----- Forwarded message from Jimmy Wales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: Jimmy Wales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 07:49:34 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Nick Mathewson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Hello directly from Jimbo at Wikipedia User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Macintosh/20050317) Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jeffrey F. Bloss wrote: > I was operating under the assumption that the problem was more along the > lines > of nefarious juveniles selectively posting "Kilroy was here" graffiti. > Something along those lines. If I'm out in left field about the nature of the > attack against Wikipedia, I'd be happy to be corrected, and forced to agree > that HashCash would be unsuitable. I have no opinion about HashCash just yet. I have to think about it some more. The nefarious juveniles problem is partly what it is, yes. But that sort of random vandalism goes on all the time, and isn't particularly problematic. What is problematic is the lunatic on crack and steriods who is selectively posting "Kilroy sucked your mothers cock" graffiti, obsessively, hundreds of times. Our admins find it much more peaceful to just block open proxies and Tor servers than to deal with that for hours on end, days on end, weeks on end. I am not an expert on ideas like HashCah or anything of the sort. I am a bit of an expert on the behavior of problem users at Wikipedia. :-) And what I can say is that problem users at Wikipedia are problem users everywhere for the most part. Ordinary sane people don't go on a spree of Wikipedia vandalism. So the _degree_ of trust we need is actually quite small. It isn't "We certify this person to be a certain user, guaranteed, the same as ever". It's just "this packet is being sent to you from a source that has somehow tended generally to lead us to believe to some small extent that the person posting it has not been a jackass, by and large". Or, as has been brilliantly discussed here already, it could be "this packet has been sent to you via a mechanism that one might bother to use, were one a dissident really needing anonymity, but sufficiently bothersome that were one simply a lunatic on crack, one would more likely have simply switched to using anonymous proxies". It won't be perfect, but as an empirical matter, it's probably good enough. --Jimbo ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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