Costanza Gallo 🛸 Censorship From 0 to 60

[Music] hi everyone my name is Costa and I work for the sworm foundation at the centralized and chancellorship assistant stage and communication Network today I'll be talking about the various level of internet sorship and how web tree can help us to do so I'm going to use the Wikipedia case study before I start a disclaimer um first of all I'm not a lawyer and this talk is not legal advice and everything I'm saying is a personal View and I do not represent an organization that I am or I was affiliated with so let's start what is internet sorship there's several layers to consider for internet chancellorship this is because internet chancellorship is the spread of fake news think about Ro Farms that obate the truth chancellorship is Shadow Banning if a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it doesn't make a sound censorship is preventing people from assessing content censorship is the platforming censorship is cutting off people from accessing internet servic providers chor ship is cutting off Energy power from internet service providers chorp is not giving people the materials necessary to build the hardware chor ship is arresting someone to force them to do any of the above so in this talk we're going to focus on how Wikipedia get transferred and spoiler those are the three ways in which it happened and how the form Network can help so what do Venezuela the UK Russia China and Australia and all the countries in red have in common they all at some point transfered Wikipedia and the list is actually much longer you can find a Wikipedia article on Wikipedia transship and this is because many in fact don't know that Wikipedia was answer it by seemingly unassuming actors like France question is why the official explanation is always the same protecting people whenever something doesn't follow the narrative that a government approves they say that it press fake news it discloses classified information so basically anything that doesn't agree with the government Narrative of a country is a reason good enough to stop Wikipedia and there is two ways in which it can happen on a human level by arresting people by stopping the infrastructure and on a technical level by preventing people from access in the content so as you can see in this day censorship is quite sneaky and you can protect you can decentralize your code but there is a human component this is what happened with tornado cat one founder got arrested and this is what happened with Wikipedia about 10 years ago the France intelligence agency the equivalent of the CIA contact the Wikipedia Foundation to ask them to take down a page because it contained classified military information and broke the French law so the W the Wikipedia Foundation ask for more details which part does it go against the law there was no response from the CIA from the French CIA Case Closed not really not long after a Wikipedia volunteer was arrested and ordered to take down the page under the threat of custody and charges what is funny here is that it had no connection whatsoever to the article it didn't even know that it existed it did it didn't edited it the only reason why they chose him because it was quite well known within the Wikipedia community so it was very easy to be identified now there is a plot twist and there is a happy handing um the article was restored by the by a Wikipedia volunteer from outside of France and karma is a so the article became the most read page on the French Wikipedia now I'm mentioning this case because it's absolute it was like 10 years ago but this is way more common than we believe transship on a human level by threatening and arresting people is the most common type of transship we have and of course we are all well aware of other um examples that happen close to us but then you can also transfer using the the middleman the infrastructure by track them so threatening means that the government that wants to transfer content can impose sanctions over an infrastructure middleman over an association and this is what happened with tornado Cash When the GitHub repo was taken down and what happened recently with Wikipedia November 2022 a russan court find wikip media Foundation two million Rubles for not deleting two articles on the Russian Wikipedia February 2023 a mosow court found the Wikipedia Foundation 2 million Rubles for not deleting articles about the Army April 2023 a few months ago the same court find the Wikipedia Foundation 800,000 rabels for not deleting the lyrics of several songs by a rock band so what about block and content so this is the third way in which you can transfer Wikipedia by preventing people from accessing it and there are two actors at play here governments and isps internet service providers and I see some confused faces here so yes ISP private actors acted on their own and transer Wikipedia in the past this is because like most web through organizations as of today the wikip media infrastructure is hosted in six data centers between the US Europe and Singapore data centers that belongs to private organizations like equinix Cyrus one okom group Halas in a very centralized fashion so until a few years ago Wikipedia was accessed through unsecure HTTP protocol so basically third party could chor a few entries of Wikipedia targeting them so anything that would be problematic and offensive and that will not fit their agenda and yeah like we saw before that was done by governments and by isps isp's private entities were deciding what people could and could not read that changed finally in about 2015 when Wikipedia started running on https so partial chanip was not possible anymore so as of today if someone wants to Target wikkipedia they have three options some countries completely Dro their ban and just accept it some other countries they ban completely Wikipedia so you can't access it at all some other countries are threatening people to delete the entries and I know what you thinking so and if hypothetically and I can't stress enough that this is not legal advice if you want to use Wikipedia in a place where for whatever reason it is not available how do you do yes you can download a VPN you can use store and you can try to access Wikipedia and that is a great solution except that it's not because VPN is centralized vpns are centralized so they can be blocked by governments or isps they are not incentivized so there is no guarantee that people will continue to use them if they are transferred a block and this is what happened to me last time I went to China in 2019 I had been to China a few times before and I always use a VPN that was working just fine but in 2019 when I got there the VPN that I normally would use didn't work so I was cut off from the internet and that's why we need a decentralized an Unstoppable solution that doesn't rely on that so here is a pretty up a synchronous mirror of Wikipedia which is hosted in a decentralized manner on this word network so anyone connected to it can access and search through the complete set of information how does it work there is two components here that makes it transip resistent first of all when you upload a file the file gets divided into small chunks and each chunks is stored on the network on several nodes and then there is the cademia routing notes communicate with each other in this way so we have Alice and Alice want to send a message to Dave but she doesn't know Dave she's not connected to Dave but she's connected to Bob so she sends a message to Bob because she knows that Bob is somewhat closer to Dave now Bob doesn't know Dave but he knows Carol and he know knows that Carol is more likely to know Dave so he sends a message to Carol and Carol is like yeah I know Dave and she sends a message to Dave and this is how halice communicates to Dave and to any other notes in the network now what is important here is that by following this communication pattern um it ensures that not Dave not anyone else knows that the request started from Alice and in the same way Alice doesn't know that Dave is the final end point it can be someone else so this communication strategy has the added benefit of anonymity for both the senders and the receiver so it guarantees anonymity at the network level and so what happens is that thanks to chks and to Academia routing notes don't know what they're storing don't know who is storing what and that gives them plausible deniability so no operators cannot be held accountable so that prevents from middleman chancellorship so what can we learn from here we saw the three ways in which Wikipedia get censored blocking access to content the platforming and arresting people and this is important because Wikipedia is just one example of permissionless publishing publishing your website your application on swarmm will give you total ownership of your content making chancellorship more difficult so what is next um I'm not sure it's public yet but um we are launching DMS 2.0 which includes e a package to help with chancellorship assistant publishing and finally and this is legal advice get yourself a shadowy super lawyer thank [Applause] you