----- Forwarded message from David Reid <dr...@dreid.org> ----- From: David Reid <dr...@dreid.org> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 21:26:49 -0800 To: Tahoe-LAFS development <tahoe-...@tahoe-lafs.org> Subject: Re: [tahoe-dev] Idea for a Publish/Subscribe Message System on Tahoe-LAFS Reply-To: Tahoe-LAFS development <tahoe-...@tahoe-lafs.org>
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:08 AM, darrob <dar...@i2pmail.org> wrote: > Hi everybody, Hi! > > I'd like to discuss my idea for a messaging system on Tahoe with you. As > far as I know there is currently no such thing. I'm also very interested in the idea of building messaging systems on top of Tahoe-LAFS, and I'd like to share some of those simple ideas with the list. I've so far considered the problem from a fairly email centric point of view. My ideas also require the so far non-existant append-only capability and draw inspiration from systems like StubMail[1] and Internet Mail 2000[2]. You see an email address, is capability in it's own right. It's a transferable (practically) non-revocable append-only capability for a message queue that is directly linked to your attention span. At this point I should hope that the negative properties of an email address are obvious. Now imagine a world where instead you give a tahoe append-cap out. Now, this append-cap is to your inbox (the ability to have many inboxes say, one for a mailing list, and one for normal people, or one of that new startup that might want to send you some messages, is quite a powerful property and likely much nicer than heuristic mail filtering in most cases.). So how does alice send bob an email. Alice has bob's append-cap. Alice creates a new message on the grid. Alice takes the read-cap for that message and writes that (perhaps with other metadata) into bob's append-cap. Bob then uses the read-cap to his inbox to look at all the message metadata and download the messages he wants to read. This is where the system resembles Internet Mail 2000, in a grid with accounting the cost of storing the unread sent message is pushed to the sender. In addition to this lazy fetching of messages Bob could very well use a client which aggressively copies messages into some directory under his control for archival purposes. I also expect to see some backwards compatibility with existing mail systems. Instead of having Web Gateways you can have SMTP Gateways that are publicly available (and perhaps consume caps of the form append-...@internetdomain.com) and local SMTP & IMAP gateways which can be used to connect mail clients to the system. My ideas sort of hinge on something which is not quite possible in Tahoe today, the revocable append-only capability. Sadly I don't even feel I have a good understanding of how hard it is. But if it existed it would be an incredibly powerful primitive for all sorts of applications. You could build this system with non-revocable append-only capabilities but then it would be only very slightly better than existing email. Revocability really allows you the power to choose who can send you mail. You could create a cap for each mailing list you wanted to subscribe to, as well as for individuals and companies you sign up for to send you email. Later when you lose interest or decide that they are consuming too much cognitive bandwidth you could delete their cap and they would no longer be able to send you mail. Of course, I leave the UX model of interacting with these long random cryptographic URLs as address for contacting people as an exercises for the reader. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StubMail [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 -David _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-...@tahoe-lafs.org http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list freedombox-disc...@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk