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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

But, I can't do whatever I want with it, and that's the point. "Full ownership" does not mean you can just do whatever without consequences.

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Sure, "full ownership" means owning the entire stack.

And it's a limited concept, in any case. I mean, you'd have no problem hosting anything as a Tor onion site, or on Freenet. You don't "own" either platform, but they're designed to guarantee decent anonymity, and takedown resistence. However, it's all too easy to screw up and lose your site, and perhaps your freedom. So you gotta know what you're doing, and practice good OPSEC.

First you say "full ownership" means "owning the entire stack," but then you go on and talk about using things you don't own, such as Tor, or Freenet. You talk about "screw[ing] up, and los[ing] your site or your freedom," as if you might have to hide what you're doing. None of that sounds like "full ownership" to me.

I mean that "full ownership" implies "owning the entire stack". Which in any useful context is arguably impossible. So "full ownership" just isn't a useful way to think about this.

I mentioned Freenet and Tor because they're designed to provide privacy and protect against censorship, even though users don't own the full stack.

Then, "full ownership" is a meaningless concept, not worth the electrons and brain cycles you and I just wasted on it.

That's a good way to put it :)

Unfortunately, I didn't think of that :(

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