You guys are all talking about tech specifications. No one cares about morality, about what they have done.
I'm going to assume that individual users data will be encrypted, split and then distributed to the network, so that no single farmer will be hosting a complete copy of an individual users data. This will mean that any individual farmers drive will contain a mix of random chunks of various users data. This also means that no farmer will be hosting complete copies of illegal content, (hopefully, otherwise in deep shit) but will open up all MS farmers/users and MS itself to government/law-enforcement scrutiny on this point.
I really cant see law enforcement allowing MS to roll this out without providing a backdoor for them to access/check content, but allowing a backdoor will kill the central points of security and anonymity. Has MS given any thought to this?
Yes, the data is always encrypted chunked compressed and obfuscated. A huge part of the crowd sale was the importance of making this a global community. So the community are now taking over, creating their own forums etc. We will assist in setting up international independent dev pools. This is our best protection as the code becomes more community owned and importantly community driven. When we have devs from all over the place working on the core then we will be protected against such issues. I would hope if MaidSafe were forced to put in a backdoor
1: I would certainly quit immediately
2: I think many, if not all staff would do likewise
3: The community would detect this and ban us from any repository immediately.
I have said to many people this is evolution, you cannot stop evolution. We all need to change our ways as new tech happens (bitcoin for instance). Sometimes the harder the man pushes the tougher the crowd becomes. I think natural evolution will give us a free Internet and this is our shot at it. Somebody else may do it better and that is cool, as long as it happens.