
Distributed Balance - paulgerhardt
http://daeken.com/distributed-balance
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daeken
I'm glad to see this here, as I think that now -- while things are in the
earliest stages of design -- is the time for us to make changes and adapt. If
you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to voice them here or
in #distributedbalance on Freenode; this project needs communities like this
to work.

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kropotkin
How do you plan to reconcile the web of trust with the potential harm that can
come to people who leak data?

I think the real issue is verifying the legitimacy of a leak. If you can
verify something, you don't have to trust the person who posted it and they
can remain safe and anonymous.

Also, are you familiar with <http://globaleaks.org/> ?

~~~
daeken
> How do you plan to reconcile the web of trust with the potential harm that
> can come to people who leak data?

So, the web of trust doesn't apply to _individuals_ , just nodes in the
network. Thus, each node can handle incoming leaks however they want to, or
not at all. In fact, if this is designed properly then there might be some
sort of plausible deniability in terms of who got a leak first.

> I think the real issue is verifying the legitimacy of a leak. If you can
> verify something, you don't have to trust the person who posted it and they
> can remain safe and anonymous.

Verifying the legitimacy of leaks is more of a social than a technical issue;
the web of trust is there primarily to prevent propagation of damage, not to
ensure propagation of the truth.

> Also, are you familiar with <http://globaleaks.org/> ?

Yeah, it's a nice project, but the lack of a federated protocol makes it
vulnerable to the same thing as Wikileaks and friends.

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jacquesm
That's pretty interesting. For one because there is a good person behind it,
second because it deals with the 'single point of failure' of wikileaks in the
form of a figurehead.

Are you going to be accepting donations to develop this?

~~~
daeken
Thanks for the kind words! I won't be accepting donations of any kind with
this, just time from people working on it; donations make things far more
complex, and it's not hard to fund it out of pocket.

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rcamera
Sharing music, video and/or porn on the network will be mostly inevitable. But
on the other hand, the web of trust should limit the impact of this alot. If
you consider that people interested in curating/helping with the leaks and
documents would distrust peers putting porn/music/video up, there will likely
be 2 or more networks with little trust between one another.

You didn't mention anything about anonymization of the nodes/peers. I am
guessing you're thinking of putting this behind Tor?

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daeken
> You didn't mention anything about anonymization of the nodes/peers. I am
> guessing you're thinking of putting this behind Tor?

You'll be able to do so, but I imagine that most people will run this outside
of Tor. 1) It makes it easier for people to access, and 2) In theory, there
will be so many nodes that the risk to any one operator will be low.

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kamaal
The link <https://github.com/daeken/DistributedBalance>

says "There is nothing to see here yet. Move on"

~~~
daeken
There's not any useful code yet. The Github repo is primarily to be used for
issue tracking and all that, but 99% of design is happening on IRC right now.

