On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 07:39:50AM +0100, Cathal (Phone) wrote: > If they could, then they wouldn't need help.from the twister team. > > The requested feature is a *refusal to relay*, it has no bearing on other > nodes. If this were useful for an *attack* then it'd be trivial to code a > fake node to do just that: connect and not relay. > > In P2P unless you trust a node, you never trust a node. So anyone trusting a > set of nodes to tell them the whole story will have a bad day. If ye want > child porn in a world where non-monsters can choose not to relay it, you'd > better keep hunting for nodes willing to share child porn with you. > > The tragwdy of the commons is that in the absence of mechanisms for a > community to protect it, a common resource usually ends up abused. This is a > democratic and anarchic way to protect the commons of free speech and thought > from abuse before it becomes known as just yet-another-refuge-for-cp. >
Hello Cathal,
thanks for your reply.
If I am reading your message correctly, you say: "It doesn't matter,
because even if it mattered, a malicious user could implement this
trivially by themselves today, without anyone being able to detect it".
I appreciate the explanation and would personally add: "*if* it matters,
we need to find a way to prevent this kind of attack". Since Twister
is a µblog service, I would consider a successful attack everything
where a message gets delayed by more than 15 minutes (imagine twister
being used to organise a political rally).
But as I said I am quite ignorant on the inner mechanism of Twister,
so I don't know if this is even possible (but you showed it is *not
related* to the particular feature requested).
I'll share with you another thought I had. I think everyone in this
ML used TOR at least once (I see you suggest it as 'the ultimate
anti-censorship technology' in your blog).
Well, if we are to run an onion-router, there is a risk (I would say
certainty) that a non-zero number of packets will contain illegal,
morally abject or even terrorism related material. If every
onion-router provider said "I don't want to risk retransmitting
those", the whole network would be impaired in its primary goal
(letting political dissenters retrieve/publish information without
being identified, etc.).
I am not saying that this related 1:1 to the case at hand (it doesn't
translate well really, in one case the information is overt, in the
tor-case we just 'peel' one layer of encryption), but that's a
simple example where the _very_ understandable behaviour of many would
influence the network as a whole.
To Erkan and the proponents of the 'censorship-resilience is not open
for debate' folks: imagine a scenario where a malicious party floods
twister with a ton of gibberish material, rendering the transmission
ineffective or very very slow. Wouldn't it be reasonable to block
those nodes then? And even share a block-list to make the process
speedier?
What I am trying to convey with those two examples is that it might
be not easy to foresee the results of our intents (those intents
can come in the form of code or behaviours).
To state how I feel about the issue: I think to let every node
decide what/what not to relay is a valid request, from an ethical
point of view (don't force someone to do what they don't want to
do) and from a technical point of view (you won't be able to control
this anyway).
Twister is a nice piece of software, I hope the community can come
up with a solution everyone can stand behind.
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