[Cryptography] Curating opinion: Re: Anonymous rendezvous

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Fri May 7 18:05:31 EDT 2021


Subject changed as nobody seems to be talking about it...

On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 4:52 PM Salz, Rich via cryptography <
cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:

> Don’t feed … oh heck.
>
>
>
>    - If NewEgg and its reviewers were strongly pseudonymous, and their
>    product links
>
> were hashes to immutable data or a third party signature to mutable data,
> it would
>
> work even better.
>
>
>
> Why would it be better and in what ways? Please be specific, and don’t
> just do a hand-wave about it being the way of the future.
>

Ah but how would people get anywhere without an asymmetric burden of proof?

The WebPKI exists, it is a known quantity. People know what it does and
does not do. The financial system exists, it is a known quantity, people
know what it does and does not do.

Bright shiny object is proposed. This is purportedly better than what
exists because <insert ideological commitment here>. But we are not allowed
to compare it with what exists. Every flaw in what exists and is deployed
is held to be fatal. Every issue with what is being proposed is held to be
irrelevant because it is 'developing'.

Some of us have been waiting over a decade for BitCoin to answer the
original issues identified in the design. So far there is no evidence for
BTC being capable of change and rather a lot of reason to think it is
immutable as the blockchain.


Yes, NewEgg is acting as a Trusted Third party to the extent it does or
does not curate the reviews it presents. Anyone buying online has to be
very cautious of malicious reviews.




> Instead of being able to easily see that my colleague Jon, whom I trust,
> wrote something. I know have to maintain my own directory of digests to
> names?  And not just me, but everyone?  Please explain what the **benefit**
> of this is.
>
>
>
> I don’t want the whole world to post things pseudonymously. I want to
> filter based on the identifiers that I can understand and already have
> decades of knowledge about. But you seem to want to throw that away.
> Again: why?
>

I don't think it remotely practical for every individual user to curate
opinions data. But Facebook has shown itself to be incapable, self-service
and on occasion outright malicious in its monopoly on curating opinion on
its platform.

Why does Donald J. Trump get to appeal his Facebook ban to a tribunal of
Facebook's choosing while the likes of Loraine Murphy banned for left wing
activism cannot? The quality of treason is not strained... etc.

Know what else Alice isn't going to be curating herself? Her malware
identification vectors. Being on the net requires us to trust other
parties. And why is that a surprise to anyone? We can choose who we trust
and to what extent but in an environment of 6 billion participants we must
end up trusting at least some of them.


Here is what I am thinking about

1) Curating opinion is a trusted function.
2) Alice has neither the skills, the information nor the inclination to
curate herself.

Therefore: Alice must be able to outsource curation of opinion to a service
of her choice.

And of course, the choices Alice and Bob make are likely to be very
different to those taken by Neville the NAZI. Alice and Bob don't want to
see any of the rubbish posted by Neville and friends, they consider him to
be an unpleasant troll and they don't want him commenting on their posts or
to see anything they write. And so they choose one curation service.
Neville choses another.

I want a social media experience where I can interact with the people who
respect me and respect my principles and not spend a moment having to
respond to blatant lies. I don't want to see any ads either and I am
willing to pay a reasonable fee for that experience.

No, king Zuck, the fact that you want me to see something doesn't mean I
want to see it. The fact that you don't want people to be down voting other
people's bigoted spews doesn't mean I want to read them.


The rough sketch I am working from has everyone publishing posts to one or
more personal feeds and subscribing to one or more curation services.

So to post on my feed you must not be on my personal block list, must have
a sufficiently high reputation score from at least one of my curation
services or pass moderation.


The curation services don't need to know the content being rated. All they
need is the feedback people give to that content. And when searching for
content, they are searching for opinion that I am likely to give the
highest score to.

Under the covers, this is probably going to mean lots of content
identifiers, lots of characteristics and some great big honking AI engines
at work. The only crypto I can see in the system is the threshold
encryption already in the mesh to protect the data at rest.
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