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Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

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Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#101

Post by beardog »

nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

Not that it is 1:1 equivalent (due to expense and difference in encoding), but blockchains such as bitcoin can be used to store arbitrary data (and have been). Thus far I believe no one has gone to jail for running a cryptocurrency node because of non-financial reasons.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#102

Post by rvz »

thisgoesnowhere wrote: post #97
redder23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is not "controlled" by large companies. People choose to use large companies and let them read their emails because they are stupid. Email has not evolved in any way BECAUSE its NOT controlled by some company. If Google could, they would do even more evil with email that "just" reading all your mails. To compare Twitter with email makes absolutely no sense. Yes Twitter is a totally controlled thing by a single…

What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?

*silence*

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#103

Post by mkl »

evbogue wrote: post #92
nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

Yes, this is where Secure Scuttlebot is superior. Why would you connect to people out of your friend of a friend zone? An algorithm should decide who you are relaying.

You are talking to strangers on the internet right now and seem to find it worthwhile.

Do you mean Secure Scuttlebutt? "Scuttlebot" seems to be the old name for the primary Secure Scuttlebutt server implementation (https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/glossary), though its website is still https://scuttlebot.io/.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#105

Post by rendx »

nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

I understand the concern, but it makes me sad.

The internet itself is a network of relays that store and forward traffic for other nodes, unencrypted.

With that modern perspective, the internet would be unthinkable.

And, yes, these days you might have to "explain", but even the law says you are clearly not liable for passing other people's traffic. At least until recently, that was the principle. In the US, that's e.g. DMCA §512.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#106

Post by xiphias2 »

nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

Authorities are already working together with companies in lots of ways to filter out illegal things, and it doesn’t look like they are putting CEOs for prison as long as they try to filter these things out with the tools available.

What Nostr changes is the backdoor deals that are happening and Elon was showing: FBI, CIA and other governmental organizations censoring politically sensitive, but legal content, which incentivises governments to be more transparent (and of course CSAM will remain illegal, there’s no controversy around it).

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#107

Post by 0xpgm »

neilk wrote: post #12

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy. That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies. Twitter is centralized d…

> That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email

Really? Web browsers, web servers and mail servers are beasts. I don't see them being 'simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice'

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#108

Post by nunobrito »

derefr wrote: post #87
drexlspivey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relays don't (have to) store your data, they relay in real time via websockets. Clients should store the data if they care about persistence

How is this not just IRC then? The thing that makes Twitter/Mastadon/etc not just IRC, is that in these, you can scroll back as far as you like—specifically, past where your client joined the network.

Because IRC still needs a lot of things to keep running (be usable) and works mostly for chat messages.

NOSTR isn't twitter nor IRC, you can take your posts which can contain just about any type of data inside and build an art gallery, a forum or dump for meteorological information.

You can scroll back in the past. It is up to the relay if they have interest in keeping your data or not. If nobody cares about your data, you can still preserve it yourself without barriers for that.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#109

Post by INTPenis »

I'm all for the best solution winning but here's the perspective of a regular end user.

When I read about nostr I see code examples and cryptography charts.

When I read about Mastodon (fediverse) I just run docker-compose up and I'm in business. That is what made the fediverse breakthrough and nostr not.

It needs to be user friendly for both end users and sysadmins for it to catch on.

Also unrelated to all that, I'm kinda skeptical about any system that claims to be resistant to censorship because it will become a hotbed of racists and bigots online. On one hand certain parts of the fediverse take moderation too far, but on the other hand you can't have a platform with zero moderation. It would be chaos.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#110

Post by nunobrito »

phkx wrote: post #104

> Telegram Group - where development chat happens Telegram has stuck with me as a red flag. Mostly because Signal, which emerged around the same time, apparently had the better tech and was open. Not sure whether that changed.

Signal development came from an ex-Twitter director that was initially sponsored by the CIA (through Radio Free Europe) and then developed with experts on the backyard of the NSA (Hawaii). Eventually this relatively unknown messenger algorithm got adopted by a messenger company own by Facebook (a privacy loving group) for over a billion users.

It ain't no surprise that just about everyone relevant in the crypto world prefers telegram than something called "signal" (just inform yourself what it means in the intelligence community).

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