On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Thomas Sachau <m...@tommyserver.de> wrote:
> Evan Daniel schrieb:
>> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Thomas Sachau <m...@tommyserver.de> wrote:
>>> Evan Daniel schrieb:
>>>> That is fundamentally a hard problem.
>>>> - Advogato is not perfect.  I am certain there will be some amount of
>>>> spam getting through; hopefully it will be a small amount.
>>>> - With Advogato, the amount of spam possible is well defined.  With
>>>> FMS and WoT it is not.  Neither of them have an upper bound on the
>>>> amount of spam.
>>> How do you define spam?
>>
>> Please clarify the question.  Do you mean me, personally?  The Freenet
>> community as a whole?  Or in the context of the proof?
>
> The question should point out the problem about "spam". One may say that only 
> messages with random
> letters are spam. Others may add many messages, which are all the same or 
> similar. Others may add
> messages with different languages than their own. Others may add logbots. 
> Another one may want to
> add everyone who argues for avogato or FMS. Since there is no objective spam 
> definition, you can
> neither say that the "amount of spam is well defined" nor that there "is no 
> upper bound on the
> amount of spam".

Have you read the proof?

>
>>>> - Being too good at solving the spam problem means we are too good at
>>>> mob censorship.  Both are problems.  In practice, the goal should be
>>>> to strike an appropriate balance between the two, not simply to
>>>> eliminate spam.
>>> Since you cannot say what is spam and what not, this is relative. In FMS, 
>>> you can choose to trust
>>> those that think the same as you and you will get their spam markings. Can 
>>> you get the same with
>>> avogato?
>>
>> I have only *very* rarely had any difficulty determining whether a
>> message was spam or not.  Why would this be any different?
>
> You yourself had no problems. But are you sure others share your view on it?

How is this remotely relevant to choice of algorithm?

>
>>>> - I believe that Advogato is capable of limiting spam to levels where
>>>> the system is usable, even in the case of reasonably determined
>>>> spammers.  If the most they can aspire to is being a nuisance, I don't
>>>> think the spammers will be as interested.  If spamming takes work and
>>>> doesn't do all that much, they'll give up.  The actual amount of spam
>>>> seen in practice should be well below the worst possible case -- if
>>>> and only if the worst case isn't catastrophic.
>>> How much noice will it allow? The alice bot spam in frost was also just 
>>> annoying, but i do think
>>> that many new users where annoyed and left frost and freenet. So a default 
>>> system should not only
>>> make it usable, but also relative spamfree from the view of the majority.
>>
>> It will accept a number of spam identities at most equal to the sum of
>> the excess capacity of the set of confused identities.
>
> The question is this: Will it prevent enough, so almost all spam or will the 
> amount of spam force
> new (and old) users to leave like it happened and happens with frost and the 
> alice bot?

That is one question, but not the only one.  Another one is, is the
provable upper bound better or worse than the provable upper bound for
a specific alternative proposal?  As to the former, I cannot say with
certainty until we try it out, and even then we only have indications,
not proof.  As to the latter, I have yet to hear anyone propose an
alternative to Advogato that has an upper bound, let alone one that's
better.

Evan Daniel
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