Thomas Sachau wrote: > Luke771 schrieb: > >> I can't comment on the technical part because I wouldnt know what im >> talking about. >> However, I do like the 'social' part (being able to see an identity even >> if the censors mark it down it right away as it's created) >> > > "The censors"? There is no central authority to censor people. "Censors" can > only censor the > web-of-trust for those people that trust them and which want to see a > censored net. You cant and > should not prevent them from this, if they want it. > > This have been discussed a lot. the fact that censoship isnt done by a central authority but by a mob rule is irrelevant. Censorship in this contest is "blocking users based on the content of their messages"
The whole point is basically this: "A tool created to block flood attacks is being used to discriminate against a group of users. Now, it is true that they can't really censor anything because users can decide what trust lists to use, but it is also true that this abuse of the wot does creates problems. They are social problems and not technical ones, but still 'freenet problems'. If we see the experience with FMS as a test for the Web of Trust, the result of that test is in my opinion something in between a miserable failure and a catastrophe. The WoT never got to prove itself against a real flood attack, we have no idea what would happen if someone decided to attack FMS, not even if the WoT would stop the attempted attack at all, leave alone finding out how fast and/or how well it would do it. In other words, for what we know, the WoT may very well be completely ineffective against a DoS attack. All we know about it is that the WoT can be used to discriminate against people, we know that it WILL be used in that way, and we know that because of a proven fact: it's being used to discriminate against people right now, on FMS That's all we know. We know that some people will abuse WoT, but we dont really know if it would be effective at stopping DoS attacks. Yes, it "should" work, but we don't 'know'. The WoT has never been tested t actually do the job it's designed to do, yet the Freenet 'decision makers' are acting as if the WoT had proven its validity beyond any reasonable doubt, and at the same time they decide to ignore the only one proven fact that we have. This whole situation is ridiculous, I don't know if it's more funny or sad... it's grotesque. It reminds me of our beloved politicians, always knowing what's the right thing to do, except that it never works as expected. Quickly back to our 'social problem': we have seen on FMS that as_soon as a bunch of idiots figured out that they had an instrument of power in their hands, they decided to use it to play "holier than thou" and discriminate against people deemed "immoral", namely pedophiles and/or kiddie porn users. Now, I'm not justifying pedophilia, kiddie pron or anything. In fact, I'm not even discussing it. What I'm doing is to point out that it is extremely easy to single out pedophiles as "bad guys" who "should" be discriminated against. It's like asking people 'would you discriminate against unrepented sadistic serial killers?" Hell yeah. Anyone would. Same thing with pedophiles, they're so "bad" that our hate towards their acts takes all of our attention, making us miss the realy important stuff. In this case, the problem isn't about discriminating against pedophiles (false target), the problem is about setting a precedent, make us accept that "discriminating against $group is OK as long as the group in question is "bad" enough. THIS IS DANGEROUS! Today pedophiles, tomorrow gays. Today terrorists, tomorrow dissidents. I hope I made it clear enough this time, because I dont think I can explain it any better than so. And by the way, if I still can't get my point across, I'll probably give up. >> On the other hand tho, if a user knows that it will take his system >> three days or a week to finish the job, he may decide to do it anyway. >> I mean the real problem is 'not knowing' that it may take a long time. >> A user that starts a process and doesnt see any noticeable progress >> would probably abort, but the same user would let it run to completion >> if he expects it to take several days. >> > > Why use this sort of announcement, if it takes several days? Announcement > over captchas takes only > around 24 hours, which is faster and needs less resources. So i dont see any > real reason for > hashcash-introductions. > > the long calculation thing wouldnt work after all, as it has been pointed out, computer power increases too fast for this kind of solution to be effective. The other idea was good, a 'grace period' of say 75 "free" messages for every new identity before the WoT kicks in, would definitely be a good idea because it would greatly reduce the power in the hands of the "wot abusers" (if you don;t like the term 'censors' we can agree to call them that) On the other hand, a malicious user who is able to create new identities quickly enough (slave labor would do the trick) would still be capable to send 75 messages per announced ID... so the 'grace period' should be as small as possible to minimize this problem. Maybe 25 or 30 messages?
