Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#141

Post by falien » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 11:45 PM UTC

cyarvin wrote: post #126

Titanous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) This isn't clear in the docs right now, but unauthenticated notifications are allowed, and eventually we'll add signing (think Domain Keys). 2) Every piece of data in the system will be available via the API including negotiated app and follow credentials, moving will consist of authorizing an importer app to have read access to everything, and then pushing a post that tells all the servers to check the profile ag…

(1) Have you thought about spam, then? After all, there's a reason social services are centralized on today's Internets. The reason (IMHO) is that the Internets since 1992 or so have been an antisocial network, and anything worth attacking that lacks a centralized defense command is rapidly overrun by digital Huns. For instance, SMTP exists today because it existed before eternal September, and being valuable was (ba…

(not associated in any way with tent.io)

1. Just because it is allowed by the protocol doesn't mean any given client needs to pay any attention. Just like email, I can filter out any messages from people not in my contacts. I may choose not to and instead run each one of those messages through a spam filter. In this respect it really seems no different than email. Individual clients/servers can choose to be as strict as they like (but servers are servers, and they are sitting on the internet, so spammers can see them and send messages that will be ignored if they like).

2. Since connections with most of your contacts are theoretically maintained so you can push out new data, updating is more akin to propagating a new ip through the DNS system than using a redirect. Yes a DNS server can misbehave, but that can only screw up a network of well behaved servers for so long.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#142

Post by dj2stein9 » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 11:51 PM UTC

I hope this crew is looking at WebRTC. The true killer app for a distributed social network is going to be a global decentalized video chat network. Imagine Google hangouts without Google. Even just to implement a voice-only chat without a centralized system would be pretty phenomenal.

Also, I really think they're making a mistake by not using secure Websockets for their protocol. Plain HTTP has too much overhead for what needs to be an efficient messaging protocol and the potential need for persistent connections.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#143

Post by alistairbayley » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:01 AM UTC

How does this compare to Mr Social? : http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/mrprivacy.pdf

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#144

Post by flatline3 » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #123

flatline3 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any suggestion that provides the same features Message passing. That's all HTTP really is, but it's dressed up in a bunch of historical complexity and inefficiency centered around supporting web browsers.

But do you have any concrete suggestions of protocols, or are you criticizing the choice based on an hypothetical protocol that would be very similar but incompatible with HTTP and all its existing tools (millions of tested and deployed caching servers, load balancers, etc), and for which whole new libraries would have to be written, just so you can make it somewhat more efficient?

I think you're grossly over-estimating the difficulty of defining a protocol. It's no more difficult than defining the protocol for which you'll use HTTP as transport.

Load balancers know how to load balance straight TCP. HTTP caching servers are an HTTP-centric idea.

The 'libraries' you'll need can be much, much smaller when all you need is a bit of framing and serialization, instead of a complete complex RFC compliant HTTP client stack.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#145

Post by cdcarter » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:03 AM UTC

ynniv wrote: post #91

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but open wifi often only allows 443 and 80.

Port numbers are not protocols.

Yes, but many open wifi hotspots at commercial institutions only have 80 and 443 open.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#146

Post by kindalu » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:30 AM UTC

I'm thinking about every smart phone as a tent server.

P2P camping site will establish when you are waiting the bus, taking the boring meeting, or camping at the river bank. I tried to use wifi-direct/bluetooth, but I found iPhone and Android system set device default to non-discoverable for security issue. But I do found a lot of Nokia/LG phone in discoverable mode on subway.

I hope the tent will be successful. Be an application to make strangers knowing each other and people to go outdoor.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#147

Post by knowtheory » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:35 AM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #132

enobrev wrote: post #97

A few years back, I started getting interested in a similar idea. I'm definitely intrigued in seeing how well it goes. Good luck to you. Of course, as ideas go, I allowed myself to think further into the possibilities, and found some interesting avenues. For instance, why allow the facebooks, twitters, etc to own domain over our content? Let people store their own data, and offer API endpoints giving facebook, twitte…

It's a great concept, but here's where it breaks down: once data is given out, it can never be retracted. Whether it's an author's novel or a shopper's purchase history, once the data is released to someone in a readable format, they are unable to stop the recipient from doing something they don't like with that data. Granted, the issue can be mitigated with trust networks, social conventions, or laws, but it comes d…

I've discussed this in the past with tent's authors, and that is a characteristic they not only tolerate but encourage (for better or worse).

Operating with these assumptions means that the things that you make public are totally and incontrovertibly public. It is, in a manner of speaking, playing for keeps.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#148

Post by gizmo686 » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:42 AM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #132

enobrev wrote: post #97

A few years back, I started getting interested in a similar idea. I'm definitely intrigued in seeing how well it goes. Good luck to you. Of course, as ideas go, I allowed myself to think further into the possibilities, and found some interesting avenues. For instance, why allow the facebooks, twitters, etc to own domain over our content? Let people store their own data, and offer API endpoints giving facebook, twitte…

It's a great concept, but here's where it breaks down: once data is given out, it can never be retracted. Whether it's an author's novel or a shopper's purchase history, once the data is released to someone in a readable format, they are unable to stop the recipient from doing something they don't like with that data. Granted, the issue can be mitigated with trust networks, social conventions, or laws, but it comes d…

Just because you cannot prevent all threat models, does not mean you through privacy out the window. For example, if Alice wants to send Bob a message, in the current system: 1) Alice tells Facebook she wants to friend Bob 2) Facebook tells Bob, who accepts 3) Alice sends Facebook the message addressed to Bob (I think in plaintext) 4) Facebook sends the message to Bob. 5) The message is still unencrypted on Facebook servers, where it is available to Facebook, advertisers, hackers, and government agencies

Using known cryptographic methods, we can construct a system that works as follows:

1) Alice looks up Bob's public key (or gets it from Bob to avoid needing a trusted key service) 2) Using Bob's public key, Alice encrypts a message 3) Alice sends the encrypted message into the network, addressed to Bob 4) Using his private key, Bob decrypts the message

In the second example, the recipient (Bob) is the only one who can release the data. In the first example, a number of potentially malicious parties have access to the data without corporation from Alice or Bob.

I used a direct message for simplicity, but we do have crystallographic methods to encrypt a message such that an arbitrary group of people can decrypt it.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#149

Post by gizmo686 » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:44 AM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #84

flatline3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate firewalls are the general boogieman, but in reality, I haven't seen evidence that they're much more than that. To test this, we implemented fallback-to-HTTPS behavior in a very widely used previously non-HTTP client. We then observed the number of clients that failed to connect via our custom protocol, but succeeded in falling back to HTTPS. The numbers were negligible. It's ridiculous that we'd seriously b…

Perhaps, but open wifi often only allows 443 and 80.

Who says port 80 has to be http?

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#150

Post by victorNicollet » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 12:48 AM UTC

I believe this is a great idea, but I disagree with some points of your implementation. I actually started writing a lengthy comment about this, and after about two hours of writing I decided it might look better as a blog post, so there you go:

http://www.nicollet.net/2012/08/tent-the-right-goals-the-wro...