I strongly believe IA or any serious project working on permanent persistence must provide an option (opt-in if you will) to make the published material irremovable, à la arXiv [1].
We regularly confuse irrevocability of licenses and actual availability. The former is something we here probably agree cannot not make sense (once the beans are spilled there's no going back, you can't withdraw intellectual property: what you gave is now irrevocably tied to the recipient, they gained knowledge). The latter is clearly wrong: there's no such thing as universal availability. As humans behinds keyboards we pretty much decide in any way we want what part of (information about) our knowledge we share.
My choice of words was indeed not optimal, though you probably know that ambiguity pervades natural languages, and that it is yet often clear what was meant. I want to hope that you don’t fear physical amputation when a friend says to you “give me a hand”, for instance.
Thank you for bringing this up, it is another reason we need mutable data structures in the decentralized web - for social reasons, not just technological.
Comments
I strongly believe IA or any serious project working on permanent persistence must provide an option (opt-in if you will) to make the published material irremovable, à la arXiv [1].
[1] Red parts of https://arxiv.org/help/license
And that is your right. However most people would like to remove slander with a court order.
Pretty sure arXiv would remove slander with a court order as well. It's an unrelated issue.
If material can be removed, it's not irremovable.
We regularly confuse irrevocability of licenses and actual availability. The former is something we here probably agree cannot not make sense (once the beans are spilled there's no going back, you can't withdraw intellectual property: what you gave is now irrevocably tied to the recipient, they gained knowledge). The latter is clearly wrong: there's no such thing as universal availability. As humans behinds keyboards we pretty much decide in any way we want what part of (information about) our knowledge we share.
I think it's fair to assume "not-${VERB}able" means "as not-${VERB}able as legally possible".
This gets tricky with things like blockchains.
My choice of words was indeed not optimal, though you probably know that ambiguity pervades natural languages, and that it is yet often clear what was meant. I want to hope that you don’t fear physical amputation when a friend says to you “give me a hand”, for instance.
Thank you for bringing this up, it is another reason we need mutable data structures in the decentralized web - for social reasons, not just technological.
In another thread, I also mention that immutability creates algorithmic complexity that makes it difficult to scale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17693920