A method of Free Speech on the Internet : Random Pads
The principle is very simple. People distribute samples of random data. We call these samples pads. A pad is a file containing random bits, completely indistinguishable from white noise, and of a fixed length. I propose a standard length of 128kB (131072 bytes) for each pad. Each pad should be given a name such as pad-md5-d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e.dat, where the 32 hexadecimal digits following the prefix pad-md5- are the MD5 fingerprint of the pads data. This is so the pads can be recognized. This naming convention guarantees that in practice we dont risk a collision. It is essential that there be nothing in a pad to tell when it was created (no date information). (A former version of this document suggested using the first 8 bytes of the pads actual data. Now this is deprecated.)
