There’s no purely technological solution to censorship, especially indirect forms like what’s arguably happening to Scott.
Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptography expert and advocate, eventually realized that cryptography, while good, was often besides the point – it almost always made sense to attack the other parts of systems instead of try to break encryption algorithms. Here’s a good essay by him about this and a matching XKCD:
To the degree that we want to avoid censorship, we need to either adopt sufficient opsec – much better than Scott and even better than Gwern, who wrote to someone blackmailing them (by threatening to dox them):
It would be annoying to have my name splashed all over, but I resigned myself to that back in ~2010 when I decided to set up my website; I see Gwern as a pen name now, and not a real pseudonym. I’m glad it managed to last to 2015.
– or we need to prevent censorship IRL. Obviously, we can (and should) do both to some extent.
But really, to avoid the kind of censorship that inspired this, one would need to remain strictly anonymous/pseudonymous, which is hard (and lonely – IRL meetups are a threat vector!).
I can’t think of a way that could work that couldn’t be automated away, e.g. to a barrier consisting solely of ‘install this browser extension’. (Or not at least without being a relatively non-trivial annoyance to the ‘trusted’ users too.)
There’s no purely technological solution to censorship, especially indirect forms like what’s arguably happening to Scott.
Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptography expert and advocate, eventually realized that cryptography, while good, was often besides the point – it almost always made sense to attack the other parts of systems instead of try to break encryption algorithms. Here’s a good essay by him about this and a matching XKCD:
Essays: Security Pitfalls in Cryptography—Schneier on Security
xkcd: Security
To the degree that we want to avoid censorship, we need to either adopt sufficient opsec – much better than Scott and even better than Gwern, who wrote to someone blackmailing them (by threatening to dox them):
– or we need to prevent censorship IRL. Obviously, we can (and should) do both to some extent.
But really, to avoid the kind of censorship that inspired this, one would need to remain strictly anonymous/pseudonymous, which is hard (and lonely – IRL meetups are a threat vector!).
I was suggesting crypto for a different reason: as a trivial inconvenience/barrier to entry.
I can’t think of a way that could work that couldn’t be automated away, e.g. to a barrier consisting solely of ‘install this browser extension’. (Or not at least without being a relatively non-trivial annoyance to the ‘trusted’ users too.)