Every time I see an article claiming that someone is building some “decentralized” system to make censorship harder I wonder if anyone of those people even understands how the internet is censored at scale in places like China.
For the censorship we have in the west e.g. blacklisting torrent sites a non-ISP DNS and or CDN already solve that problem, for anything beyond that nothing would help.
The real innovation of Handshake is that is allows you to verify the public key associated with a name. This opens the door to enabling SSL/TLS without relying on Certificate Authorities, which is a vulnerability point in the security of the Internet today. The additional benefit is that the names are difficult to censor. Governments can still censor by IP of course, but the point is that it forces bad actors to censor at a deeper level (and there are other projects tackling solving that).
Comments
Every time I see an article claiming that someone is building some “decentralized” system to make censorship harder I wonder if anyone of those people even understands how the internet is censored at scale in places like China.
For the censorship we have in the west e.g. blacklisting torrent sites a non-ISP DNS and or CDN already solve that problem, for anything beyond that nothing would help.
There's also various kinds of registrar concerns; registrars revoking domains for questionable reasons, the WIPO/UDRP regime, etc.
It all comes down to whether you think the current stewards and legal regimes and ICANN are doing a good job or not. [I'm undecided].
The real innovation of Handshake is that is allows you to verify the public key associated with a name. This opens the door to enabling SSL/TLS without relying on Certificate Authorities, which is a vulnerability point in the security of the Internet today. The additional benefit is that the names are difficult to censor. Governments can still censor by IP of course, but the point is that it forces bad actors to censor at a deeper level (and there are other projects tackling solving that).