which transforms "sum total" - " total" + "mary" --> "summary.

They mean "Sum total" -> "Summary"

As in, that's a more accurate descriptor(?)

relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/208/

Only in the sense that it's something to do with regular expressions.

Did you look into Lunyr much at all? They are just using IPFS on the backend (or plan to use, per their ICO communication to raise money), and using an Ethereum-based ERC20 token to 'incentivize' people to contribute and edit.

Feels like everyone in the ethereum community has sick frontend design skills

Because every such project starts with crowdfunding. Some of them may actually get some code written but not always. /s

Blocking the domain is not an effective step. Every censorship circumvention tool's domain is blocked, except for ones that aren't popular and so are essentially unknown. As with many other areas, half the battle is just entering the arena. Until you do that it's hard to know what your real challenges will be. The IPFS team should be commended for entering the arena, and we should all help however we can.

My god Chris, you're seriously interpreting this action as a business strategy? If being docile in the face of evil is Keybase's business strategy, I strongly urge you to re-prioritize, because if the government goes rogue, it's going to kick down your door looking for access to encrypted communications from dissidents, whether you're polite about it or not. How many John Does have you waffled on because it was a "better business strategy" so far?

The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective.

Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time?

Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out?

Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.

GP suggested that IPFS might not want to openly circumvent a specific country's censorship system, and blog about it, and you're comparing not doing that to the use of fake accounts by reddit? The issue is not as complicated as you're making it.

Well, yeah. The consequentialist viewpoint is if IPFS fails to succeed because it jumped too early, then ZERO people benefit from it. That's arguably the greater sin.

There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.

The greater sin is not failing, as failing is expected on the road to success. The greater sin would be to not jump when the opportunity presents itself.

Maybe look at it from a different point of view, if to someone in Turkey trying to access wikipedia it makes a difference then it's already a success.

It's a question of where you want to dray the line, and maybe the consequentialist drawing the line when ipfs takes over the world and gets 3 billions daily users is far fetched.

Youtube is probably not a sound example here as posting a trove of copyrighted content was a deliberate strategy in the larger scheme of having youtube bought by a giant actor for a hefty sum of money by a group of people from the paypal mafia with experience in this shady business.

From the get go the exploitation of illegal content (and other shady tricks) was made for the sole purpose of personal profit and had no intent on making the world a better place.

In other words youtube has been evil from the start, with evil intent, using evil tricks as part of an evil agenda. There was no room for ethics there.

Unless proven otherwise, IPFS seem to not have such a nefarious purpose even to work towards a greater good, due to its nature will hardly ever be made up for sell and has to leverage different mechanisms due to being a protocol and not a website in need of registrations.

Wow, that's ascribing a lot of motivation to things which have multiple interpretations.

Napster was rarely categorised as 'evil' except by 'big content'. In the music industry there was compulsory licencing which enabled it's successor - Spotift. There was nothing similar in video.

This stuff can lead to race-to-the-bottom issues. Consequences are different on a micro or macro scale. The optimal answer is to figure out how to stop others from doing the dishonest approaches. But in a macro context where everyone else is cheating, it's a lot more fuzzy and complex whether it is right or wrong to cheat as well in order to compete…

It's not just about business strategy. Pretty much all censorship circumvention that I am aware of leverages "collateral blocking" to achieve their goal. A determined enough state can block anything they want if they are willing to accept the collateral damage it causes. Turkey could try to shut down the entire internet inside their country in order to prevent the spread of information, but it would have serious economic consequences. Therefore, Turkey probably wouldn't block the whole internet.

Those trying to circumvent censorship leverage the fact that most countries can be modeled as at least somewhat rational actors. For a rational actor, censorship is a delicate balancing act. But this also means those interested in circumvention are also in a balancing act.

I've downvoted you because I feel the tone of this comment has upended what could have been a constructive, well-thought conversation and turned it into somewhat of a shouting match.

Ignoring your tone, it seems to me that you're drawing a false comparison (however to be clear, this isn't the reason why I'm downvoting). Chris's comment recognizes the importance of critical mass of adoption in network effects. He's pointing out that at this stage in its development, censoring governments would have no need to strong-arm IPFS. Simply blocking their domain is much lower profile and as such, much lower risk.

In this scenario there's no point at which "being docile" or "being strong" comes into play. If you think otherwise, then I'd argue that you may be mistaking the primary goal of the effort in question to be an open protest, rather than providing residents of Turkey access to censored information. I think you'd agree that the primary goal is for IPFS to give the people of Turkey Wikipedia, and while it might be nice if they also gave the Turkish government a big bold middle finger in the process, that's not in service of their primary goal.

If you accept that premise, then I'm not sure how you can take this idle musing from Chris and construe it to be evidence of how he'd behave when being legally strong-armed by a government while at the helm of KeyBase. The situation upon which that conclusion would be predicated just simply isn't represented in his original comment.

Finally I'd argue that if this is of critical concern to you, then why are you trusting a third party with your key storage in the first place?

> while at the helm of KeyBase

'cjbprime (cjb on Keybase) is an employee of Keybase; he's a different Chris from 'malgorithms (chris on Keybase), who's a founder.

Why did you bring his company into this? Casting aspersions on his company, over a personal internet comment... this is a chilling effect.

I will now ensure my business persona does not overlap with my personal one and avoid technical discussions where i could otherwise contribute.

I absolutely do need to know that Keybase is going to take privacy and censorship resistance seriously, and posts like this are not helpful in that "strategy". I depend on them for key distribution and so do a lot of other important, likely-to-be-targeted people, many of whom probably live in Turkey. When the Turkish dictatorship starts demanding information on political opponents from Keybase, what is Keybase going to do? Send the info to avoid being blocked? Wait until they're "strong enough" before fighting the important fights?

We're in a dark political period right now, this stuff is deadly serious. There's 110,000 people that have been detained in Turkey, they're not waiting for a future resistance, they need one right now. Stop spreading FUD about censorship resistance.

...I'm not understanding your rancor.

He(?) said that drawing attention to yourself while vulnerable is risky. Nowhere did he say anything about being less secure. Arguably it's the same security with more utility - better to be secure and available only to a few (because of limited advertising) than to be equally secure, and available to none because you got blocked early.

Now that last point is definitely arguable, and I think that's what you want to do, but that argument has no connection to the security of the information. Even if you think vocal advertising as an anti-censorship platform is the greater good, it doesn't make the information any more secure.

So what am I missing that explains your vehemence?

I think the problem is that pushing the anti-censorship angle lets more people avoid censorship today, whereas government censoring of IPFS is a problem for the future. And compromising on the present for fear of a future problem that may or may not actually happen, is a typical consequentialist trap that deontology is essentially designed to fix.

If GP values adoption as the path to censorship resistance - then maybe their product will include backdoors to "stay compliant".

For example, when you receive a NSL - do you pull a Lavabit and close shop, or do you backdoor your users?

Given the domain of keybase - this questioning is entirely warranted.

And while we're here. Cjbprime, do you have any NSL's? And what's your policy on warrant canaries?

> If GP values adoption as the path to censorship resistance - then maybe their product will include backdoors to "stay compliant".

It's quite a leap to assume that - the poster said nothing of the sort, and saying "I don't want to get shut down so I can help people against censorship" is very different than "I care more about staying open than helping people against censorship"

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I certainly wouldn't assume it

Even rumors of presence of a backdoor are extremely bad for a business like that.

Lavabit were nobodies. If today github pulls a lavabit it will be noticed.

I'm gonna be really blunt here - IPFS isn't going to be the turning point in a revolution. Neither is Keybase.

Self censorship is the only way the book burners can really triumph. So long as humanities' collective ingenuity continues to exceed the sum of our malevolence; I ain't too worried. Ps key base is awesome :)

What he's saying is, IPFS will never be useful if it gets blocked before it has a chance to spread.

If IPFS is blocked and the people that need anti-censorship tools can't use it then they might as well not have bothered.

I don't get it. Once blocked does this now render ipfs useless regardless of spreading ?

I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?

So nobody should have done anything and we collectively should have just let Turkey censor Wikipedia with zero alternatives, that's the better solution here?

"Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins.

But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.

What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now.

Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?

That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms.

We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either.

If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.

There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.

But it won't grow unless others can download IPFS software to continue hosting it and there is no reason to believe they could not simply block it internally as well to prevent spreading.

As said before, it needs to be used/useful to many normal people (like a previous example of GitHub) before there it requires too much political will to effectively block.

You can download IPFS software via IPFS, and there is always sneakernet.

> As said before, it needs to be used/useful to many normal people

Installing software from a USB drive is within the reach of most normal teens and young adults in the developing world. So, sneakernet -> IPFS -> Wikipedia is a viable path so long as blocking the IPFS protocol, over all reasonable transports, is hard enough to do.

Responding to 0xCPM (sibling comment). IPFS was not designed to hide the sources but thanks to versatility of transports (you can ever run it on cjdns or mesh network) and possibility of using it offline it is not easy to censor.

According to another comment on this thread: Unfortunately IPFS wasn't designed to hide and would be easy to block for a nation state.

Are you arguing that providing a mirror of localized wikipedia is not useful to normal people ? Or am I missing your point ?

The person I was responding to was talking about people getting the IPFS software via IPFS or in person delivery of media. This is not a promising method for distributing anything to normal people, even if it later lets you view Wikipedia.

What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country?

(I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)

I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.

It's possible to design DPI-resistant protocols; see e.g. domain fronting (Fifield et al. 2015, https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/), which uses HTTPS connections to popular CDNs where all unencrypted data (target IP address + SNI header) look just like normal connections. Tor supports this (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek).

I don't know how to make this work with IPFS' P2P approach: a request for www.google.com with a destination IP of some residential Turkey customer looks awfully suspicious. I suppose it's workable if App Engine has a colo inside Turkey.

There's a circuit switching relay protocol [1] in the works which will allow multi-hop connections. This is generally useful for situations where two nodes can't directly connect to each other, be it because of NAT, censorship, or simply because they don't have a transport protocol in common (e.g. js-ipfs in the browser).

That means nodes can soon use the Websockets transport to connect to a domain-fronted node (this part already works), which then acts as a relay.

[1] https://github.com/libp2p/specs/tree/master/relay

Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).

No, he's just saying they probably announced this at a point where their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want, so they may be shooting themselves in the foot a little bit.

They're still doing the right thing, no doubt.

> their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want

That's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but without evidence, definitions of words like "weak" and a proper wash through the scientific method, I'm not convinced we can make conclusions like that at this point in time.

That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method).

It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?

You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion.

Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.

I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.

In this case, business and political strategy unify in their mutual interest in IPFS's survival. Screaming and being outraged doesn't produce change. Methodical, contemplated action does. Flying under the radar until you're strong enough for conflict is a sensible strategy.

You should really keep your outrage in check until you have a better grasp of the issues.

Blind ideology-driven attacks without any kind of strategy may make your hind brain feel all tingly, but they are routinely squashed like a bug by the censorship apparatus, which has plenty of resources to block IPFS at the protocol level.

Rational strategy is not "being docile in the face of evil". It's just not openly marching into battle against a vastly stronger adversary who was only dimly aware of your existence.

Given the exposure and that this is Turkey, the IPFS project may be making the right call here, but strategy, not blind ideology, is the way to make those calls if you want to win.

This idea isn't even a particularly new or unusual one. When faced with a superior enemy, fighting opportunistically is an old as dirt strategy. People have continued to use it for literally millennia because it's effective.

Force is tilting the balance of power to your side by gathering advantages. Warfare is the Way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near.

If your enemies have advantage, bait them; if they are confused, capture them; if they are numerous, prepare for them; if they are strong, avoid them; if they are angry, disturb them; if they are humble, make them haughty; if they are relaxed, toil them; if they are united, separate them. Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect.

This strategy leads to victory in warfare, so do not let the enemy see it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Relatively speaking, I'd say 'our enemies' are extremely strong. Probably best avoided (for the moment) if the overall objective is victory.

He said nothing about "business". And I'd hope Keybase's strategy is to be effective in the face of evil than just performatively non-docile in the face of evil.

Settle down

Speaking as someone who watched this come together on IRC, it definitely was NOT a business decision! This is just a problem being solved by smart people with great tools! That's how it should be!

Ok, so you are saying this move is probably going to lead to IPFS being completely blocked by Turkey in the near future.

If this prediction turns out to be mistaken, will you acknowledge it publicly?

This is a very good point.

However the benefits of content addressing are so great in terms of performance that I doubt it is possible to prevent it.

This view seems optimistic. I think you are overestimating the role of technical factors in political decisions.

The technical factors are actually key to the political decision. Content addressing will occur at the browser level in order to improve caching behaviours, this will be implemented by organisations who are part of a political sphere (google, mozilla, apple) whose influence is largely determined by their technical performance. It is then a minor matter for it to move forward into a larger addressing scheme (likely to occur at the same time).

IPFS is approaching the issue from the opposite direction of course, but the two are so tightly coupled that I doubt there will be much risk.

IPFS is most likely to fail for any technical problems it may have.

The potential benefits are high but there would be no obvious, appreciable and immediate economic impact of blocking IPFS outright tomorrow.

Correct, but over time, Turkey would find their internet is progressively more broken as people switch over to IPFS.

More importantly, I doubt the censorship-efficiency gains would be improved much by banning IPFS, since nobody really uses it yet, and I suspect selling the "anti-censorship" angle will get more non-anti-censorship adopters (i.e. people who just use it for performance gains) in non-Turkey places, compared to staying silent on the anti-censorship angle of IPFS. And more widespread non-Turkey adoption means more pressure on Turkey to allow IPFS.

So China blocked github, and then eventually relented because it was too useful for people in China. Why wouldn't the same thing possibly happen to IPFS?

Because it's not useful? Make IPFS useful - only then can it be used against censorship. Otherwise it ends up like Tor: Something governments can block without consequence.

Because IPFS is useless at the moment compared to something like github.

Maybe you have an example of how IPFS could so useful to China that it would revert a block, but it seems to me that the reason of existence and purpose of IPFS goes against the tide of Chinese governement preventing it from ever being useful to them.

The government has limits on how much it can defy economics - if it inflicts too much unnecessary economic damage on its corporate powerbase, they'll go support other factions, who promise to rectify this.

Relevant CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

So basically you're saying "do not circumvent censorship and tell the world about it or your domain might get censored too", right ?

How does that make any sense ? ipfs is still available to install from github, ditribution repository and other places. IIANM blocking the ipfs.io doesn't block the protocol.

Moreover the Streisand effect shows that attempt at online censorship has the opposite effect and actually draws more attention to it making your point dubious.

> So basically you're saying "do not circumvent censorship and tell the world about it or your domain might get censored too", right ?

No, that is not what was said.

What was said is, if you're going to claim to be able to circumvent censorship, actually be able to circumvent censorship first. There are connections (HTTPS to GitHub was a specific example that was given) which cannot be censored without significant collateral damage to the GDP of the country. IPFS is not yet one of them. IPFS should become one of them, and then make these sorts of claims.

These things are usually an ongoing race between the government and the people fighting censorship. The first move here was Turkey blocking Wikipedia, next is Wikipedia on IPFS, then maybe later Turkey blocks IPFS, then IPFS gets on tor, which I understand is already coming pretty soon, and so on.

Yeah, the Steisand effect is important. If Turkey blocked ipfs, it would get publicity on places like the NY Times and all sorts of people who had never heard of ipfs would learn about it, and many would get intrigued and look into it.

"Most people aren't running IPFS nodes, and IPFS isn't seen yet as a valuable resource by censors."

It's on HN. Most relevant people will know about IPFS soon :)

> It's on HN. Most relevant people will know about IPFS soon :)

I think that's overstating the importance and prominence of HN on a whole bunch of different axes.

Not to mention that IPFS has been on HN repeatedly in the past.

On the frontpage? It's the first time i've seen it for sure

It was here 3 or 4 times in a span of 2.5h years.

From HN it goes to the general newspapers also. So not sure why i would be overstating the importance.

>if you want to.

I'm not sure it's ever advisable. Most users will figure it out and get the word out anyway. Best for the company to focus its advertising on the other ways it provides value.

I concur.

There's a lot to be said for letting the government save face when they choose to back down, and shouting about how you defied them isn't always a great plan.

It's open source software. Can't we just upload the source to a new site when the old one goes down? It's different than GitHub, which is a proprietary, centralized system.

Of course, you could even work around the domain blocking in a variety of way: using uncensored DNS, proxy, mirrors, use of IP address, sneakernet, and so on. The usual ways of working around domain blocking which has been demonstrated countless times to be ineffective.

Github is a centralized service so I don't know if the comparison is fair. Perhaps a better comparison is Bitcoin's adoption given the rhetoric of early adopters. It seems to me the whole point of decentralized services is to evade control. If IPFS isn't decentralized and censor resistant - then what exactly is the point of it?

The point of decentralization in case of BitTorrent is offloading files hosting to users. That is how Debian and Blizzard use it. It is better to advertise BitTorrent as such but then use it to avoid control.

Same point was raised about Tor changing its mission (https://twitter.com/torproject/status/635856569201246208), because it makes it vulnerable to states where "human rights", democracy etc. is associated with US propaganda.

It is better to advertise IPFS, GNUNet and FreeNet as a cache layer instead of censorship resistance. CDNs are used usually used due to domain fronting application. Censorship has hard time trying to convince CDNs to block particular sites and services (Signal) and it can't block just like 30% of the internet because of one "violation". But any CDN that advertises itself as VPN or some sort of censorship resistance service is easy to block.

So basically you're suggesting to make censorship resistance software invisible to people looking to resist censorship as a way to make them more useful and easy to find ?

I would never had found and supported freenet if it was advertised as a cache layer, I would be surprise if the larger population would even comprehend what a cache layer is and how it could help them defeat censorship.

For example, BitTorrent probably advertises itself as a peer-to-peer data distribution protocol, but not as a way to get pirated content. But you and I know through some other way that you can install a BT client and get pirated content, right?

Changing Tor to explicitly say "human rights" makes it a red flag in oppressive countries where they may claim these words mean "Western propaganda!". Previously anyone caught with Tor can say they're a network researcher or whatever, now anyone caught with them can be charged with "spreading Western propaganda".

Just like if a torrent client would advertise themselves as a way to get pirated content. Anyone caught with the software can probably be easily convicted of copyright infringement, because they actually have software that advertises itself as copyright infringement software.

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