Silk Road forums

Quote from: kmfkewm on October 02, 2012, 05:25 am

You would only 'own' the child of a slave until the child is old enough to say they want to be free.

Why?

Because the child did not enter into a contract with you. Even in a libertarian society, only free agents who are capable of rational thought are capable of entering into a contact, as no coercive contracts are considered binding. For this same reason it is not a legitimate contact if you hold a gun to someones head while they sign themselves into slavery. As a child is not a rational being it can not legitimately enter into a contract of self slavery with you.

A child would be a drain on resources until it's old enough to be put to productive use, so unless it is also a slave I'd just kill it.

I am not sure how that would be dealt with. Clearly a child is incapable of entering into a legitimate contract, so it can not be born into slavery. However you are not required to care for the child of your slave if this is not part of the original contract signed by the slave. This would result in the child dying of malnutrition eventually if you forbid the slave from caring for it. Some anarchists believe that children are the property of their parents until they are old enough to make a claim to their own independence, following this line of thought you would legitimately be able to kill the baby as it would be the property of your slave. I disagree with this though, I think that children own themselves as much as adults do, but as they can not fend for themselves it brings up some interesting problems. I do not believe that you have the right to kill your slaves baby, but perhaps you do have the right to order your slave to not care for its child. Certainly you do not own the baby as a slave. I suppose I would hope that some charitable defense agency would act on behalf of such babies by taking them from you and raising them to adulthood, in the hopes that the adult will pay them back for saving its life. As the baby is not owned by you and also not owned by its parent, I believe it would be acceptable for a third party to take parental control of the child, especially as that would be in the best interests of such a child and indeed is what one would likely imagine the child would choose if it had the ability for rational thought.

We are treating people like commodities now, like a chicken or a cow. That's what slavery is, or it is not slavery of any kind that is recognizable to me. If I do not own the product of my slave's labors, including the offspring dividend they produce, then the whole thing stops making sense. In fact historically speaking what I'm describing, how children were either born into chains or disposed of, did occur.

You can own the product of your slaves labor, but that does not include its children. Your freedom ends where another persons begins. You are free to contract people into slavery and people are free to contract themselves into slavery, however one person can not contract another person into slavery. Thus a parent can not contract its child into slavery anymore than I can contract you into slavery.

Yes, enslaving the children is cruel almost beyond imagining, but the point I'm making is sound. When you have ownership of any domestic animal, you own it's products, like meat, eggs, butter, and so forth. The same principal must apply to people too.

People and livestock are different.

Your caveat of "the child must be old enough to make a choice" doesn't make sense practically, because I'd put it down for wasting my resources and in theory because ownership means you get dividends. You own a cow for its milk. You own a chicken for its eggs. You own a stock for its dividends. There is no point in ownership if you don't get to own the production.

As you do not own the child, putting it down would be murder imo. I certainly would not object to a defense agency assassinating you anyway. Not caring for the child would be more acceptable, even though that would certainly result in its death. I believe that you could rightfully force the slave to abort the fetus if it has not developed substantially. However, after the child is born you can either care for it or ignore it. Better yet, some agency could offer to pay you in order to enter onto your property long enough to remove the child (as you do not own the child you can not strictly speaking sell it to them, but you could sell the right to obtaining the child from your land). 

I am not certain. But I only require a small number of 'stock' in order to accumulate more via sexual reproduction. The humans are treated like cattle, made to constantly produce children which are then forced to work for myself at the first possibility. So I don't need very many people to accomplish my evil plan. Like you say, I could import some desperately poor souls from the Third World.

Except that assumes that you own your slaves children and I would disagree with this so the point is moot. The most you could do is deny care to the child and let it die of dehydration.

You yourself may never sign yourself over to my ownership. Most people wouldn't. And that's the kicker. Eventually you guys are completely outnumbered by myself and my hordes of slaves. Eventually I can use geometric progression to kick your ass. If I had 1000 female slaves imported and set them to work, I would have something like half a million slaves working for me within 50 years. With just 1 generation in my evil dynasty we'd control the world and the number of people with free market freedoms would be inconsequential, they could be brushed off very easily with those kinds of numbers on my side.

You will not have hordes of slaves, because if you raise the children up to the point that they are rational beings, if they choose freedom and you detain them you will be holding prisoners. At that point it will be moral for defense agencies to storm your property and release your prisoners, as well as to hold you to some form of justice for false imprisonment. If you do not raise the children up, they will die very quickly after they are born. So you can not force your slaves to produce massive armies for you.

That is not what slavery means kmfkewm! Slavery is defined as the ownership of people. It can involve coercion and most often does. But in principal people could sign themselves over permanently due to stupidity, an ideological framework similar to religion, and so on. Once they are in, there is no escape, there is no way out. You cannot recover from a mistake. Direct coercion would not be necessary kmfkewm, look at Scientology, look at how the Russian communist elite manipulated the common people. In fact until the markets came, a small number of people dominating the rest was the norm for thousands of years. Property ownership of this widespread kind is a new paradigm (an overused word, but appropriate here).

Slavery must involve coercion. There is no such thing as a person who willing chooses to be a slave.

tldr; in order for free markets to exist, the right to sell oneself must be prohibited without exception. You may only rent or contract yourself out, but never to sell proper.

If you deny people the right to sell themselves then you claim to own that right yourself. Essentially you claim that you must own the right to selling humans, which you deny to everybody, in order for a free market to exist.

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on October 02, 2012, 02:36 am

Quote from: kmfkewm on October 02, 2012, 02:29 am

If you tell a person that they can not sell themselves then you claim to own them.

perfect summary.  I think you brought up the point earlier, could I sell someone the right to kill me?  You could argue that killing someone is an even greater breach of their rights than enslaving them.  But is killing someone with their consent moral?  Is preventing it immoral?  I think that's a tough pill to swallow for some, but really gets to the heart of the matter.

Enslavement is immoral because it denies that others the ability to be free agents. Let us say that we adopt the approach that people may enslave themselves. What happens to the children when they born? They are a dividend. Now I own them and they never had any choice in the matter. Their choices are irrelevant because I own the mother. Unless I owe all her labor, all her, then she is not truly a slave. In order to prevent this, you yourself have to make a logical contradiction or paradox, which is that some things my slave produces are not owned by me.

denying someone the right to sell themselves into slavery denies them the ability to be a free agent, if someone freely chooses to sell themselves into slavery then they have acted as a free agent in becoming a slave.

Quote from: jameslink2 on October 01, 2012, 09:40 pm

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on October 01, 2012, 09:14 pm

I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Thank you to divinechemicals for engaging in the debate

Big thank you and a big thumbs up. To both you and devinechemicals, I look forward to reading and debating this every day!

I have a question for DPR, You comment about Slavery not being Libertarian and I will say that slavery is libertarian with some minor caveats, those being contractual and between two consenting adults. Do you disagree?

That's a very interesting question, and one I've given some thought before now, but don't have a strong opinion on because I can see both sides of the argument.  If I understand your question, you are asking if someone can sell themselves into slavery and still be consistent with libertarian morality.  Or maybe put another way, can the person who bought that slavery contract morally enforce it.  Rothbard's position is that this is not moral and you cannot sell your life-force or will or sovereignty whatever you want to call it because it is inseparable from you.  If you later change your mind, then you should be able to abandon whatever contract you made.  I can see the other side though.  If you truly own yourself, then you should be able to sell yourself.  What if your child needs a $100k medical procedure to survive and your only asset is your labor.  Let's say 5 years of your labor is worth $100k.  Shouldn't you be able to sell the next 5 years of your labor to help your child?  Would it not be violent interference to prevent you from pursuing that path?  How about someone that borrows $100k?  Does the lender not have a right to be repaid and would be justified in confiscating that persons wages, effectively owning their labor, to regain their property and enforce the contract?

If I had to choose a side to this question, I think it would be the latter, which might be the first point I've disagreed with Rothbard on

You mention consenting adults though.  If someone is actively consenting to slavery, then it's not really slavery is it?  I think the difficult situation is when the jameslink of today promises his future labor and effectively sells into slavery his future self.  What are your thoughts on the matter?

If you sell yourself into 'slavery' you are not a slave.

Quote from: Limetless on September 29, 2012, 07:39 pm

Use bridges.

If I offer to help censored users will it slow me down?? Will it compromise my safety?? got any insight on this??

blog.torproject.org/blog/risks-serving-whenever-you-surf

Thanks man, interesting read.

At the risk of saying something very naive here, but if this becomes a serious issue, wouldn't there be some easy fixes?

For example, padding the sizes of the chunks of data sent, until they are all of a uniform length. Or frequently changing the contents of a website (for example, us changing our avatars really often).

Or add some random data to the packets, so that the size is no longer a clue towards it's contents. This last option might even be done at the last node of the Tor network, just before the traffic is sent to the end user. That way the Tor network wouldn't be burdened too much with random bits.

Just thinking out loud here. I don't think we'll be at great risk because of this.

Tor already pads packets to the same size, that is probably a large part to do with why it is not as easily fingerprinted as most VPN's. The total size of the entire stream of packets is not obfuscated though. You could try to add random padding to each page that is loaded in an attempt to obfuscate the total stream size, but I don't know how effective this will be. I think it would be better than nothing though. 

Another thing that you need to take into consideration is the ability for an attacker to do bidirectional fingerprinting. If they think they have identified you following a thread through SR, and then see you send 15kb of data at x time, if they see a post of that size on SR in that thread y time after they saw you send traffic, they will be pretty certain that they have identified you. The solution to this would be to pad all posts to the same size and have a random delay assigned to each post prior it to being publicly displayed. However then you are pretty much turning the forum into a cryptographic mix, and I suggest waiting for me to finish my decentralized mix forum prior to attempting to implement it yourself .

How does this fingerprinting work? Is it determined by the size of the packages of encrypted data?

And what are those numbers, 60 and 99% accuracy referring to? The probability that I'm using a certain hidden service, or visiting any website from the clearweb through Tor?

They refer to the accuracy with which an attacker can say that you are visiting a certain website which they have fingerprinted. Size of the encrypted data is a common area where information leaks. Imagine the SR forum and all of its threads. Let's say an attacker has created a fingerprint of the entire forum. They know the size of every page, they know which pages are linked together. They can observe the traffic you get, but it is encrypted so they can not see the plaintext. They can however see that you accessed a page of a specific size. Then they can see that you accessed another page of a specific size. Let's say you follow a thread through from page one to page twenty. The attacker will see the size of each of the pages you have loaded, and then they will see that the sequence of pages you loaded have sizes that match up with the fingerprint they took of a thread on SR. They can perhaps use this information to infer that you are browsing through a thread on SR. The attacker may also be able to determine the sizing characteristics of individual objects on each of the pages you have loaded. They might see that these objects are of sizes that correspond to the sizes of objects you would load in order to browse through the many pages of the thread. I believe that with pipelining this becomes more difficult for the attacker as their ability to identify the sizes of individual objects being loaded is taken away. Hm, a quick google confirms my thoughts:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/experimental-defense-website-traffic-fingerprinting

Instead, we are deploying an experimental defense in today's Tor Browser Bundle release that is specifically designed to reduce the information available for feature extraction without adding overhead. The defense is to enable HTTP pipelining, and to randomize the pipeline size as well as the order of requests. The source code to the implementation can be viewed on gitweb.

Since normal, non-randomized pipelining is still off by default to this day in Firefox, we are assuming that the published attack results are against serialized request/response behavior, which provides significantly more feature information to the attacker. In particular, we believe a randomized pipeline will eliminate or reduce the utility of the 'Size Marker', 'Number Marker', 'Number of Packets', and 'Occurring Packet Sizes' features on sites that support pipelining, due to the batching of requests and responses of arbitrary sizes. More generally, the randomized pipeline should obscure the request vs response size and request ordering information available to the classifier.

Our hope is that the randomized pipeline defense will therefore increase the duration of observation required to establish certainty that a site is being visited, by lowering the true positive rate and/or raising the false positive rate beyond what the researchers observed.

We do not expect this defense to be foolproof. We create it as a prototype, and request that future research papers do not treat the defense as if it were the final solution against website fingerprinting of Tor traffic. In particular, not all websites support pipelining (in fact, an unknown number may deliberately disable it to reduce load), and even those that do will still leak the initial response size as well as the total response size to the attacker. Pipelining may also be disabled by malicious or simply misconfigured exits.

Unfortunately it is up to the person running the server to enable pipelining as well though, and it is not always possible to do so.

Sorry I am not able to provide more useful information, it has been a while since I researched traffic fingerprinting and possible ways to counter it.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/flaws-in-tor-anonymity-network-spotlighted/

I really liked kmfkewm's point that the drunk driving issue really comes down to who owns the roads. 

And I will even concede that it should be totally okay for a person who owns a field, to say that it is okay for people to shoot randomly into the field, even if there are crowds of people in the field. Of course it is just as okay for people who own fields to say that if you shoot into the field you will be open to being shot back at and killed. I strongly suspect that people will avoid the killing fields, and the people who go to them understanding the risks involved can shoot at each other all day. If the bloods and the crips want to buy an enormous plot of land and turn it into a free for all gang war territory, let them. However if you own a huge plot of land you should be equally as capable of saying that people who engage in gang wars on your land will be imprisoned.

Recently I was convinced that men should be allowed to say in their wills that if they are murdered in cold blood, the murderer should be able to pay a fine to their families and get no other punishment. At first I hated this idea, after all if a man kills an innocent person they are at a statistically greater chance of killing another innocent person. Originally I thought, regardless of the wishes of the murdered victim, the murderer should be punished to protect other innocents who may not want to be killed even if the killer pays a huge fine to their families. However I see now that this takes away a persons self ownership. Indeed a person should be able to sell to a psychopath who wants to kill them the ability to do so, if we deny this right to a person we say that we own them.