Wed, 02 Jul 2008
Owner Free Filesystem
It seems that somebody finally got the eight years old idea of Schizzors (which is essentially a one-time-pad) with respect to the absurdities of the copyright law into something useful in a real world: meet the owner free file system.
The interesting feature is that in theory, you don't need to have the whole 2*n bytes of "random" data stored for retrieving n bytes of the data you want - the "truly random" seed can be reused to some degree: for example, if I want to store the files A and B (for the sake of simplicity suppose they have the same length of n bytes), you have to generate another n bytes of truly random data (let's call it C), and then store three files: A xor C, B xor C, and (for example) A xor B xor C. From them, either A, B or C can be retrieved, while all three stored files are "truly random" data, i.e. provably by themselves bear no relations to the original data A or B.
What this brings is not (only) an easy way to commit a copyright violation, but it allows the storage subsystem (i.e. a P2P network) to plausible deny the responsibility for the actual data they store, because they are truly random and bear no relation to the possibly copyrighted material. For example - I would happily offer my free hard disk space and bandwidth to some distributed computing project or whatever, but the risk of somebody storing a copyrighted material on my file system and then police seizing my computer is too high. With OFF client and protocol, the situation might be different, as no possibly copyrighted data is actually stored.