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.
There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
'cjbprime (cjb on Keybase) is an employee of Keybase; he's a different Chris from 'malgorithms (chris on Keybase), who's a founder.
I will now ensure my business persona does not overlap with my personal one and avoid technical discussions where i could otherwise contribute.
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.
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?
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?
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
If IPFS is blocked and the people that need anti-censorship tools can't use it then they might as well not have bothered.
They're still doing the right thing, no doubt.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?
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.
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.