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Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

drewdevault.com

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Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#11

Post by devmunchies »

danbruc wrote: post #6

Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. Not true. [1] [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

Even if it were true, couldn’t a company argue that they want to put users before shareholders to prevent a public fallout like we are seeing with Facebook? Which could be seen as risk management.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#12

Post by jake-low »

AHMagic wrote: post #7
yorwba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money. The formerly decentralized services are no…

Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers. There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable wit…

> and send mail with UPS instead of USPS

Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696).

An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front.

Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#13

Post by tscs37 »

snvzz wrote: post #10

Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.

Why does it need to be signed and encrypted? We have PGP, Signal and Co. for that.

Mastodon is a microblogging service, it's perfectly fine to not sign all messages (though ActivityPub does support signing)

Mastodon is as trustworthy as your instance administrator, so you'll have to find a place where you can trust your admin.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#14

Post by marknadal »

Yeah, Mastodon and others are Federated which means the same thing that happened to email (gmail, which everybody uses) will happen there.

Instead, we should make the developer tools EASY to create P2P (not federated) decentralized apps. This is what we are working on:

http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit...

Also, d.tube is a pretty good decentralized YouTube clone, worth a mention.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#15

Post by kodablah »

snvzz wrote: post #10

Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.

Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#16

Post by slipstream- »

kodablah wrote: post #15
snvzz wrote: post #10

Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.

Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?

Unencrypted at rest.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#17

Post by detaro »

kodablah wrote: post #15
snvzz wrote: post #10

Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.

Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?

Not end-to-end encrypted. TLS is recommended (or even required, not sure), but the instances involved can see the contents of private messages.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#18

Post by kodablah »

Lots of people are working on this problem. I too am even trying to spin up something simple on top of Tor v3 hidden services.

I think too many implementations are focused on the wrong things. Too many implementations are hung up on the distributed storage part. These can be plugged into abstractions as new ones come about. In the meantime, just because it says "decentralized" doesn't mean that pieces can't be centralized on some people's computers. I think when most people say that they mean off the cloud and into the home. Also, too few implementations care enough about anonymity.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#19

Post by kodablah »

detaro wrote: post #17
kodablah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?

Not end-to-end encrypted. TLS is recommended (or even required, not sure), but the instances involved can see the contents of private messages.

Out of curiosity, if the messages themselves were encrypted externally, would this solve most people's concerns? Or is the metadata that is leaked (I assume to/from, timestamp, size) also unacceptable? Also curious for those that have this beef with Mastodon, would transit anonymity help alleviate some of the concerns w/ data transparency?

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#20

Post by kodablah »

AHMagic wrote: post #3
panarky wrote: post #2

I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is tha…

We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?

> We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail.

I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.

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