On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Sumana Harihareswara
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 3) Look at Nymble - http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#oakland11-formalizing
> and http://cgi.soic.indiana.edu/~kapadia/nymble/overview.php .  It would
> allow Wikimedia to distance itself from knowing people's identities, but
> still allow admins to revoke permissions if people acted up.  The user
> shows a real identity, gets a token, and exchanges that token over tor
> for an account.  If the user abuses the site, Wikimedia site admins can
> blacklist the user without ever being able to learn who they were or
> what other edits they did.  More: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~iang/ Ian
> Golberg's, Nick Hopper's, and Apu Kapadia's groups are all working on
> Nymble or its derivatives.  It's not ready for production yet, I bet,
> but if someone wanted a Big Project....

A few things strike me there:

1: Is there one central PM and NM, or can there be multiple competing
PM and NM providers? If the latter, there's no indication of how easy
it is to set up a PM or NM. If the vandal can set up their own PM or
NM, they can easily pretend to be an entirely new person for each
edit, rendering the whole thing pointless.

2: It looks like Nymble allows us to block the person, but only for a
short period of time (less than one day by default) at the discretion
of the NM, since the "linking token" only works within one
"linkability window".

3: The inability to see what other edits the user did before being
blocked may also be a sticking point, as one of the first things many
do when reverting vandalism is to check Special:Contributions to see
if the user vandalized anything else at the same time.

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